Grief is a universal human experience, painful and inevitable. In this wise and compassionate book, a psychiatrist who has done extensive work and research with the bereaved shares her broad experience, revealing how people cope with, understand, and eventually adapt to many different bereavements in the course of human life.

Those first few hours and days after a loved one has died may seem to pass like a dream, and only afterward does the real work of grieving and healing begin. In this comprehensive book, Beverley Raphael describes all the stages of mourning and healing, and analyzes how the effects of loss differ at each stage of life. Starting with the infant's loss of a parent, taking up the effects on adolescents of death in the family, and moving on to the losses people face in adult life and in old age, Raphael, with sensitivity and grace, shows how the dynamics of grief and recovery vary over the course of time.

In describing the experience of loss, the author provides the reader with a rich understanding of how different people at different ages cope with grief, loss, and pain. The most thorough book on the subject ever written, The Anatomy of Bereavement is the standard work.