Grief Is At Once A Public And

One Of The Difficulties With Grief Research Is That It Risks Making Certain Kinds Of Grief Seem Normal And Others Abnormal - And Of Course Having A Sense Of The Contours Of Grief Is, I Think, Truly Useful, One Has To Remember It's Not A Science, It's An Individual Reckoning, Which Science Is Just Trying To Help Us Describe.

I Have Seen That Grief Can Be Very Different For Different People. While The Range Of Emotions Experienced Is Similar, The Way We Deal With Those Emotions Isn't, Necessarily.

My Mother Died Of Metastatic Colorectal Cancer Shortly Before Three P.m. On Christmas Day Of 2008. I Don't Know The Exact Time Of Her Death, Because None Of Us Thought To Look At A Clock For A While After She Stopped Breathing.

I Think That Grief Is A Profound Spiritual, Metaphysical, And - Oddly - Physical Reckoning With Death, Which We Don't Understand Well. It's Both The Process By Which You Relearn The World In The Absence Of Someone Who Was A Pillar In It, And The Process In Which You Confront The Reality Of Death.

This Is Part Of The Complexity Of Grief: A Piece Of You Recognizes It Is An Extreme State, An Altered State, Yet A Large Part Of You Is Entirely Subject To Its Demands.