What do you do when you’re facing the end of your life—or the life of someone you love?
Available December 1
Preorder now!
Hardcover
10 x 10, 299 pages
$46.95
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| It All Belongs offers a unique pairing of perspectives and actively models spiritual tools and practices most helpful for navigating life’s inevitable realities and unwanted journeys — while embracing the love, beauty, light, and joy in all our life’s moments.
Upon her devastating terminal Glioblastoma Multiforme diagnosis, Judy Smoot was forced to put spiritual practices she taught so many others to the ultimate, personal test. In the opening section of this beautifully illustrated book, “How to Live,” we get to know Judy as an artist, spiritual director, expressive arts teacher, retreat facilitator, and innovator of a non-profit organization supporting people with chronic disease.
The book’s second section, “How to Die,” begins with Judy’s terminal diagnosis and unfolds with her heart-wrenching yet strangely uplifting narrative and art through which Judy shows us what it looks like to live fully into our own mortality by living fully into hers. Actively modeling spiritual and expressive arts practices she taught to so many others, Judy’s living into her own mortal battle prompts a friend’s observation, “Judy taught us how to live . . . and how to die.”
At first interspersing with her primary narrative, and then gradually moving toward full ownership of this interwoven tale, Judy’s husband and soulmate Roy reveals his own day-by-day struggle to navigate his unwanted journey using tools Judy taught—and some of his own. In the book’s final section, “How to Survive,” It All Belongs invites its readers to journey with Roy as he learns to embrace life’s twin realities of love and grief, offering a rare window into the elusive rhythms of his bittersweet dance.
Woven into both sides of this honest, beautiful, heartbreaking, and awe-inspiring narrative, readers will discover spiritual tools and practices to equip them for their own inevitable end-of-life realities. It All Belongs offers hands-on help for learning to embrace the love, beauty, light, and joy tucked within even our most tragic experiences. About the Authors: |
 JUDY & ROY met in college at Ohio State, were married following graduation, and for the next four decades lived and loved in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and Maine. Roy enjoyed a successful banking career; Judy served as a Wellstreams spiritual director, a Dominican Associate, and an Expressive Arts Florida Institute (EAFI) certified expressive arts therapist. Judy established Always We Begin Again (AWBA), a non-profit organization to support people with chronic illness. Later in life they made their home at “Sunrise Ridge,” their cottage and retreat center renovated and created in the breathtaking beauty of Ohio’s Hocking Hills.
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MELINDA FOLSE is a writer, editor, and collaborator on a mission to tell stories that make a difference. She believes this story will strike a meaningful chord in every life it touches. It All Belongs is her eighth book, joining Grandmaster, Dream Catcher, and Lessons Well Learned as her favorite explorations of lives and passions well lived. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
