Bereavement: Not Everything Can Be Fixed
Julia Samuel is a grief psychotherapist. She suggests not only that death is hard to contemplate but that we are discomfited by the idea of grief, encouraged to put a good face on loss and hasten towards “a new normal”. She says, “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 you 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.”
