Free e-books: World travel; Suicide Grief; Malaysian Borneo (green travel)

 

The price of my three e-books are now $0.00 – on Amazon: "A Love Letter to Malaysian Borneo.", "Surviving Suicide" and, "Naked in Budapest: travels with a passionate nomad,". Enjoy my gift to you!

A Love Letter to Malaysian Borneo

Surviving Suicide

Naked in Budapest

                                          Two anthologies I've appeared in 

Review of Surviving Suicide: a mothers story

Surviving Suicide: a mother's story 
by 

Heather Hapeta (Goodreads Author)

Pip Adam's review 

Oct 07, 2012

really liked it

Like many people, suicide has been a part of my life from an early age. I found Surviving Suicide: A Mother's Story a very helpful book. Although, thankfully, it has been almost a year since the last suicide in our family I still gained a lot of information and hope from this book.

The book begins with a detailed retelling of the author's experience of her son's suicide. Hapeta recounts this time in an intimate way, explaining exactly how she felt and what she did, in the time leading up to the suicide as she tried to help her son recover from the debilitating affects of a serious accident, when she found her son's body after his suicide and in the time following. I found this account very affecting and the detail was extremely helpful. I have found that we often talk in abstracts about suicide, with our relatives and friends, but to read a detailed account of one person's experience was very useful. I could relate to many of the experiences Hapeta recounts and I found it quite helpful to compare my own experience with hers, both the similarities and the differences. In this section Hapeta also talks about what worked and what didn't during this time in her son's life and death. I'm not sure what it would be like reading this account closer to a suicide but I found it very helpful.

The second section of the book (I am not sure the book is as clearly delineated as I am presented it as, Hapeta's voice continues into the second section which is great because its easy tone and direct language is part of what makes this book so helpful) offers some invaluable advice concerning a large range of things. This makes the book an extremely useful handbook to have in the time of a suicide. This section begins with some lists about how to deal with the time directly after the suicide and comes from both Hapeta's personal experience and her word as a grief cousellor. There is one particular list which helps friends of people surviving suicide might help them. I remember Hapeta giving me this list a long time ago after a friend died and I found it useful then and I think it is still useful now. As well as guidance on how to navigate the emotional landscape of suicide, Hapeta offers pragmatic advice about the law and the media. I think this is an extemely important part of what makes this book so successful. I remember directly after the suicide of a close friend, whose will I was the executor of, being inundated with legal requirements which I didn't understand. I'm not sure I would have been robust enough to read these sections of this book but if I had a copy I am sure someone close to me could have read these and clarified what needed to be done. This legal information deals mainly with New Zealand law, but I feel that if you are an overseas reader it would act as a checklist of things to ask legal experts about. I also found Hapeta's sections about the media very helpful. There is a lot of publicity about whether the media should report suicide and Hapeta offers really intelligent and caring recommendations about how to deal with this that again come from her unique experience as suicide survivor and professional.

This book is unique, I believe. I have never read anything quite like it. The blend of personal and professional experience is invaluable. My hope is that no one will every need a book about suicide again, but I suspect they will and if they do, I think this is a very good option.

this book is avaibake on Amazon

Tips to about how to help after a suicide death

How to help after a suicide death

Remember, despite the headlines, suicide deaths are numerically small and the grief from this form of death is different, however, I know, and so do many, many others, it is possible to survive the pain.

Here are a few suggestions learnt from my own pain and the experience of others’ when I was involved with the Canterbury Bereaved by Suicide Society:

* Do let us talk – mostly we don’t want your advice, just your ears – we need to voice what's going on in our head.

* Do respond honestly to our questions about the death.

* Don't remove tasks, responsibilities, or other actions, unless we ask you to. Tidying our daughter’s room; sorting our husband’s clothes, or a father’s office; although painful, these actions are often valued tasks that help us work through the pain. Just because it hurts doesn’t mean we don't want to do these jobs. We may just want to do it later: when we are ready.

* Don't tell us it's not our fault; that it's XYZ's fault; that it’s God’s will; and that we'll find a meaning to this in time, or any other conclusion you may have: ours may be different. Your deductions may be true but we have to work through a process to arrive at our own answers. Each of us will grieve in our own way and come to our own solutions.

* Don't tell us that you know how we feel – you don't, even if you too had someone die by suicide.

* Try not to let your own sense of helplessness stop you reaching out to us. Some of the most helpful support I got was from people who said; ‘I don't know what to say’. I knew they were speaking from the heart.

* Do allow us our own feelings: we will be working through anger, disbelief, hate, love, blame and every other human emotion there is. We won't be doing it in a nice neat list like many grief books suggest. It will be more like the tin of emotional worms I spoke of earlier – each one wriggling, and working their way from the top to the bottom then back up to the top, again, and again, and again.

* Don't tell us what you would do, or how you would feel if you were us – you aren't us.

* Remember our grief will not be over in six weeks or six months. We have at least a year of working through the initial, intense, pain, the funeral, the inquest, then the first Christmas, the first birthday, and the first anniversary of the death, the funeral and every other important time that we shared with our loved one.

 © Heather Hapeta

Extract from Surviving Suicide: a mother’s story

April 2012. ISBN 978-0-473-20510-2 available free for e-readers  - AMAZON 

Malaysian Borneo- one of my fav places

A love letter to Malaysian Borneo, or, can this travel writer be green? By Heather Hapeta

There’s no universally accepted definition of ecotourism, and there are considerable overlaps in the meanings. It’s perhaps the most over-used and misused word in the tourism industry - often deliberately misused for marketing purposes.

Hapeta say "I’m a self-taught writer, not a journalist, or an ecologist. This is not a scientific paper with lots of facts and figures, merely the musings about green issues by a traveller who wants to walk as lightly as possible on Earth"

She uses her trips to Malaysian Borneo as a way of exploring the issues.  She also says she is "Time-rich, I’m a slow traveller, so stay longer in more places than most, trying to absorb the culture and flavours, to sit and watch people. It also means that although I don’t always sign up for an expensive eco-tour, I do try to practise the principles of ecotourism."

This small book starts with her surrounded by noisy, diesel-fumed boats, nudging each other, racing their engines, drivers manoeuvring so their passengers get the best view.  It made her wonder "can a travel writer, or any traveller, really be green - or is this just an oxymoronic dream, given the air miles needed to get to destinations?"

In this essay-cum-travel memoir she considers how green she was, or wasn’t, while exploring this ‘seething hotspot of bio-diversity’ of an island. (‘Quote from Planet Earth’ BBC TV).

She obviously agrees with Malaysia's tourism tagline. ‘Malaysia - truly Asia’ and this booklet is a good introduction to the island of Borneo and green travel issues around the world.

Hapeta has two other book available on Amazon ( and other e-sellers) Naked in Budapest: travels with a passionate nomad;  and, Surviving Suicide - a mother's story

She writes travel blogs on www.kiwitravelwriter.wordpress.com  

Her FaceBook page is The Travelling Writer

Suicide grief - book reprinted (also for e-readers)

Surviving Suicide: a mothers story - by Heather Hapeta

20,000 words - written by a kiwi mum and therapist

• A practical guide for people who have had someone die by suicide – and ideal for friends who want to support others who have had a suicide death in their family.

• The first half is about a son’s motorbike accident at 15 years old, then his suicide at 20.

• The second half offers the family many helpful tips for surviving this grief and also shows friends of the bereaved ways in which they can help each other during an extremely difficult time.

Unaddressed suicide grief often leads to more suicide deaths … learn how to lessen this risk

www.amazon.com/author/heatherhapeta  (for Kindles etc.)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/146316 (Kindles & all other e-readers, Kobo, Nook etc.)

Also available as paper copy for $20 - directly from Heather Hapeta (heatherhapeta@orcon.net.nz) when posted to a NZ address. (Direct credit or PayPal )