Grieving for Grownups: Navigating Loss in a Happiness-Obsessed Culture

Cody Delistraty shares 5 insights from The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss.

Photo by Louis Galvez on Unsplash

How do you move through grief? Is it a straightforward march through the famous five stages? Or is it something messier? Mourning a loved one is rarely a brief, orderly process and for some people, coping with loss is a lifelong challenge. The American Psychiatric Association has given a name to this difficult experience -- prolonged grief disorder. Here to share a new paradigm, as well as his personal story, is Cody Delistraty, author of the new book The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss. Cody is a historian and author, who has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. He has served as culture editor at The Wall Street Journal and as features editor of the Paris-based magazine Mastermind. Here he is to share 5 of his key insights.

1. Bring grief back into the public sphere for the sake of health and better coping.

When my mother died of cancer, I was a 21-year-old college student trying to do everything right: school, sports, religion, all of it. I hoped that by being a good griever I could honor her. What that meant to me was moving forward, keeping my grief mostly quiet, not burdening others with it, and getting through the five stages—to acceptance and closure.

There is great societal pressure to get on with life after loss. You have the memorial. You take a few days off work, then it’s back to life. But over the course of the past decade, I’ve found that almost every aspect of what I thought it meant to grieve well was misguided. I also found an expanding array of people searching for better and new ways to cope with loss.