This week’s review will be rather more personal than usual.
After the loss of our son Luca to suicide in 2019, local librarian and friend Jackie Phillips recommended the book Resilient Grieving. I knew that our family would never be the same, that we would always miss Luca and that life as we knew it was over. But even in those early days I was so scared that our future was going to be an unbearable endurance contest without joy and meaning that I was looking for buoys to keep me afloat.
There is a sense of passivity in grief-literature that ‘anything goes, anything is okay; you just take your time’. It irked Dr Lucy Hone, an expert in resilience psychology, that the literature did not include things to enable you to regain a degree of control over your fate and functioning. After she lost her 12-year-old daughter Abi in a car crash that also took the lives of Abi’s friend Ella and Ella’s mother, in Canterbury in 2014, she wanted to see if the general knowledge around resilience could also be applied to grief. This culminated in her first book What Abi Taught Us in 2015. In this book the author shares her own story and mixes it with experiences of other people, research and helpful tools. The book was reprinted under the title Resilient Grieving in 2019 and last month saw the publication of an updated and revised edition.
The book gave me the hope that even though we had lost so much with Luca, we didn’t have to lose everything. It also showed us that we were not entirely at the mercy of our grief but had some agency in finding new and meaningful ways to live without Luca. The updated version includes the latest findings from resilience research and contemporary grief studies. She has added her story of what life is like eight years after Abi’s death. Lucy Hone has created an online course and has set up a Facebook group. If you want to know more, you can go to her website: www.copingwithloss.co
Wilma
