Learning about grief from personal experience

It seems to me the great contemporary books on grief are by writers who have learned from their own experience. Then they realized what they learned resonated with others, so they wrote about it.

These are the books I keep on my bookshelf. Usually these writers have gained their understanding of grief from figuring out how to cope with the death of a beloved partner, parent, child, sibling or friend. Sometimes it's from professional counseling or other clinical experience. Sometimes it's a combination of both.

Many of these books are written as memoirs, a sharing of their experience. Some excellent examples are:

• “It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand,” Megan Devine (Sounds True, 2017). She was exhausted with people telling her how she should feel — how she should grieve and mourn. So she wrote about this problem and made the very important point that each person experiences grief their own way and must cope in their own individual way. Find what works for you.

• “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion (Vintage, 2007). A memoir written after the death of her beloved husband.

• “The Way Through The Woods,” by Long Litt Woon (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2019). Another great memoir on finding a path after the death of a beloved. I have mentioned this before; it's a favorite.

But here is a warning: One can learn certain things about grief from others, but the advice must be an experience that resonates with you. A lot depends on the relationships, circumstances of the death, personality and so on. So it takes some sorting through and selecting ideas that work for you, that fit with your own experience and personality.

The role of understanding grief from personal experience is very interesting to me because I never really understood grief until my beloved Baheej died. I never really “got it” until I was personally faced with intense grief and had to figure out how to manage it.

Of course, there are many ways of learning about something. Personal experience — yes, but also by doing research, such as interviewing or being involved with clinical work learning from clients or patients. But when it comes to intense grief, I had to face it myself to really understand it.

The point is: When one reads really special books on grief, we find they are usually writing based on personal experience, and even then we need to pick and choose. I personally didn't start reading much of anything on grief until about five years after Baheej died. I started out by just finding my own way of coping. Later, I started writing about what I'd learned.

There are definitely some helpful books out there, one just has to pick out and choose the nuggets.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a doctorate in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@comcast.net or see her blog longtermgrief.tumblr.com. See previous columns at www.dailyherald.com/topics/Anderson-Kleif-Susan.