Living with Grief & Loss

Grief is crazy-making.  It can drain the color from everything you see and strip the meaning off anything you think about.  In the face of that, it’s hard to know what’s normal any more.  C.S. Lewis was one of the great Christian theologians of the 20th century, and when love came late into his life, it was taken just as quickly when his wife died of cancer.  It turned his world upside down and made him question everything he believed.  Regardless of whether or not you’re a Christian, his memoir, A Grief Observed, can be a comfort for knowing that other people have been through it, too.

An idea that is more recently gaining traction in the field is the idea of continuing bonds.  When we lose someone we love, one part of the pain relates to the fact we were so attached to them (psychologically, emotionally, etc.).  Grieving— and coming to “acceptance”— need not be about “letting go [detachment],” but rather about understanding the transformation of the relationship in the perpetual absence of the other person.  The book, Continuing Bonds (eds., Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, & Steven Nickman) is an academic take, but an informative one.