Dear Cindy, Love Mom: Letters of Love, Loss and Life

Early on the morning of April 23, 2007, Cindy Sherwin left her Lower East Side Manhattan apartment and began her day with a bike ride on Riverside Drive. She was training for her first Ironman Triathlon in Lake Placid, NY. This would be a busy day with training for the 100-mile cycle portion of the race, a packed schedule of personal training clients, and a run in Central Park. But this was not to be a typical day. Midway through her ride, Cindy suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and died at the young age of 33, leaving her mother, Elaine Roberts Schaller, devastated and lost.
 
Dear Cindy, Love Mom: Letters of Love, Loss and Life is an honest, first person account of Schaller's experiences and feelings throughout that first year. It is a book filled with heartbreak, suffering and ultimately hope, a compilation of the author's letters to her daughter and her observations about things that helped her heal and those that did not.
 
Suggested by a grief counselor as a means of coping with her heartbreak, the book started out as a journal. At the end of that first year of daily entries, Mrs. Schaller looked back at the progress she made and realized its possible value to others.
 
While the book is sometimes a difficult read, it also provides hope. Elaine gropes through the tunnel of her agony and emerges at the other end to see glimpses of sunlight.
 
For someone who has suffered a loss, for a friend of someone dealing with grief, for the grief counselor or other professional to suggest to a client and finally to a compassionate reader, Dear Cindy, Love Mom is a must.