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Grieving
A beginner's guide
Jerusha Hull McCormack
Paperback |144 pp
‘Grieving: a beginner’s guide is a personal, concrete exploration of ways to deal with the pain of loss. It is a book of lessons learned first-hand by the author in her own grieving, and so the book has an unusual immediacy and usefulness. There is not a note of emotion or advice out of place. I can imagine giving it to friends as a first resource. It is a trustworthy and intelligent handbook, deceptively simple and straightforward. While there are many books offering theories about grief, this one offers a phenomenology of sorrow, a charting of a wide range of experiences anyone might have in the aftermath of loss. It is an excellent book addressed to the person grieving, not to the person thinking about grief.’
‘A beautiful book in its honesty and common sense. The words are carved out of the author’s own grief, written with deep feeling. But she is also able to stand back, and to empathise with others in their grief. I shall give grieving: a beginner’s guide to those I know who are experiencing the agony of bereavement.’
‘Chances are, if you are reading this, your heart is broken. This book is designed to help those in pain – and specifically those who have lost someone through death – to imagine the path before them. It is a path of suffering. But it is also a path that may lead to unexpected discoveries – and to peace.’
There is no sure route through grieving. Jerusha Hull McCormack provides instead a series of signposts by which we may find our own path to a new life. ‘We are all amateurs at grief’ she writes, ‘it comes to us all; we must all go through it. 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 special to learn from the process.’
