“Grief Works” by Julia Samuel
“We need to respect and understand the process of grief, and acknowledge its necessity.”
Julia Samuel MBE is a leading British psychotherapist. Her book “Grief Works” is a series of stories of about some of her counselling clients, grouped into sensitive case studies that are based on specific bereavements: partners, parents, siblings, children and the importance of facing our own death. As the book draws to a close there are additional sections on the work we need to do to help us grieve and survive successfully, how friends and family can help and the historical context of death and dying in the UK. In the Afterword, the author explains that the stories she recounts are not fiction, they are “based on the real experiences of people who are devastated by the death of someone they love”.
Although there are no overt coping strategies in the book, Julia Samuel’s book demonstrates how vital it is that we understand what is going on inside us when we are grieving and how important it is to recognise our feelings and get to know our own emotions and reactions. The introduction to the book starts by explaining that “as humans, we naturally try to avoid suffering, but, contrary to all our instincts, to heal our grief we need to allow ourselves to feel the pain [of grief]” and to find ways to support ourselves because it cannot be avoided. Each case study shows the power of a person being fully heard and evidences the healing power of the therapeutic relationship.
What I wanted: I was looking for a book to support the work I do as a bereavement support volunteer for Cruse and to help me understand bereavement in the context of different types of relationships. This book clearly showed that “grief has a momentum of its own, and our work is to find ways to express it and to support ourselves through it, while realising that over time it changes and we are changed by it”.
What I liked: I found it helpful that the grief responses were grouped into the different types of bereavement and, after each section, the author added her own reflections that related to certain issues that had typically come up within each section. One theme that permeates the book is that when we avoid dealing with grief we “imbue it with more power to frighten us” and there is a clear message that “it is not the pain of grief that damages individuals… but the things they do to avoid that pain”. As intelligent human beings, it is natural that we prefer order, perfectionism and avoidance of difficulty to pain, but Julia Samuel points out that the other side of love is loss. Therefore, “in continuing to deny death we are inevitably denying the richness of life” and this book shows that we need to sit with our pain and accept discomfort in order to process it.
This book will be as valuable to those who are grieving as it will be to those around them wanting to provide support. There is no neat solution or quick fix offered up, but the book illustrates the courage of different individuals to endure their grief, accept support and learn to live their lives again. I strongly recommended this book to anyone wanting to understand the impact of grief across different relationships.
“Every single one of us, whoever we are, whatever our story, will be touched by death at some point.”
- Julia Samuel