Grace Gawler’s Memoirs – Review by Jeff Hutner USA – for New Paradigm
- A book that inspires the best in us – whatever the circumstances.
Grace, Grit and Gratitude is an autobiography of a remarkable woman, Grace Gawler, whose extraordinary life saved her husband from almost certain death from bone cancer after having been given two weeks to live by his doctors. She also helped save countless others from their doctor’s death sentences. After her husband’s recovery, she worked with him in Australia providing information that helped many cancer patients take responsibility for their healing and later wrote a book for women with breast cancer and duplicated her successes there.
The book is both inspiring and very difficult to read because of Grace’s inability to move away from an abusive and emotionally frozen husband time and time again. Most women would have left Ian early on but Grace always saw a possibility for communication and healing that never came. In the end, the icy silences and violent outbursts of physical abuse directed at Grace were the precursors to Ian’s finally walking out on Grace and their children. Ian’s departure was not the end of Grace’s challenges physically, emotionally and financially. She developed her own life threatening complication after a surgery requiring 16 more operations and miraculously lived to tell the tale becoming the first recipient in the world of a bionic implant for her condition.
Grace’s story, set in the Australian countryside, Melbourne, the Philippines, London, Scotland and the Netherlands is full of epic drama and after hundreds of pages, there is finally hope and resolution beyond imagination. I do not remember a book that made me feel more overwhelmed by the enormity of life challenges faced and overcome nor more inspired by the true grit that Grace displayed from marrying a man given two weeks to live and being totally responsible for his care and recovery to raising children and taking care of the farm on which they lived. Grace, Grit and Gratitude is a magnificent story of overcoming adversity on a scale few can imagine. It puts life into context and reveals a strength and compassion beyond reason.
If you have been or are being challenged in your life, know someone going through hard times or anyone with cancer needing support, this is a must read book. For me, Grace defines a woman on a mission whose work has benefited thousands while saving the lives of men and women including her husband and her own that would have certainly died had this angel of mercy, intelligence and compassion not been there to offer her healing love and light.
Grace is quite simply an angel in human form whose life is a shining example of what we might become if we discover the amazing power of love and focus that all to often become buried by the many overwhelming challenges and distractions of life.
To learn more about this remarkable woman and order her astonishing and illuminating book, visit her site gracegawler.com.