Grief

Review: Grieving Wholeheartedly

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Cover image of "Grieving Wholeheartedly" by Audrey Davidheiser

Grieving Wholeheartedly

Grieving Wholeheartedly, Audrey Davidheiser. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010839) 2025

Summary: Grieving well can lead to healing and hope as we make space for all our grieving parts to express themselves.

This may seem a strange post for Christmas Day. But most, perhaps all of us, will come to a Christmas holiday grieving a loss–a death, a divorce, or job loss or another kind of loss. And for some who are reading, that is where you are right now. Grieving evokes all kinds of thoughts and emotions at various points. Being able to express all of these is part of the process of healing.

But sometimes, we struggle to get it all out. Audrey Davidheiser, a trained counselor in Internal Family Systems (IFS), discovered this with when her father died suddenly. The counseling approach of IFS proved helpful in her own grief process. Basically, IFS recognizes that there are different parts of us, and they respond to grief differently. The purpose of this book is to help the grieving process their grief well through the insights of IFS.

The first part of the book discusses why we cannot avoid grieving and how important is processing our grief. This part also introduces IFS and shows how the idea of our having different “parts” is evident in the Bible.

The second part of the book seemed one of the most important to me. It explores our “protectors.” These parts may try to shield us from griefs. They may come in the form of critics who tell us we shouldn’t be wallowing in these emotions or “firefighters” that try to extinguish our pain. Davidheiser shows how to negotiate with and later, thank, these parts for letting us grieve. Because she writes for a primarily Christian audience, she also identifies “religious” parts that are protectors.

Then part three identifies some of the different grieving parts. These include shock, sorrow, anger, guilt fear, and loneliness/ Not all of these will be present for each person. She devotes a chapter to each and how we may help these parts safely express themselves.

Finally, she addresses the future. First she briefly touches on other parts not mentioned here. Then she explores how we address anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays, the times we often most acutely feel loss. She helps us to know what to expect and how to cope even if we have experienced a healthy grieving process.

Each chapter includes a “Dipping Inside” section in which you can invite different parts to speak and reflect. The author also references her own grieving experience in ways illustrative of different parts.

The one thing I wondered about is whether some people would have difficulties identifying parts, or understanding how protector parts might be hindering the expression of other parts. I would recommend that if you like this idea of parts and the Internal Family Systems approach, but find yourself either at an impasse or experiencing intense feelings you cannot resolve on your own, to seek out a counselor trained in this approach. The IFS Institute provides a directory of certified IFS practitioners. In an emergency in the US, dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or 911 for local emergency services.

We all will face grief at some point in our lives, if we haven’t already. Grieving is hard, but avoiding grief is worse. When we process grief well, it’s not that grief goes away, but we grow deeper and our life experience can be richer. Dr. Davidheiser’s approach recognizes the different dimensions or “parts” of grief, all which have their place and need to be honored and given expression. In so doing, we know and care for ourselves more deeply.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

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Cover image of "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. Vintage (ISBN: 9781400078431) 2007.

Summary: A memoir of grief and remembrance for Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne.

They had just arrived home after visiting their daughter Quintana, in intensive care fighting pneumonia and septic shock. Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, were talking while he was enjoying a drink and she was preparing dinner. And then he wasn’t talking. She turned to find him slumped over the table, victim to a massive coronary called “the widow maker.” It was December 30, 2003.

In this memoir, begun in October of 2004, Didion recounts her grief journey over that first year beginning with the efforts of the paramedics, the trip to the hospital, the pronouncement of death, and receiving his effects, and returning to an empty apartment. Didion turns her gifts to describing one of the most difficult of human experiences:

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

She titles the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, reflecting a belief that somehow he could come back. She refrains from giving away his shoes because he will need them when he comes back. Obituaries disturb her because she fears she buried him alive. She replays the events of the night as if something different might have saved his life, yet he was likely gone from the moment he slumped over, as she eventually learns.

Drawing upon grief research, she chronicles her own descent into the kind of temporary insanity of grief. She struggles to finish a piece of writing because the two of them had always discussed each other’s writing and she’s waiting for that conversation that will not come. Later, when her daughter suffers a stroke in Los Angeles, she describes returning to the city in which she and John had once lived. and avoiding all the places that would awaken memories (“the vortex effect”) of him. She describes the look of “extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness” in the eyes of the bereaved and the memories that visit unannounced and her response:

“I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted him back.”

Quintana’s serious condition offers a kind of diversion as she immerses herself in clinical materials and becomes her daughter’s advocate. Was this just a desperate effort to stave off further grief? To keep at bay the grief at the door? A mother’s love? Probably all three.

Yet she cannot help remembering. The birthday gift twenty-five days before he died. The trip to Paris John thought he must take or never go. Did he have a presentiment of his death? That is another theme, unresolved in the memoir.

Then there is the unending character of grief. It is not for a few days or weeks. Yet as the year ebbs to an end, she comes to some resolution to her “magical thinking.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive; we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

“I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

Most of all, Didion explores the special kind of grief of that comes of two people sharing many years together. Is this the price exacted for many years of shared love, shared memories, of lives intertwined? I’ve known the widower beside himself with grief, losing the partner of over sixty years. It’s most likely that one of us will bear this grief in my own marriage. Reading Didion’s unvarnished and quietly eloquent account alerts us to that. But it doesn’t prepare us. What can?

But for those who grieve, and who go through all the changes Didion experiences, she helps us understand that this is just what it is like. Sometimes it helps to know we are not alone when we find ourselves alone.

Review: Looking Up

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Cover image of "Looking Up" by Courtney Ellis

Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief, Courtney Ellis (Foreword by Kay Warren). InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514007167) 2024.

Summary: A birder’s guide to hope through grief consists of reflections on various birds as the author grieves a grandfather’s death.

Birders speak of “spark birds” that first turned them on to birding. For Courtney Ellis, it was a phoebe, perched on her backyard string lights. A friend identified it. She writes:

“What I did know, in those very first moments, was that this little bird had unexpectedly captivated me. For a moment the volume turned down on my shouting to-do list and clamoring young children and creaky house projects and pinging work emails, and it was just me and this bird. A moment in time. A breath. Delight.

“In that moment, I looked up.”

She joined birding groups, bought binoculars and guides and downloaded apps. She learned the patience required of birding…and the wonder. These were lessons in attentiveness that spilled over into the rest of life as a pastor and parent. As acquainted with the griefs of others as she was as a pastor, she did not realize how important the lessons of looking up at the birds would become when the news came that her grandfather was dying.

In this book, Ellis takes us through her process of grief as she rushes home to spend time with her grandfather, only to find him sinking much faster than expected. While gathering with family, she remembers her grandfather, including many incidents of her childhood. An outdoorsman, he shaped her love of the natural world. As many of us do, she reckons with both his admirable and less than admirable qualities. She parts hours before his death to partake in Easter services. Then she grieves. Coming out of COVID, the church grants her and her husband sabbatical. During this time she had lost her voice. And, drawing on an idea from John Stott, another avid birder, the birds become her teachers.

In each chapter, Ellis interleaves her journey with reflections upon a particular kind of bird. Vultures symbolize death and they are the janitors of the natural world. Yet there is marvel in a physiology that allows them to ingest rotting carrion without being sickened. Then sparrows, so commonplace and ubiquitous, remind her of how much of life is lived in ordinary time, that it is often in the commonplace that we meet God. She reflects: “Blue Jays may not be good to other birds, but they are very good at being themselves. And this is its own kind of beauty.” As she thinks of her grandfather, she sees that he had his own kind of beauty as well.

In addition to these birds, we are introduced to mockingbirds, owls, house finches, hummingbirds, warblers, albatrosses, wrens, doves, pelicans, and quail. In her grief journey she learns that “looking up” doesn’t remove the hurt of grief but points us to the one who cares for the birds, and notes the falling of even one sparrow.

There is an understated beauty beneath the attentive observation of the birds and the unvarnished account of her grief. While pointing us toward healing and hope, there are no sappy assurances or sweet nostrums. But there is the wonder of the birds in all their variety, (And there is even an appendix for those who for whom this book is a kind of “spark bird” to take up birding.) Most of all, we have the chance to listen to one who has not only looked outward at the human condition and inward at the darkness of her her own grief. We also accompany her as she looks upward, not only at the birds but at the God who made them.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Hopeful Lament

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Hopeful Lament, Terra McDaniel. Downers Grove: IVP/Formatio, 2023.

Summary: Out of a string of experiences of loss, the writer, a spiritual director writes about grief, lament, and the hope inherent in biblical lament.

Terra McDaniel and her family went through a season of life where her friends began to liken her to Job. Their house burned to the ground, their daughter lost a child amid a life-threatening miscarriage, and her husband lost his pastoral position, resulting in their deparure from a church community they helped nurture from a home group.

As a spiritual director, and with the aid of others, she turned to the practice of lament to tend her grief. She writes because she believes we all need to recover the practice of lament. If nothing else, we’ve all lived through the experience of loss and grief in the pandemic, and the societal and environmental upheavals of recent years. And lament both heals and engenders hope in allowing us to express our griefs, all our emotions, questions and losses to God rather than being caught in a downward spiral.

Over ten chapters, she walks us through how this is so. Lament gives us permission to grieve and not suppress our grief but walk through it. Lament allows us to speak our sadness, with biblical lament offering us language to express our sorrows to God. Lament allows us to give our vulnerability, our “broken hallelujahs” to God and to discover that this is enough. She explores trauma and how it manifests physically and the practices that allow one to gently and safely lament trauma. She addresses how we lament when what we’ve lost is a toxic Christian community and the complicated work of both grieving and confessing our own complicity. Sometimes grief comes to whole families and she offers guidance of how we do that both individually and together, particularly with children who may grieve differently but need to grieve, whether it is the loss of a pet or a parent. Finally, she explores how we make our way through lament to life beginning anew.

Each of the chapters is accompanied with an exercise with suggestions both for adults and children. And this is one of the strengths of the work, its recognition that lament is important to children and shared experiences, whether making collages, using our bodies to express how we feel, or terra divina, identifying an object in nature and thinking about what God might say to us through the object.

McDaniel’s book gives permission to “feel all the feels” and express them to God, to take the time to tend and go through our grief, and offers ways to give voice both verbally and bodily, with all our being, to our laments. She shows sensitivity to safety, to what triggers, and to times when we need to get help. It’s a book born of real-life experience honestly shared. We and those we love will face loss. This book, along with caring friends, can be a trusted companion offering help and hope.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Can You Just Sit With Me?

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Can You Just Sit With Me?, Natasha Smith. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: An extended reflection for Christians permitting ourselves and others to grieve well and how we may accompany those who are grieving.

Can you just sit with me? Have you ever felt like that in a time of pain, grief, or loss? You don’t want to be asked questions, or to be fixed, or told to “get over it,” or be counselled. You just want a friend or friends who will be there with silence, a listening ear, a caring hug, and to hand you another tissue when you need it.

The title captures both the longing of the grieving and the point of this book so well. Natasha Smith has known more grief than one would think one could bear in a lifetime. It has left her with lots of questions, including questions for God. But one thing she knows. Our culture isn’t very good at giving people the space to grieve and the time to heal. Out of her own experience she helps others who are grieving to understand that what they feel is normal. And she helps those who want to care to know how to sit with the grieving.

She discusses the nature of grief and particularly offers a helpful chart contrasting myths versus facts about grief. The first of these is that the myth is that everyone grieves in stages when the fact is that grief doesn’t follow the rules. Another resource in this discussion that is powerful is Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D’s “Mourner’s Bill of Rights” which begins, “You have the right to experience your unique grief” and enumerates nine more “rights.”

In successive chapters she discusses the truth that God understands, the many questions loss and grief raises and the freedom to confess these to God, our struggles with unanswered prayers, and our struggle to finds meaning. In discussing the dual process of loss- and restoration-orientation in grieving, Smith proposes that we can take a break from loss to long for home, to think about rebuilding. She discusses the invisible griefs, the losses that are not always recognized as losses to grieve. Grief is also revealing–it reveals what is true of us and our identity in God. Smith uses an “I am…” exercise to help us identify the things we are coming to understand both about ourselves and who we are in Christ. She talks about how we may both love Jesus and grieve in her “Both/And Jesus” chapter. She observes Jesus own path of grief and what we may learn about the healing of grief from him. In her concluding chapter “As We Sit,” she ties it all together. She offers a helpful series of statements we can share with others in our grief.

Each chapter combines Smith’s personal stories, biblical principles centering on Jesus, and a grief exercise in each chapter. We are invited to retell our grief story, to recollect the names of God, to confess our questions, to pray breath prayers, to consider what grief does in us, to write a lament, to journal and pray our invisible griefs, and more.

The book reads like a conversation–we are invited to “feel all the feels.” Smith both helps us understand the grief journey and unabashedly speaks of how God meets us in it–not to fix it or to tell us to get over it, but to accompany us, to quietly minister to us, to heal us, and to change us. This understanding of grief and how God meets us is also important for those who care for those who grieve. We can just sit with the grieving, both because grief doesn’t follow rules, and God alone heals. We so want to do more, and yet that is not for us. We sit, and listen, and weep with, and love and pray. And with God, that is enough.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Grief

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Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Summary: A philosophical discussion of the nature of grief, why we grieve, and its importance in our lives.

The journey of the last several years has been a time of grief for many of us, losing loved ones to the pandemic or to other causes. A host of books have been written over the years, addressing psychological and spiritual dimensions of grief. What distinguishes this book is that, while referencing this literature, this work is a philosophical discussion that seeks to understand what grief is, who is the object of our grief, and how grief is important within the human experience.

Michael Cholbi observes that in much of the philosophical literature, grief is regarded as shameful, a sign of weakness. Cholbi argues otherwise, getting there through a sustained inquiry into the nature of grief. He admits that this may not help a person amid the tumult of grief, but may help prepare us to understand what is happening and how we may grow through it. He begins by considering for whom we grieve, why we grieve some and not others. He proposes that we grieve those in whom we have invested our practical identities, that is those who play important roles in our lives. He then considers what grief is, arguing that it is not a single emotion but a series of affective states, not necessarily those of Kubler-Ross’s five stages, or in that order. In addition, he suggests that grief is a form of attention, challenging us to interrogate the meaning of our emotions toward the one who has died, and what they reveal about our relation with the one who has died, a relation that has been transformed by death.

He then turns to some ethical questions. One concerns what he calls the paradox of grief. Grief is both painful and distressing, which seems detrimental to our flourishing and yet also capable of yielding insights and self-knowledge, shaping how we may live, moving forward. Can something so terribly painful be good? Cholbi moves on then and explores the rationality of grief. Instead of considering grief either arational or irrational, he argues that it is contingently rational, that is, it is “rational when we feel the right emotions in the right degree in light of the loss of the relationship with the deceased that we have suffered” (italics in the original). He then considers whether we have a duty to grieve. He argues that we do not have a duty to other grieving persons or to the deceased but to ourselves because of the good of the self-knowledge that may come when we attend to our relationship with the deceased and grow as rational agents. Most intriguing is that he wonders whether C. S. Lewis, at least on the evidence of A Grief Observed, grieved well in terms of growth in self-knowledge.

One of the most interesting questions Cholbi deals with is whether the peculiar “madness” of grief is a type of mental disorder. Cholbi would argue that grief is a human experience rather than a mental disorder, one from which most emerge, often with greater self understanding that shouldn’t be circumvented. Rather than treating grief as a pathology, he would want to treat the instances of pathology that emerge when grief goes awry.

In his conclusion, he distinguishes grief from other traumas, like divorce, contending that the loss of a person is more severe. I’m not so sure–sometimes the loss of a spouse or a parent to divorce is a living wound that never resolves. He also considers whether a considered philosophy of grief may change the experience of grief. While it may offer understanding of what we are undergoing, the emotional experience of grief and its course is unpredictable, nor can it determine what the specific content of our self-knowledge will be.

I suspect this is not the book to give someone amid grief, if one even can read books at some points during the grief process. I found the book helpful in reflecting upon what my experiences of grief have meant for me. I also suspect such a book, with its contention that we ought lean into the paradox of grief with attentiveness, is helpful. I believe attentiveness is the basis of various spiritually formative practices. It seems consistent that this would be so in the practice of grieving the loss of someone significant to us. Also, the careful discussion that distinguishes grief and mourning, that thinks about who we grieve and why, and that normalizes grief as part of the human experience are all important contributions of this work.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.