"In this short memoir, Mansfield recounts her husband's grueling two-year battle with a rare, incurable lymphoma and her three years of grieving and growth (she now facilitates bereavement groups and writes on the subject). Vic Mansfield, a physics professor and student of Tibetan Buddhism, held onto life fiercely, and the author recounts with honesty as well as tenderness the impact of mysterious symptoms, conflicting diagnoses, emergencies, and setbacks on the couple's relationship. Sustaining her, she writes, were her sons, the couple's land, Rilke's poetry, spiritual rituals, and her friends, centered on Wisdom's Goldenrod, a community founded by the late Anthony Damiani near Ithaca to offer study of Western and Eastern philosophies. Mansfield's matter-of-fact, sometimes graceful narrative offers witness that healing is possible, notably within the context of multi-decade commitments to people, places, and ideas. Left intriguingly unexplored are the reasons for the couple's medical choices, how her husband's illness and death reflect the challenges of end-of-life care in America, and the impact of the author's sampling from an array of wisdom traditions rather than sustained dedication to one. This account may appeal most to Mansfield's peers who are interested in nonsectarian spiritual responses to loss." --Publishers Weekly

“An instructive guidebook for readers confronting their own losses. . . . Deeply spiritual without being preachy, a comforting guide to mourning for readers of any stripe.” –Kirkus Reviews

"Magnificent, proundly moving . . . gives encouragement and solace to all." --Naomi Shihab Nye

"Not only a touching and courageous memoir about love, illness, death, and grief. . . Leaning into Love is a manual for healing that offers us the emotional and spiritual tools needed to grow and even flourish through life's deepest crises." --Dale Borglum, Founder, executive director, Living/Dying Project

"A powerful account of the journey of grief." Roshi Joan Halifax, abbot, upaya zen center, Author of Being with Dying

“Elaine Mansfield knows far more than most people about love and loss, and she tells it with admirable honesty and clarity.” –Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist --Foreign Affair, Truth or Consequences , TheWar between the Tates

“Reading this beautiful memoir of love and loss and triumph felt to me like a sacred journey into the very heart and soul of the courageous woman who writes it. With finely crafted, poignant as well as powerful prose, Elaine Mansfield tells the moving and inspirational story of her husband’s valiant battle with a rare form of incurable cancer and her own emotional struggles to support him throughout their shared ordeal. . . . Overall this is an uplifting story of courage, hope, determination and triumph—and a very compelling read. Highly recommended!”

--Marty Tousley, CNS-BC, FT, DCC, is a nationally certified grief counselor who blogs at www.griefhealingblog.com. Marty is a bereavement counselor and is the moderator for online Grief Healing Discussion Groups for Hospice of the Valley in Phoenix, Arizona. She is author of Finding Your Way through Grief: A Guide for the First Year.

“Some books are so original they could only have been written by one person. This is one of them. If you want to know what real love looks like, read this page-turning testament to the exquisite beauty and tragedy of life, death and rebirth. You won’t come away unchanged. Mansfield is a masterful storyteller whose prose is as spare and meaningful as poetry and whose integrity is as intrepid and inspiring as the most magnificent heroine or goddess.”

--Jean Benedict Raffa, author, Healing the Sacred Divide, The Bridge to Wholeness, and Dream Theatres of the Soul.

“Elaine Mansfield's book with her extraordinary husband through sickness, death and then on to grief and renewal is heart breaking and healing at the same time. It is a spiritual as well as an emotional journey, a good companion, a beautifully written story of a woman's journey through bereavement.”

~ Lama Tsultrim Allione, author of Feeding your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict, Women of Wisdom

“Each person’s path through grief is as startlingly unique as the palm of a loved one’s hand and yet mythic in its universality. Elaine Mansfield’s testament of loving and loss lets intimate details and overarching truths reinforce each other, so that those of us entering her story find ourselves crossing into the underworld with her. In that land we find not only helplessness but the courage to learn new skills; not only inconsolable loneliness but the steady support of family and community; not only absence but the love which never leaves. Above all, we discover with her the life-saving value of kindness. This is a book which captures the heart from page one and continues to hold us even when we must put it down, and so it mirrors the undying connection between Elaine and her beloved Vic.”

~ Patricia Campbell Carlson, Executive Director, A Network for Grateful Living

I come to Elaine Mansfield’s book with two perspectives: that of a former hospice director, and as a surviving spouse of a long and loving marriage. The book is an honest and sensitive portrayal of Elaine’s journey accompanying her husband Vic through the anguish of what turns out to be an incurable form of cancer. We know immediately that she is writing this after Vic’s death; the mystery is not whether he will live, but how she will survive without him.

The details of the illness and its treatment are unsparing, but softened by the love and candor that bind this extraordinary couple. There is much to be learned here about the critical role of the honest communication that is the deepest kind of intimacy. The book is also a portrayal of Elaine’s circuitous and painful path to recovery after Vic’s death and her deeply understood recognition that while her husband has not survived, their complex and rich love is forever part of her. This is a book that will touch your heart and inform your understanding of love, loss and grief.

--Nina Miller, Founder of the Nina Miller Center for Hospicare and Palliative Services, Ithaca, NY

“The book is a teaching, without a hint of pedagogy, teaching by reporting from the quaking ground of her experience of marriage, family, community, friendship, and death, without leaving for a moment the inevitability of resurrection. What emerges is not only a portrait of one person's experience, but, like the great and ancient stories undergirding human culture itself, an indelible pointer to all that it is to be human. --Fred Weiner, DDC author of Getting There

Sometimes Elaine Mansfield's writing makes me smile and sometimes it makes me cry, but it never fails to make me *FEEL*. Her words are perfectly descriptive - so much more than just sentences on paper. Read her blog, feel her joy, her struggles, and get a sense of the utter beauty of the land on which she lives... Every once in a while, you stumble across a person so special that they touch you more deeply than you can explain. Elaine is one of those people for me. ♥

Ann Napolitan, The Long and Winding Road, Journey through Alzheimers, runs alzjourney.com, and is a writer and advocate for Alzheimer’s, loss, and the eldercare

National reviews, newsletters, talks at bookstores, hospices and palliative centers. National radio tour. Blog tour, active social marketing. Talks at Camp Widow, Hospicare of Ithaca, Rochester, NY., San Francisco and North Carolina.

TEDx talk is Nov 8, TEDx ChemungRiver at Corning Glass in Corning, NY.