Surrendering to Joy: My Year of Love, Letting Go and Forgiveness (The Joy Series)

"One of the most remarkable books you'll read this year. Or any year..." — Publisher's Daily Review
Sometimes the worst crises become our greatest healers.
That’s what happened to author Suzanne Falter after the sudden, strange death of her daughter Teal at age 22.
Immediately, Suzanne began to write. She had to just to make sense of Teal’s death. Since then, these essays that have been shared hundreds of thousands of time on Facebook.
But then, that’s what Teal would have wanted. Because she was, in fact, a healer.
In Surrendering to Joy, Suzanne charts her path over the year following Teal’s death.

With searing, raw honesty, she covers the most important things in life – love, forgiveness, humanity. Compassion.
She writes about the incredible outpouring of love around the world after Teal’s death.
And about forgiving her difficult mother just before her death a few months later.
And about realizing she has been a drama junkie, and how to deal with uncertainty.
Her readers have described the book as intimate, healing, wise … like having a chat with an oldfriend. And that is its essence. Each page is, indeed, blessed with some kind of unusual grace.
This is a story of letting go. Dancing through a dark tunnel, fumbling along from one signpost to the next, and believing for no good reason that at any moment an unexpected light will shine.
Of course, the light was always there from the beginning, shining quite beautifully. I’d simplyforgotten where to look for it.
So I found myself with nothing to call my own in my 53rd year. That was the year I lost everything: my career, my home, the relationship I had been pinning my hopes on, my mother, and my marriage of 23 years.
And then I lost Teal.
"One of the most remarkable books you'll read this year. Or any year..." -- Publisher's Daily Review
Sometimes the worst crises become our greatest healers.

That’s what happened to author Suzanne Falter after the sudden, strange death It took the sudden death of my beautiful, life-loving, jubilant 22-year- old daughter for me to truly dissolve and be reborn. And to find my way back to a state of grace, and a deep and abiding joy.
Knowing Teal, that is just the way she would have wanted it; she always had a better idea of how her mother should do things.
It was only after her death that I realized she was exactly right.
* * *
The cause of Teal’s death remains unknown. A housemate found her collapsed in an empty bathtub after a cardiac arrest. EMTs managed to restore her heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness and was taken off life support six days later. Teal was an epileptic, but doctors will never know if a seizure was the cause of her death.
Researchers estimate one in one thousand epileptics pass away from mysterious sudden deaths each year. But I believe Teal died because she was meant to become a healer from the afterlife. Several months before her death, Teal called me to say, “In six months something really big is going to happen that will give me my healing gift.” She had received this information in a meditation.
A few days after her cardiac arrest, I began to feel Teal’s presence around me, talking to me and sending me this beautiful, shimmering, etheric love.
Not long after that, driven by a sense of love and peace, I began to write these essays ... they chronicled my slow crawl back to acceptance – and a deep forgiveness of others, but mostly myself.
It was as if Teal was sitting with me as I wrote each essay, thoughtfully guiding my choice of words with love and care.
Each of these essays has a healing heart, offered with my wish for your own love and happiness. That is what writing these essays has done for me.
In her lifetime, Teal wanted that love and healing for all of us more than anything. And so it is.

Suzanne Falter is an author and speaker who helps women find their way back to joy by embracing life just the way it is. After the sudden death of her 22-year-old daughter, Teal, in August, 2012, her work has deepened to radiate Teal’s free-spirited love for life. Suzanne’s work has been featured in More, Fitness, The New York Times, Woman’s Day, New Woman, The Wall Street Journal, SELF, The Christian Science Monitor, as well as more than 100 TV and radio programs. She is the author of How Much Joy Can You Stand? and Living Your Joy (both Ballantine.) Her work as a writer, speaker and blogger has touched more than 2 million women.