Riding the Wave: Stories of Loss, Grief and Healing

Description

Some losses change the shape of your life forever.

In Riding the Wave: Stories of Loss, Grief and Healing, Cindy September opens her life and heart to tell a deeply personal story of family, love, devastating loss and the long journey towards healing.

Cindy describes grief as something that arrives in waves. At first, those waves can feel enormous: filled with sorrow, hopelessness and emotional and physical pain, arriving without warning even during the most ordinary moments of life.

Her story begins with loss before she was even born, when her eleven-year-old brother Eugene died while her mother was pregnant with her. Years later, Cindy would experience another life-changing tragedy when her beloved sister Constance died suddenly in 2016, leaving behind infant twins. The book follows Cindy through the shock, trauma and grief that followed, and later through another profound loss: the death of her father, Kennith.

But Riding the Wave is about far more than death.

It is also a story about the people who remain.

About parents, sisters, nieces, nephews, friends and colleagues. About the people who sit beside us when there are no right words. About therapy, faith, anger, laughter, memories, unexpected moments of joy and the stubborn human instinct to keep living.

Cindy writes candidly about the reality of grief: the loneliness, emotional exhaustion, triggers and anniversaries, but also the humour and ordinary moments that continue alongside sorrow. Her message is clear: grief does not follow a neat sequence, and there is no universal timetable for healing. Everyone experiences loss differently.

The title itself comes from Cindy’s realisation that grief behaves like waves. They can crash unexpectedly, disappear for a time and return when least expected. Eventually the waves may become smaller and less frequent, but the love behind the grief remains.

Along the way, Riding the Wave also offers something especially valuable to people supporting someone who is grieving. One chapter specifically explores what to say, and what not to say, to someone who has lost a loved one. The book later reflects on survival, healing and meaning, before closing with Cindy’s own poetry written through different seasons of grief.

Cindy describes the book as both a personal release and a love letter to the people she has lost: a testimony that her family has loved, has lost, and is still standing.

Ultimately, this is a book about continuing.

About discovering that survival itself can be an achievement.

About understanding that pain can become part of our story without becoming the whole story.

And about knowing that, even when grief returns, we can learn to ride the wave.

Riding the Wave is especially for readers who:

• are grieving the death of someone they love;
• have experienced the loss of a parent, sibling or close family member;
• are struggling to understand why grief still hurts months or years later;
• want to better support someone who is grieving;
• are navigating trauma, bereavement or major life change;
• appreciate honest memoirs about family, resilience, faith and healing; or
• simply need the reassurance that their grief does not make them abnormal and that they are not walking the journey alone.

Cindy’s hope is that readers who have lost someone will feel understood, less alone and reassured that their experience of grief is valid.