Tithe Green Book Club October: Grief Works

Grief Works is a collection of stories from those who have “experienced great love and great loss – and survived.”

Collated and contextualised by psychotherapist Julia Samuels, Grief Works gives us a unique insight into the therapy room: those things that we are scared to say, or struggle to find the words to express, laid bare and examined through a lens that manages to be both analytical and empathetic.

Samuels began working with bereaved people as a volunteer and now, over twenty-five years later, offers a comprehensive understanding of the full repercussions of loss and the myriad ways grief manifests. With Grief Works, Samuels tells the stories of how grief forces us to meet fear, anger, desire, frustration and loss of self, and how working through these dimensions of grief can reveal our innermost selves.

"The fear that surrounds death and grief is largely caused by lack of knowledge and the aim of this book is to address this fear and to replace it with confidence," writes Samuels. "I want people to understand that grief is a process that has to be worked through - and experience has taught me that grief is work, extremely hard work; but, if we do the work, it can work for us by enabling us to heal."

Grief Works is split into sections. This is helpful – it’s a book you can pick up and put down, or read certain sections of when they feel most relevant to you or someone you are supporting. Beginning with an introduction and an exploration of what grief is, the book then dedicates a chapter to each of the following losses:

• When a partner dies
• When a parent dies
• When a sibling dies
• When a child dies
• Facing your own death
• What helps: the work we need to do to help us grieve and survive successfully

Lessons to take from Grief Works

Below are a few quotes which we feel evidence the helpful and articulate manner in which Julia Samuels writes about grief in Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving.

"That most people can somehow find a way to bear the unbearable says much about our extraordinary capacity to evolve as we work towards the rebuilding of our lives."

“…grief is an intensely personal, contradictory, chaotic and unpredictable internal process. If we are to navigate it, we need to find a way to understand and live with the central paradox: that we must find a way of living with a reality that we don’t want to be true.”

"Our culture is imbued with the belief that we can fix just about anything and make it better; or, if we can't, that it's possible to trash what we have and start all over again. Grief is the antithesis of this belief: it eschews avoidance and requires endurance, and forces us to accept that there are some things in this world that simply cannot be fixed."

“Death shatters control; it is brutal in its ultimate power over us, and it is this fact which we find so impossible to accept.”

"Death steals the future we anticipated and hoped for, but it can't take away the relationship we had."

If you are seeking a book that might hold a story which reflects your own, might offer some hope and consolation in hearing about how others who have walked your path came through the hardest parts, then this book is for you.

Grief Works is available on Amazon or from major bookstores such as Waterstones and Daunt Books.