Table of Contents
Preface xi
Introduction: Getting Over Getting Over It xix
Chapter 1 The Story of Grief 3
Death, Dying, and the Echo That Spanned a Century 11
What We Think about When We Think about Grief 13
Mourning as "Work" 15
We Were Going through a Stage 18
Chapter 2 Getting It Together 25
The Social Rides of Bereavement 26
Saying Hullo Again 33
The Children Who Led the Way 35
Re-Membering the Departed 39
Chapter 3 Something New 43
New Grief: Here and Now 48
A Model for Everyone 51
What More Is New Grief? 55
The Childhood Exception, Part 1: Staggered Grief 63
Chapter 4 Old Grief: Recurrent and Resurgent 70
Cyclical Grief 72
Sneak Attacks 79
Resurrected Grief 86
The Childhood Exception, Part 2: Developmental Grief 92
Chapter 5 New Old Grief: One-Time Transitions 97
Life Transitions: Maturational Grief 102
Proxy Grief 107
Age-Correspondence Events 109
Next-Gen, Next-Level 117
Chapter 6 The Rings of Grief 121
Model Behavior 122
The Rings of Grief 128
Chapter 7 The Power of Story 137
A Story Takes Shape 140
Testing and Telling 148
Chapter 8 People, We Need to Talk (and Write, and Paint, and Perform) 151
The Cost of Silence 157
The Good Kind of "Letting Go" 167
Chapter 9 Six Exceptions in Search of a Narrative 172
Stories of Sudden Death: Narratives Compressed 175
Too Young to Remember 177
Too Young to Understand 183
Stories of Silence, Secrets and Lies 187
Stories with Missing Pieces 196
Traumatic Loss 199
Chapter 10 Reauthoring Your Story of Loss 205
Snapshots in Time 206
Stories in Motion 208
The Story of Now 217
Stories of Loss Are Also Stories of Lives 221
Chapter 11 Story Cracking: Getting from A to Z 224
Issues of Identity 226
The Alphabet of Overlooked Events 228
The Role of the Surviving Parent 231
Dominos and ACEs 232
Let's Get Back to Christopher 240
Chapter 12 Story Mending: Finding Continuity 243
Two Kinds of Life Stories 247
Two Things Can Be True 252
The Continuous You: An Experiential Exercise 255
Epilogue: The Missing Elements of Grief 260
Bibliography 267
Acknowledgments 285
Reader's Guide 289