Review by Bonnie Cehovet, November, 2006
Review by Carol Haggas, March 2007 ForeWord
“This beautiful book familiarizes us with the fact that our loved ones must die but they do not cease to exist. They are deeply alive in us, in others and around us. The book teaches us to appreciate our loved ones and express our appreciation of them before it is too late. This means to live in mindfulness every day of our lives.”
Thich Nhat Hanh—Zen master, poet, peace and human rights activist, author of over 100 books, including No Death to Fear.
“Love Letters is a masterpiece of warmth and fine-quality feeling—a tender and highly intelligent offering. It is profound nourishment of the soul to read Baltins’ words that reflect the splendor of God present in suffering, which sometimes comes before one has the strength to see it for what it is.”
Robert A. Johnson—Jungian analyst and lecturer, author of Inner Work, Owning Your Own Shadow, Balancing Heaven and Earth and many more, including the trilogy He, She, and We.
“A brave book that deals with life, love and death, Love Letters is affirming reading for anyone grieving the loss of a loved one.”
Kathleen Gavin—Executive director, Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance (MOCA)
“Love Letters is not only a reflection of Andris Baltins on the strength and goodness of his wife, Nancy, but a tribute to her and all mothers who care so passionately about their families and draw upon their inner wisdom and strength to guide and support their children with disabilities.”
Paula Goldberg—executive director, PACER Center, a parent advocacy organization in Minneapolis that trains parents to make a difference
“For those who wish to accord with the resonance of all life, Andris Baltins’ Love Letters is a gift. With a heart and mind opened through intense encounters with impermanence—his own dire prognosis at age 37, and the death of his lifelong and beloved partner—Andris studies himself and the mysteries of life with inspiring honesty and uprightness. This intimacy is offered to us; one cannot help but be moved to receive it.”
Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi—senior dharma teacher, San Francisco Zen Center
“Through these letters we also see that Andris and Nancy’s teenaged son, who has Down syndrome, knows intuitively the importance of grieving the loss of his mother and demonstrates how to do so effectively. His remarkable insights and wisdom show us that unconditional love easily trumps intellectual disability.”
Judy C. Martz—former president, National Down Syndrome Congress, Atlanta, GA
“Having recently lost my wife to ovarian cancer, I was apprehensive about reading another man’s grief journey caused by the same disease. But I found reading Love Letters to be a warm and comforting glimpse of Andris Baltins’ love, loss and grief relationship with his wife. This experience was so similar and yet so different from mine, but the similarities with another’s experience are what I find most helpful.”
John Zimmerman—Lakeville, MN
Review by Bonnie Cehovet
"Love Letters - Reflections On Living With Loss" is a series of letters written to the author's wife, after her death from ovarian cancer. It chronicles one individual's path through grief, and that of those closest to him. There is no way that we can be "ready" to lose someone, even when we have some small amount of warning. This is a heartfelt, heartwarming, moving book — one that I wish had been there for me when I lost my father, after a lengthy illness when I was thirteen years old.
The lasting message from this book is that when someone dies, they do not "vanish", they in fact live on in the memories and lives of those that they leave behind — their loved ones, their friends, their coworkers — anyone whose life they have touched. And they live on in the manner of life that they leave behind them, in the manner in which they touched the environment around them, in their own personal touches on life.
Writing this book was a necessary part of the process of working through his grief over his wife, Nancy's, untimely death. Nancy died shortly before their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, leaving behind her husband, a daughter, Julia (who was in college), and a fourteen year old son, Mac, who suffers from Down syndrome. They had been in each other's lives since they were eight years old. How do you go on without your reflection, your "other half"? Here Baltins reveals the personal rituals and reflections that brought him to his own personal understanding of the process of death and grief.
In his preface, Henry A. Gustafson talks about the transformation of memories that initially bring only a painful sense of loss into a resource that sustains, through recall, inventive creation of rituals, and the courage to do what seems to be helpful, rather than what seems conventional. Again and again we see this throughout the process, beginning with Nancy's death at home, in her own bed, surrounded by family and friends.
There is an incredibly moving section concerning a conversation that Baltins has with an Amish carpenter, one that he wishes to hire to build his wife's coffin, a simple, wooden coffin. The carpenter is steadfast in refusing the commission, for one very sincere reason — he never knew Baltins' wife. To build her coffin, he would need to know what kind of person she was. There is more to this story, but I am going to leave it to Baltins to tell! The end result of this conversation was that Baltins and one of his friends built the coffin themselves. An inadvertent ritual of passing.
Then there are the conversations that he has with two different pairs of police officers — who are looking for answers for the coroner as to why Nancy's body is still in the bed that she died in, and not in a mortuary. A major part of this section deals with the family and friends that sit with Nancy's body, so that she is never left alone. There are options that many of us never think of, but that are out there. Perhaps they occurred here because Nancy was a seminary graduate, and spirituality was a part of her life each and every moment. But perhaps they occurred because Nancy and her husband paid attention to the living of life.
Interspersed with Baltins' letters to Nancy are excerpts from Nancy's own spiritual writings. The two reflect like thoughts — one the thoughts of someone attempting to live an authentic life, and the other the thoughts of someone attempting to come to terms with death.
These letters cover the whole of life — conversations with family and friends, a moving section on the dispersal of Nancy's ashes over the river that she loved so well at their personal "getaway", Mac's intuitive understanding that his Mother existed "everywhere", and Julia's personal path to discovery of her Mother's essence. It is all about planting flowers along the pathways of their personal getaway, the
first spring after Nancy's death. It is all about a life well lived.
© November 2006, Bonnie Cehovet, used with permission
Review by Carol Haggas, March 2007 ForeWord
Who's to say how one should grieve? Only someone who has endured the tremulous mourning process and emerged, if not whole, at least intact, can know what to say and, better yet, how to say it.
After nearly twenty-eight years of marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Baltins lost his wife Nancy to stage-four ovarian cancer. In the days following her death, when Baltins' sense of fragility was at its most pronounced, he searched for a way to make sense, not only of what his life was to become, but of what his life had been.
So began a series of letters to Nancy, thirty-nine of which are gathered in a candidly reflective collection that expresses intense pain as well as immense joy, stark honesty as well as sublime remorse. For Baltins, a respected practitioner of business law, such a contemplative journey was an uncharted one: "When I sit down to write these letters to you, Nancy, I have no sense of what will appear on these pages. It's like I'm building a road by reverse engineering: I'm constantly at my destination, looking back to appreciate the path by which I arrived."
That path began at the outset of Nancy's chemotherapy. A deeply spiritual woman, Nancy herself acknowledged the challenge such a rigorous course of treatment presented, yet saw it as an opportunity to transcend the parameters of her temporal existence in order to more fully appreciate her essential being.
"That's what our lives are about," Nancy told her husband. "Discovering our self-imposed limitations and discarding them."
It was a philosophy that would serve Baltins well as he persevered on his own, raising their two children, maintaining important routines and relationships. Whereas he previously considered himself incapable of doing all that his wife had done, and done well, by writing to Nancy, Baltins found a way of coming to terms with daunting tasks. "I realize my love for you didn't change the course of the cancer that took your life. But I can accept what I can't change and change what I can—my attitude."
As with all such introspective exercises, Baltins' is a fiercely personal reckoning, yet one that has universal implications. Surprisingly, Baltins seems reluctant to capitalize on his hard won insight—"I've learned I don't know how anything feels for someone else," he protests. The act of sharing these poignant love letters belies such an assertion, for it is precisely this sense of intimacy that imbues Baltins' keenly rendered portrait of a grieving husband with authenticity. Baltins does indeed know what to say, and says it with heartfelt simplicity and grace.
Carol Haggas, ForeWord Magazine, March 2007
231-933-3699 www.forewordmagazine.com