“With courage and heart, Susan Hadler embarks upon a difficult journey to find the lost and forgotten members of her fragmented family. Along the way, she uncovers the family’s decades-old pain and sometimes shame―all with the hope of healing and reconciliation. Her story shows how loss, denial, and stigma can drain us, and also how forgiveness and compassion can restore us. Her unique blend of talents―equal parts writer, psychologist, and bloodhound hot on the trail―make for highly engaging and relatable reading. No one who reads this book will ever look at his or her own family history the same way again.”
—David A. Lande, National Geographic senior researcher and author of I Was with Patton
Where are they now, the lost, the forgotten? With the love in her mother’s silence as her guide, Susan Johnson Hadler began a quest to find out who the missing people in her family were and what happened to them. The search led her to Germany, where her father was killed just before the end of WWII; then to a Buddhist monastery in France, where she learned new ways to relate to life and death; and ultimately to a state mental hospital in Ohio, where the family abandoned her mother’s older sister years earlier. She believed that her aunt had died—but Hadler, to her great surprise, found her still alive at age ninety-four. And the story didn’t end there.
Captivating and often heart-wrenching, The Beauty of What Remains is a story of liberating a family from secrets, ghosts, and untold pain; of reuniting four generations shattered by shame and fear; and of finding the ineffable beauty in what remains.
Author: Susan Johnson Hadler
Publication Date: September 15, 2015
