'Resilient Grieving' Book Review

As I sit to express my thoughts on the book “Resilient Grieving” by Dr Lucy Hone, I’m reminded of my initial hesitation about this book. Even after I had purchased it, it sat on my bookshelf for a while before I read it. I think my hesitation was based on the use of the word “resilient” in the title in a book about grief. Sometimes the term resilient is used in the context of “being strong” or “bouncing back from adversity” and I was hoping the book didn’t lean into a narrative that pressured grievers to cope in a certain way or timeframe.

Thankfully, I got over my resistance, read the book and now I understand and appreciate what Dr Lucy Hone has offered us with her approach to grief. I was already following Dr Lucy Hone on social media and knew that she had survived the death of her 12 year old daughter so I was curious about how she had coped with such a devastating loss. A mother who loses a child and then puts her thoughts to paper… I want to read what she has to say. It turns out that Lucy made a decision about how to respond to grief and knew from the earliest moments following the death of her daughter, that she didn’t want to let her loss break her or her family.

What Lucy offers us is a proactive approach to coping with your grief, without taking away from the reality that there is no timeframe to grief or that there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. She explores how to be gentle and patient with yourself in your grief, but also how to actually function while grieving. Often while you are grieving, you may have other children or people to care for who need you so it’s important to consider what are the things that you can proactively do to cope with your grief, without avoiding or denying it.

Dr Lucy Hone is considered a thought leader in the field of resilience psychology so when she experienced the death of her daughter, she decided to use the knowledge and tools that she’d learnt in relation to resilience and apply them to her grief. This led her to ask questions about what we can actually do to help us get through the loss of a loved one and what things end up holding us back. Lucy experimented on herself, taking a proactive approach to coping and shares her insights from this perspective.

So, the concept of resilient grieving is about living and grieving at the same time. Being resilient in your grief doesn’t mean that you’re not going to experience the depth of sadness that is understandable when you’ve lost a loved one. It means that you will experience the full extent of grief and also find ways in which to cope, function, live your life and go on to embrace the joys of life.

‘Resilient Grieving’ offers an interesting distinction between our reactions to grief (things like emotions and other impacts) and our response to our grief (what we choose to do). Rather than pressuring us to just endure and be ok, this distinction actually highlights the autonomy we have in how we navigate our grief, adapt and adjust to our new reality. Michelle xx