FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: How to be a young Jewish widow: What your mother never told you.

Miriam Sagan, a Jewish, Santa Fe poet, was 42 when her first husband, a Zen Buddhist Priest, died unexpectedly after surgical complications. As a non-traditional woman, now a non-traditional widow, Miriam found the usual guide to widowhood to be irrelevant to someone of her age and background. Instead, she adopted what she calls a typical baby boomer" approach to grief, embracing it as an extreme state to be experienced." As one reader aptly stated: No, this is not your mothers widowhood." The chronicling of Miriams journey is engagingly, poignantly, and even humorously told in her recently published memoir Searching for a Mustard Seed.

Costa Mesa, CA (PRWEB) January 15, 2004 --The memoirs title comes from a Buddhist teaching story about a woman whose only child dies. The desperately bereaved woman comes to Shakyamuni Buddha, asking for a miracle, asking, Please bring my child back to life." The Buddha agrees, but only if she will bring him a mustard seed from a household that has never known death. And so the woman goes out seeking. Miriam, too, seeks, unashamedly, unconventionally, everywhere she perceives that there might be support, or answers, or miracles.

She flies to Korea in the middle of winter (Seoul was frozen by cold dry Siberian winds. It was polluted. It was ugly. It sounded perfect to me."), enrolls in weightlifting classes ('Im a widow! I yelled by the machine that strengthened my arms, 'Im a widow!"), and seeks new romantic relationships ( I made a mental list of everyone I knew who might qualify as a potential lover. My list was undiscriminating, it included people who lived thousands of miles away, the perhaps about-to-be divorced, those with bad reputations, and some I hadnt met.") She engages in the mourning rituals of her Jewish faith as well as those of her husbands Buddhist practice, and turns to friends, books, movies, therapists, travel agents, grief counselors, and family. Her ultimate answers come mainly in the form of self-acceptance, when she realizes that grief is not a one-size-fits-all process and that it is all right to keep living ones own life, even after a loved ones death.

With the goal of helping another woman like me find a friendlier book on the shelf," Miriam wrote her own narrative, one that tells a candid story of coping with loss and change and insensitive comments from relatives, with profound moments among strangers, with devastating loneliness, and with the understanding, in the end, that life, in its own way, was a strong as death." Instead of a mustard seed, she finds that she is surrounded with continuity, with community, and all the beauty that is life."

For additional information or a readers copy, contact: Holly Gruber at Quality Words In Print at (714) 436-5700 or hgruber@qwipbooks.com.

Searching for a Mustard Seed by Miriam Sagan (hardcover, 208 pages, $18.00) was published by Quality Words In Print in 2003, and is available through major internet booksellers and selected bookstores.

Quality Words In Print is an independent publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction based in Costa Mesa, California.
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CONTACT INFORMATION:
Holly Gruber
Quality Words In Print
(714) 436-5700
hgruber@qwipbooks.com
www.qwipbooks.com