A Book For Bereaved Parents and The People Who Love Us
An invitation to anyone who wants to understand the complexity and depth of parental grief
The first time I read The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents by Dr. Dennis Klass, I was completely bereft. It was the spring of 2017, roughly three months after my daughter died.
A friend and fellow bereaved parent sent it to me. It sat on a shelf with a collection of other books about grief, all of them gifted to me by well-meaning friends and family. I ignored them all, unable to do much more than glance at the pile as I moved through the days in a kind of grief-induced trance.
Then one evening, in a fog of misery and despair, I rummaged through my library of sadness and selected it. I was in a very dark place that night. I needed a lifeline — some shred of hope that other parents had been through what I was going through and survived. I needed to believe in the possibility of solace if not in those first months, then on some distant day in the future. When I found my way to Klass’s book, I literally wanted to die.
More than two years later, I read the book again. This second time around, I read it with intention versus desperation. I wanted to revisit Klass’s book because it had helped me so much the first time around. It…
