Resilient Grieving

Resilient Grieving, Dr Lucy Hone (Allen & Unwin, 2017)

This is an excellent book about grief, how it impacts and changes us, and how we learn to live with loss.

Dr Lucy Hone works in the field of resilience psychology. Living in Christchurch, she worked with people through major loss and disruption over the time of their earthquakes. Her life was then turned upside down when her daughter Abi (12) was killed in a car accident, along with two dear family friends.

As Lucy, her husband and two sons faced their devastating grief, she began to consider how her her work could interact with her grief experience. In the end, she decided she wanted to be proactive about her grieving, to take control of it.

Her reading, research and experience has produced Resilient Grieving (first published as What Abi Taught Us). She says “this book is less about what you might experience during bereavement and more about what you might do to enable the process of healthy grieving“.

The book is split into two parts.

Part 1: Recovery

This section is intended for the early days, weeks and months after a major bereavement. The first chapter suggests six strategies for coping in the immediate aftermath:

• There are no rules, do what you need. 
• Choose where to focus your attention 
• Take your time 
• Feel the pain 
• Beware of the grief ambush 
• Reestablish routines 

Further chapters consider ideas such as:

• Accepting the loss 
• Noting humans are hard wired to cope - death is normal and most people manage tragedy and trauma quite well, with time. 
• Noting the secondary losses that come with any major loss - perhaps loss of role, income, dreams, etc. 
• Choosing to find positive emotions 
• The usefulness of distraction 
• Habits of resilient thinking: realistic optimism, redefining hope, and mindfulness 
• Managing exhaustion and depression through rest and exercise 
• What family and friends can do to help. This chapter is very helpful for support people, and also includes comments about grief in children 

This was all very useful material. My only thought is that whether someone is likely to have this book and be in a state to read it in those very early days of grief, or able to process the content within. As such, this may be more of a tool for a support person, who can also put it in the grieving person’s hands when they are ready.

Part 2: Reappraisal and renewal

This considers the reality of your life after the loss, so chapters address:

• Reappraising your brave new world 
• Facing the future 
• Continuing bonds 
• Post-traumatic growth 
• Rituals and mourning the dead 

The main reason I found this book so helpful was not related to a personal grief story. Rather, I have done a Theories of Grief course at uni this semester. And so forgive me, because this next sentence will mean nothing to many - but for those that have spent time in the field it should make sense. What Hone has managed to do is turn numerous grief theories (e.g., Worden’s tasks of mourning, Attig’s relearning the world, Stroebe & Schut’s Dual Process Model, and Neimeyer’s meaning making concepts); and combine them into an easily understandable explanation that grabs the key elements of each and applies them to her own situation. What I appreciate about the various grief theories is how readily they can interact with & build on each other. Hone has developed her own pictoral grief model - a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking pieces, not linear or circular, but something that keeps needing to be fit together in a way that works for her.

So, Hone has managed to tell her own story of loss and grief, and combine it skilfully with research, producing a book that is both deeply personal as well as being a learning and guiding tool for others - readily accessible for anyone in grief. Each chapter finishes with personal questions to consider for your own situation.

This could be a very helpful guide to those charting their own way through major bereavement. In addition, it would be a valuable addition to anyone who cares for or counsels those in grief.