Conversations with Bella: A love story, a spiritual odyssey, and the gift of a broken heart

When Bella, Dr. Merv Dickinson’s beloved wife of fifty years, dies suddenly, grief plunges him into previously unknown depths of love and inner connection. He experiences mystical moments when Bella seems powerfully present. And messages as if from her emerge in deep meditation. Far from something to endure, grief, he finds, is just another expression of love, which hides within it the unexpected gift of a broken heart. This memoir is at once a very human love story and an extraordinary spiritual odyssey. As love story, it is tumultuous, adventurous, and deeply moving. As spiritual odyssey, it begins with an astonishing epiphany in the new-age community of Findhorn, leads Bella and Merv to find their destiny in New Zealand, and ends in the embrace of the Eternal. But as a rational and skeptical psychologist, Merv fears that his unusual grief experiences may only be a comforting delusion. He struggles to make sense of it all. Finally he concludes that the heart has its own way of knowing, and that a broken heart may open the door to a timeless dimension that transcends all separation - even in death. Told in an intensely personal style, in language both poignant and lyrical, this memoir will inspire anyone touched by grief, as well as those on their own inner journey of awakening. Readers who appreciated the grief memoirs of C.S. Lewis, Joan Didion, and Joyce Carol Oates will find Conversations with Bella irresistibly compelling.