This book served to be my guide to surviving my mother's death without feeling alone, misunderstood, helpless, or -worse- hopeless. This book has validated all the emotions I've felt in my devastating loss by seeing life and death, love and grief through almost every perspective.
"On Grief and Grieving" defines all five stages of loss (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance), while also addressing and defining grief from a variety of perspectives (when a person dies from suicide, accidents, murder, Alzheimer's, and many other conditions and actions.) Further, this book explains that many experiences other than death deserve the grieving process and mourning, such as divorces, job losses, or any other large, life impacting, negative event.
Of course this isn't to imply that "On Grief and Grieving" suggests a person live life as a pessimist, relishing in sad thoughts, but rather this book insists that we fight the endless cultural cues to minimize our grief by "being strong" or "bucking up."
Kubler-Ross and Kessler demand that we recognize how validating grief is to our mental health, work through it at our own paces without focusing on an end, because grief is not a process. They write, "Grief is not just a series of events, stages or time lines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through the grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? five years? forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but it's aftermath lasts a lifetime."
Therefore, do not limit your grief, do not pressure yourself to limit your grief, nor should you ever deny your grief. "To deny grief," according to this book, "is to deny the love" you shared with the one you lost. To deny your grief, is to deny the love that was shared in a lost marriage.
As the author's write in "On Grief and Grieving", "Why grieve? For two reasons. First those who grieve well, live well. Second, and most important, grief is the healing process of the heart, soul, and mind; it is the path that returns us to whole-ness."
And ultimately, through proper grieving you will realize that you will survive and eventually again find happiness.