How We Grieve: Relearning the World [Paperback]

Thomas Attig (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195074564 | ISBN-13: 978-0195074567 | Publication Date: May 23, 1996 | Edition: 1

What do we do when a friend, relative, or loved one dies? If we wish to understand loss experience, we must learn details of survivors' stories. In How We Grieve, Thomas Attig tells real-life tales to illustrate the poignant disruption of life and suffering that loss entails. He shows how through grieving we meet daunting challenges, make critical choices, and reshape our lives. These intimate treatments of coping hold valuable lessons that address the needs of grieving people and those who hope to support and comfort them. The accounts promote understanding of grief itself, encourage respect for individuality and the uniqueness of loss experiences, show how to deal with helplessness in the face of "choiceless" events, and offers much priceless guidance for caregivers. Grieving is not a process of passively living through stages. Nor is it a clinical problem to be solved or managed by others. How We Grieve shows that grieving is an active, coping process of relearning how to be and act in a world where loss transforms the fabric of our lives. Loss challenges us to relearn things and places; relationships with others, including fellow survivors, the deceased, and even God; and most of all ourselves, including our daily life patterns and the meanings of our own life stories.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If one is looking for a book on grief and grieving based on lived experiences rather than more remote psychosocial theories, then Thomas Attig's How We Grieve is the resource to read. Although it is not a brand new book (first published in 1996), in this reviewer's opinion no book published in the last four years comes close to the power of Attig's contribution to understanding the grief process. Attig, a former philosophy professor and past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, uses the power of story to unlock the mystery of the human experience of life and death, and produces a rich treasure of intensely human stories of coping with loss due to death. This book has substance, theory and organization, and is highly readable--packed with the everyday drama of life and death. It is an immensely useful and provocative, sensitive and human, inspiring and engaging book."--America

"In this richly rewarding book, Attig, a philosopher who has written and taught extensively about death, bereavement, grief, and grieving, presents his reflections on the grieving process. . . . The author writes in a graceful prose style that is often powerfully metaphorical, but that is nevertheless clear and straightforward. Insightful and enlightening. Highly recommended."--Choice

"Attig, through the use of vignettes, takes the reader along on a number of pilgrimages toward resolution; journeys whose starting points may appear to be the same but are, in fact, dissimilar. The need of the person in grief to relearn her/his world (grief resolution) is discussed along with the importance of understanding how this pilgrimage to resolution significantly changes the traveler as well as the way future journeys will be experienced. This book is a must read for anyone who is involved in providing support for individuals in grief."--David K. Meagher, Editor, The Thanatology Newsletter

"How We Grieve is a valuable resource in death education courses and workshops, as well as for those who want one good book on death and dying....(It may become a valued handbook for caregivers in hospice, hospitals, and nursing homes." --Death Studies

"Attig has written a groundbreaking book, one that may prove to be a cornerstone in a revised theory of grief and its place in human life....I would recommend it to all those who have suffered a loss, as well as those therapists and counselors who attempt to help them." --Robert A. Neimeyer, President, Association for Death Education and Counseling

"[Attig] rejects the grief stages and phases offered by Kubler-Ross, Engels, Lindemann, Bowlby, and the medical profession as static and too automatic. Instead he considers grief to be an individualized process. . . [that] should help the survivor make the transition from loving someone in the present to 'loving them in their absence.' This book should prove useful for counselors, survivors, and caregivers alike."--Readings

"Attig's How We Grieve: Relearning the World . . . is written in the 'inspirational we' model, with an emphasis on stories as the vehicle for illustrating psychological messages. Attig directly challenges the imagery of 'tasks' and 'stages,' the former associated with J. William Worden's theories . . . Unfortunately, it is difficult to write and 'inspirational' book when the message is that 'mourning never ends' and that, although people will eventually feel better, relearn the world, and form new relationships, this process does not leave them in a state of 'light, warmth, and peace.' On the other hand, Attig insists that an 'active' stance--grieving understood as something we do rather than a fate that befalls us--is a key to enduring it."--Religious Studies Review

About the Author

Thomas Attig is 1995-96 President of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. Formerly a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, he has been teaching and writing about death, dying, grief and loss since 1974. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (May 23, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195074564
• ISBN-13: 978-0195074567
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn to deal with grief after loss., August 30, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: How We Grieve: Relearning the World (Paperback)

TO GRIEVE IS TO RELEARN THE WORLD. The relatives, lovers, and friends of those who die face inevitable bereavement. For many, however, the grieving that follows death is poorly understood, and hence, poorly handled. *** Thomas Attig's recent book, How We Grieve: Relearning the World (Oxford University Press, 1996), offers a powerful conceptualization of bereavement and grief, and thus offers immediate help to those who may have come across only the facile generalizations of some of the "death and dying" popularizers, such as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. *** Thomas Attig is President of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. In a series of six intertwined essays, each with a slightly different emphasis, he develops his central metaphor: "relearning the world." Attig argues that bereavement is a "choiceless event"; grieving, by contrast, is full of choices, all of which require tremendous amounts of directed energy. Grieving, in other words, requires that survivors choose to relearn the world. And this relearning--this making of choices-- is an active, difficult, and not always successful, process. *** Relearning the world encompasses a frighteningly wide range of choices. Attig illustrates these choices through the ingenious use of a small number of case studies (i.e., concrete instances of grieving), each of which occurs over and over in various contexts as the notion of "relearning" is unpacked and deepened. If you now think of grieving as simply a matter of "feeling sad," you need this book. *** In less than 200 pages of clean, concrete, sharply focused prose, Thomas Attig illustrates and explains what it means to relearn the world (i.e., what it means to grieve): 1)We relearn our physical surroundings; 2)We relearn our relationships with our fellow survivors; 3)We relearn our places in space and time; 4)We relearn our spiritual places in the world ; 5)We relearn our selves [one entire essay is devoted to grief and personal integrity] ; 6) We relearn our relationships with the deceased [another essay is devoted to love, grief, and separation]. *** The brute reality of death remains, no matter what. No book can prevent bereavement or block the pain of bereavement when it does come. No book can make grieving easy. No book can remove the mystery of life and death. Still, reading does help. Thomas Attig's How We Grieve: Relearning the World may help survivors think a bit more clearly about grieving and make more positive choices as they struggle with their bereavement. *** As a bonus, the book is beautifully printed. I recommend it to you.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely helpful and insightful, July 25, 2001

By 

Paul C. Rosenblatt (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How We Grieve: Relearning the World (Paperback)

This is a very, very good book. It helps immensely in understanding why grief can be so difficult and absorbing. It teaches how to be patient and understanding in dealing with grief, our own grief or the grief of others. It offers deep and valuable insights into the many aspects of the grief process--including why the world seems so strange after somebody dies, the importance of stories in grieving, our choice-making in bereavement, the ways we remain connected to a loved one who has died, even why so many of us want to read about grief when we are grieving.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It was my favorite., July 6, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How We Grieve: Relearning the World (Paperback)

I was widowed at the age of 29. In the months that followed I read every non-secular grief book that I could find. Attig's was definitely the most helpful book I came across. It repeatedly enforced the point that things had changed beyond my control. It also then pointed out to me what I still had some control over. At a time when I was lost and feeling rather helpless it did a great job of showing me how I wasn't helpless. I gained a lot of motivation for facing the challanges ahead of me from Attig's book, I recommend it to others who's lives have been turned upside down from grief.