If you have lost a sibling or a child or grandchild, particularly after a CHRONIC CHILDHOOD ILLNESS, you will identify with the journey of the Gandour family in HEART WORK: A FAMILY PILGRIMAGE INSPIRED BY SIBLING GRIEF. If you teach students preparing for careers in medical or mental health professions, HEART WORK will enrich their understanding of the family backdrop of CHILDHOOD CANCER and sibling grief. Aimee died at the age of fourteen after an eight-year bout with leukemia. Her younger sister and only sibling, Molly, was just ten at the time. Sixteen years later during an autumn visit to her childhood home in Indiana, she proposed to her parents that together they attempt much deeper and riskier therapeutic work on her sister's death. And possibly film much of it. The result was a years' long heart pilgrimage for the Gandour family and a return of Aimee to their fold. Written from the perspective of the mother of both the deceased and surviving sibling, the memoir Heart Work takes us by the hand and leads us through her family's and her own journey. It offers a rare and intimate developmental perspective on a family living with life-threatening illness and death. Much of it is based on actual data including diaries that the author kept on each of her daughters from birth; taped conversations between family members and Aimee's hematologist; journaling and notes from therapy and interviews; and writings from each of the siblings as children.Even though the author writes from a bereaved mother's point of view, she enlightens us psychologically along the way and leaves us with deep questions to ponder. Heart Work is the story of one family in the Midwest but it touches on multiple themes that will resonate with parents and surviving siblings, as well as those who have cared for and supported them.
About the Author: Mary Jane Mulvey Gandour is the granddaughter of Irish immigrants. Her Pittsburgh mother and Brooklyn father married during World War II. Mary Jane and her two younger brothers grew up in East Meadow, New York and Oakmont, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA in English from Wheeling Jesuit University and completed an MAT in secondary English teaching from the University of Pittsburgh. She later earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Purdue University where she won the James D. Linden Award as an exemplar of the scientist-practitioner model. She and her husband have traveled extensively in the United States and have lived overseas in Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong. After studying and teaching in California during the 1970's, they moved to the Midwest where their two daughters were born.