1. The Hole in Your Life: Grief and Bereavement.
The title is pretty conclusive, but please give us the high concept for your
book in 25 words or under.
In this little book, Bob Rich leads you from grief
to growth.
2. How did you decide on the exact title?
Punctuation in titles is always a difficult decision. One of mine has an
exclamation mark...
The original working title was If You Have Lost a Loved
One: How to cope with grief, but as I worked on what needed to be included, I
found two problems with it.
First, you can grieve after
losing a hated one. I think one of the most powerful chapters covers this
topic. It reports on a real client. I only changed her name. She was referred
to me as a victim of domestic violence. Then the guy got killed in a drunken
fight, and... And while cheering at his departure, she also deeply missed him.
Good theme for a novel?
The second problem was that
other serious losses are processed in the same way as the death of someone.
Examples are failing an exam so you are barred from the profession you’ve
dreamed of for years, and the bankruptcy of your employer eliminating your job.
Just today, I heard about a
man who had a medium-sized business. He formed a partnership with two others.
They ganged up on him and basically stole the business, though in a legal way.
He lost his major interest in life, much of his income, and his self-perception
as a businessman.
No loss of a loved person,
no, but a BIG hole in his life. My book is essential reading in this situation.
The subtitle is from my
publisher, Victor Volkman. The purpose of a subtitle is to precisely put the
book in the right box. To do that, it should predict the search terms a
potential buyer might use. “Grief and bereavement” does that.
3. What was the inspiration to write this book at
this time?
My eighteenth book was From Depression to
Contentment: A self-therapy guide. It is my most successful psychology
book, and has won two awards. https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#depression The original I sent to my publisher was twice as
long, but he said modern readers won’t buy a self-help book above 50,000 words.
So, I took a sword to it and cut it in two. The second half is Lifting the
Gloom: Antidepressant writing https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#lifting It contains essays and stories I took from the
original, then I wrote specific stories to illustrate all the points in From
Depression to Contentment. As I say in the introduction, “If you like a
clearly laid out map to contentment, regardless of your circumstances, it’s in From
Depression to Contentment. If a ramble with surprising twists and turns is
more your thing, that’s Lifting the Gloom. And actually, the two go
together like main course and dessert.”
In between having fun with fiction, I started the
next logical project: grief, but I struck a difficulty. I wanted to quote
extensively from another book and asked the author’s permission. To my
surprise, she was an echidna/hedgehog on steroids and refused in a rude way.
So, with the book over three quarters completed, I put it away into a dusty
drawer within my computer and wrote other stuff.
Then my darling daughter was diagnosed with
inoperable terminal cancer.
Before you buy the book, you can read the first
chapter, which is about her. http://grief.lhpress.com
I know a surprisingly large number of people who
had cured their cancer (“spontaneous remission”) and kept hoping she would, too.
But also, I immediately put into practice all the techniques I used to teach to
my clients, including the ones I have learned from them. This meant re-reading
my grief manuscript, and trawling through my case notes to refresh my memory.
My daughter will live in my heart as long as I
pester this planet with my presence, but the immense agony of grief is not
there.
The more you give, the more you get, and also the
more you give, the more you grow. I want to do the tiny bit one person can do
to reduce suffering by passing on my tools to as many other people as possible.
So, this book is dedicated to my daughter’s memory.
4. Do you believe we process grief differently at
different times of our lives?
Sally, I have the handicap of a scientific
training. That means I don’t believe anything but go with the evidence.
A child’s grief is very different from an adult’s,
so I have a chapter dedicated to how to help them. Teenagers may be mature
enough to do adult grief, but many react with disrupted and disruptive
behaviour.
And actually, a different kind of maturity is more
relevant than chronological age. This is spiritual age.
An infant spirit won’t bother grieving. You can
only grieve if you can love, and love depends on empathy. To an infant soul,
other people are either tools or obstacles. It’s annoying to lose a tool, but
“hey, I’ll grab another one.”
As we rise in spiritual development, grief hurts
more and more. As I get pummelled by the news, I often wish I was a psychopath
who is not affected by the suffering of other people (including but not limited
to humans). Not that I claim to be enlightened. I need to work off all too much
debit on my karma for that.
All sentient beings are apprentice Jesuses;
apprentice Buddhas. An apprentice learns by copying a master. That’s what I do.
5. What are three key pieces of
wisdom/advice/comfort from your book?
1. We survive anything, even death. Before my
daughter died, she told us she’d turn our washing water purple. We save the
output of the washing machine for the garden, and indeed the water from the
first wash after her death was a bright iridescent pink, you know, like highly
diluted beetroot juice. There were no red items in the wash, and a white
tablecloth stayed pristine white.
So, I know she is in a far better place, and still
has her sense of humour, and is loved.
The scientific evidence for what happens after
death is set out at my blog because a grieving person won’t want to wade
through it. https://wp.me/p3Xihq-3oq
2. A major reason for my
ability to process my grief so fast is the Buddhist concept of equanimity.
Suffering has two parts. My
toe (or my heart) hurts, and I want the pain to stop. If I can simply accept
the toe damage sensation or the broken heart, I am not suffering.
This is also central to the
other great religions and philosophies: inshallah
(as Allah wills), God’s will be done, Job’s story...
There is more to it than I can summarise here, and
I am not saying it’s easy, but it is immensely effective.
3. Grief needs to be felt. If you hide from it
behind antidepressants, or worse, addictive substances, if you try to drown it
out with busyness or deny it, it will fester on and on.
But this does not need to be 24 hours a day. By
scheduling it to set times, and faithfully keeping the appointment with your
grief, you can live the rest of your life as if it was normal.
And the two most important thing you need to return
to your life are creativity and fun. And yes, it is possible to have fun while
grieving. If you don’t believe me, ask my daughter.
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