LIVING IN A WORLD of Grief

In the days following the death of my mother almost 14 years ago, I was desperate for words to describe the chasm that had opened beneath me. So when a friend who’d recently lost her own mother insisted I read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, I got the book and opened to the first words of the first chapter: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

If you’re familiar with the five stages of grief as famously characterized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, you’ll know that among the well-known DABDA (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) framework, there is no F for fear.

It’s an omission that grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith has thought a lot about. The author of , she had lost both of her parents to cancer by her 25th birthday. The way this grief