Cressida Connolly

Comfort the suffering

If a single book can make you a stronger, better person, it is Julia Samuel’s Grief Works

If a single book could help you to be kinder and more compassionate, could expand and deepen your understanding of other people (and possibly yourself) and make you less afraid of dying in the process, you would surely be eager to acquire it at once. Well look no further, for Grief Works is that book. The King Lears among us — whose every third thought is the grave — will need no persuading that a collection of essays about surviving bereavement is an enthralling read. For those of a more timid or sunny disposition, ask yourself this: when someone you love dies, how will you manage?

The odds of avoiding grief are not in anyone’s favour. In Britain half a million people die each year and it’s estimated that each death affects at least five people. Julia Samuel is founder patron of Child Bereavement UK and has worked as a grief psychotherapist, helping grieving families, for 25 years. But there’s nothing po-faced about her:

I’m sure some would disapprove, but when I’m talking to someone who has had really bad news, I often swear a lot. ‘It’s really fucking terrible, isn’t?’… somehow swearing goes straight to the heart of how awful it is.

Nor does she toe the line, so beloved of Macmillan nursing, that people in denial about their own impending death need constantly to be reminded of it. Instead she is gentle, warm, wise and unexpectedly funny.

The central message of the book is that grief takes time. There isn’t a short cut round the back of it: you have to go through it to get out the other side. Samuel notes that at least 15 per cent of all psychological disorders have unresolved grief as their source. It’s surely at the root of countless cases of insomnia and alcoholism besides.

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