Project Rebirth Read Free

to contain a new entry called “bereavement-related disorder,” which will attempt to describe and classify grief that goes on and on.
    Dr. Leeat Granek, a Toronto-based psychologist, worries that such an inclusion pathologizes grief, rather than seeing it as a normal part of the human experience: “Many of the mental illnesses in the DSM are social constructions that are based on the cultural zeitgeist at the moment. We already live in a culture that is intolerant of grief and loss in general. The message is often, ‘You need to move on, you need to see someone.’” Granek is leading a bourgeoning movement advocating for the reconceptualization of grief, particularly in the North American context, where is has been misunderstood and neglected for too long. The cultural context within which grief emerges is key in understanding how we process. The brave eight who are featured in this book all mourned their losses in the United States, but each has very particular cultural scripts within that commonality.
    Understanding grief, in all its manifestations and cultural mores, is not just beneficial for our own inevitable experiences of loss, but so that we might support others through theirs. Megan O’Rourke reflected on her grief process following her own mother’s death in a series for Slate.com, which evolved into her book, The Long Goodbye . She explains, “I am not surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel not just that I am, but that the world around me is deeply unprepared to deal with grief.”
    She goes on to detail the well-intentioned yet unsatisfying emails that she got from friends and colleagues following her mother’s death. They echoed one another, sympathetic, yet inadequate: “At least she’s no longer suffering.” O’Rourke was crushed by the lack of wise support. She is not alone. So many of us have felt abandoned during times of great suffering, left to the fumbling condolences of a world that is both uninformed about grief and also afraid of what it indicates: that we all love and lose, that we all will die. It’s imperative that we become more aware of the complex truths about grief, and in turn, more skillful in comforting one another, so that we, too, may one day receive the same substantial support in return.
    This is also not just a book about grief. It is, first and foremost, a book about resilience. It is about that miraculous process by which people whose lives have been shattered in an instant, manage to find the strength to pick up the pieces and put them back together again—not in the same way as before, but in a new, reintegrated form.
    Resilience is often assumed to be a personality trait, something you are either lucky to be born with, or doomed to be born without, but it is actually more accurately thought of as a process. A resilient person essentially draws on inner resources and calls on community support in order to move forward after disappointment, failure, or trauma. Research confirms that the presence of resilience is encouraged or discouraged by the communities and environments of which we find ourselves a part. When difficult things happen to us—divorce, illness, death, job loss, etc.—we are able to weather those changes based on a unique combination of our own hard-wiring and psychological resources in consort with the protective factors that our families and communities, social policies, and schools create for us.
    Resilience has been a widely discussed topic as of late, identified by educators, mental health professionals, and researchers as one of the key ingredients to living a long, happy life. Bonanno, among others, has found that resilience, rather than some rarified quality, is actually quite common, and that there are “multiple, unexpected pathways” to get there. In fact, resilience researchers