Dear Reader,

If you’re an adult who has lost a parent, or if your parents are aging, ill or dying, this book has good news for you: you can make sense of your relationship with them and deal with the unfinished business between you after they’re dead. In fact, it’s often easier—and sometimes only possible—then. Death Benefits will help you emerge from mourning a wiser, freer, more creative person. Do you want to have real input and make conscious choices about which aspects of your parents’ characters you perpetuate in your own life, and which you leave behind? Death Benefits will show you exactly how to do it.

Even though it’s never been said out loud before, we’re all entitled to what I call “death benefits”—to growing up, coming to terms, coming into our own, transforming our lives—when we become the older generation. But too few of us claim our benefits because we don’t know how. We think we’re too old to change, that we have no say in how our parents and their passing effects us, or that it’s somehow wrong to “profit” from this loss. Don’t cheat yourself out of the most precious gifts of insight, or leave your life to chance based on a misconception! I invite you to be inspired by the stories you will read in my book, and let Death Benefits help make the years after bereavement the best years of your life.