Bereavement: Academic edition

How do we go on living without someone we love?

Bereavement changes more than how we feel. It can reshape our relationships, routines, responsibilities, beliefs and sense of the future. Yet people who grieve are often met with expectations about how quickly they should recover, what they should accept and when they should move on.

In Bereavement: How do I live without you?, Stuart Corlett explores life after loss without imposing a compulsory timetable or a single correct way to mourn.

This academic edition brings psychological research into conversation with philosophical and ethical questions. It examines continuing bonds with the dead, loneliness, guilt, ritual, family tensions, the hope of reunion and the practical pressures that follow a death. It also makes room for sudden and unresolved losses, complicated relationships, and the possibility of enjoying life again without treating pleasure as disloyalty.

Drawing on years of cross-cultural health work in Thailand and along the Myanmar border, Corlett approaches grief with respect for different traditions and individual experiences. He distinguishes what research can tell us from questions that evidence alone cannot settle.

For readers seeking a deeper understanding of bereavement, and those supporting someone through it, this book offers a careful exploration of love, absence and the life that remains.

The first of three linked books exploring bereavement, mortality and our responses to the suffering of others.