Grief is a natural response to loss. It's the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. Often, the pain of loss can feel overwhelming. You may experience all kinds of difficult and unexpected emotions, from shock or anger to disbelief, guilt, and profound sadness. The pain of grief can also disrupt your physical health, making it difficult to sleep, eat, or think straight. These are normal reactions to loss—and the more significant the loss, the more intense your grief will be.

Coping with the loss of someone or something you love is one of life's biggest challenges. You may associate grieving with the death of a loved one—which is often the cause of the most intense type of grief—but any loss can cause grief

Although the experience of grief and how one grieves may be unique to the individual, they are influenced by relational, cultural, and spiritual beliefs.

Despite a universal familiarity with death and grief, the capacity to articulate the meaning of grief challenges even premier scholars in the fields of psychology, sociology, theology, and anthropology.

This book has been motivated and inspired by a lifetime relationship with death and the awareness that our contemporary understanding of dying, which lacks a multivalent language, is inadequate.