"We are all amateurs at grief," writes Jerusha Hull McCormack, visiting Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. "It comes to us all; we must all go through it. Some of us make extraordinary discoveries while doing so. To treat grief as a problem to be fixed, or (worse still) to medicalize it, is to rob us of the extraordinary privilege of encountering this experience on our terms: for each of us has our own way of grieving, and each of us has something to learn from the process."
When McCormack's husband died, she was overcome by the loss. This sturdy and accessible volume is designed to help others negotiate this precarious and disorienting process. The author is convinced that the pain must be experienced and not avoided or covered up: "You learn how to stay with the pain, and even attend to it, so that, in the end, you can make it your own. And, in the process, grieving becomes something else, a resource that has become a reservoir, a support for others, a world that initiates us into a new chance for life."
In chapters titled the resources of pain, imagine, lost in loss, a world without maps, transforming loss, only half alive, remembering and forgetting, griving in a "happy" world, directions to another place, and guidelines for spirit guardians, McCormack presents an engaging and lyrical anatomy of the various nuances and stages of grief. There is no "one size fits all" for suffering and loss of a spouse/child/sibling/parent/ friend. The author spells out the complications and the unpredictability of grief and the varied emotions that often accompany it. She also makes it clear that the person in mourning doesn't have to accept the false comfort offered by others.
One of our favorite sections spells out the rights of a person in grief, such as "you have a right to complete your grieving in your own time and in your own way, without being subject to the 'schedules' and expectations of another." We also appreciated the many poems and the description of grief as traveling in a far and alien country.
