When Words Fall Silent: Grief & Celebration
About this audiobook
This story began as a gift—a short piece written for a colleague navigating one of life's most difficult passages. Devonne was watching her mother slip away, stroke by stroke, word by word, until all that remained was the language of hand squeezes and eye contact. I wanted to capture that particular grief, that specific helplessness of loving someone whose voice has been stolen but whose presence remains achingly, powerfully there.
But as I wrote, something unexpected happened. The story grew beyond Devonne. It expanded to hold her siblings and my own mother, Bobbejo, and her siblings—TJ, Pam, Jill, and Tobey. It reached forward to embrace my siblings, Michael and Ashley, and myself. And in the process of chronicling their journey through that first terrible year of loss, I realized I wasn't just writing about one family's grief. I was writing about my own siblings, the generation before mine, and my own. About every family that has gathered around a hospital bed, a hospice room, a grave. About all of us who have had to learn the impossible task of continuing when the person who taught us how to live is gone.
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About the author
Tiffany Solter, PhD is a mental health professional, educator, advocate, and lifelong seeker of magic whose writing explores the boundaries between life, death, justice, and the profound connections that define us. Born into a family of mountain people spanning Wyoming and Colorado, she grew up shaped, largely, by two grandmothers who taught her, one through train journeys across the West, the other chasing shooting stars across the plains, that anything is possible.
A survivor of a near-death experience in 1996, Solter spent decades integrating what she encountered in that "warm place where light is everything" into a life of healing work, academic achievement, and fierce advocacy. She holds a doctorate with a dissertation on grace and recovery, and has worked alongside peer counselors, nurses, and mental health teams she considers among the most transformative teachers of her life.
Her advocacy voice is unflinching and deeply personal. In "Be a Man": The Violence Society Ignores, Solter turns her clinical expertise and lived experience toward a crisis our culture has long refused to see: domestic violence against men. Drawing on research, survivor accounts, and her own family history, she challenges the archetypal and institutional blind spots that leave male victims invisible, unbelieved, and without adequate resources. The book is equal parts gripping fiction, Jungian psychological analysis, and practical call to action. It is complete with resource guides for survivors, supporters, military families, and children. It is the work of someone who has sat in clinical rooms with these men, loved them as family, and refused to stay silent.
She lives in what she calls Camelot, a home she and her husband Jeff manifested in childhood whispers, surrounded by family, familiars, motorcycles, and what she simply calls the magic.
Between Worlds is her memoir. "Be a Man" is her battle cry.
