Westberg, born in Chicago in 1913, received his bachelor's from Augustana College in 1935, and later graduated from Augustana Theological Seminary . He served a short time as a parish pastor then became a full time chaplain at Augustana Hospital in Chicago . After that his writing and career focused on a team approach to health care . In 1951 Westberg became Chaplain of the University of Chicago Clinics. In 1956 he started a joint appointment in both the Chicago Divinity School and the school of medicine at the University of Chicago. In 1962 Westberg's interest in the grief process resulted in his writing Good Grief which enjoyed popular success. Later in 1964 he became Dean of institute of Religion at Texas Med Center in Houston providing a graduate program in pastoral care and counseling through a program for seminaries . Later he would serve as Professor of Medicine and Religion in the Department of Psychiatry of Baylor College of Medicine, and at Hamma School of Theology now Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Ohio. In Hamma Westberg began what would become the model for a "neighborhood church-based clinic", where physicians, pastoral counselors, nurses, seminarians and medical students and community volunteers provided needed care. He continued this sort of work when in the early 1970s he moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he worked with a team to create several "wholistic health centers" focused on prevention, whole-person care, and the church as a healing community. In the mid 1980s at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, with support from a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Westberg launched a parish nurse project in which nurses and others in congregations promoted health, prevented illness, and cared for those in need. This approach is now known as "faith community nursing" (FCN) where there is an intentional integration of the practice of faith with the practice of nursing so that people can achieve wholeness in, with, and through the population which faith community nurses serve. Westberg lived in Willowbrook, Illinois toward the end of his life and died in 1999. By the time of his death in 1999, sales of his popular work, Good Grief, would reach more than 2.4 million copies.