What is Resilient Grieving?
If you are grieving the loss of someone you love, here’s a book to check out: Lucy Hone’s Resilient Grieving: Finding Strength and Embracing Life After a Loss That Changes Everything (2017).
Thank goodness I found this book!
Hone certainly knows deep grief. When her twelve-year-old daughter Abi died in an accident, it changed her world forever. She had previously done some academic research on the resilience of people who have lived through hardships and was known for her TED workshops on resilience. After Abi’s death, Hone realized that it might be helpful to apply to her own life some of the strategies she had found in her research.
Hone says, “It’s also important to recognize that some people very quickly develop a hunger for tools to help them cope with grief, and that there is nothing wrong with desire for action --- for what might be called proactive participation in the grieving process” (p. 6).
She recently revised the book, and its second edition is titled, Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through Devastating Loss (2024). In the new edition, Hone describes how ten years have passed since her daughter died and says, “Reading back through old notes I’d made in the first two years after her death … I was struck by how far we’d come. How much better, happier, more contented and at peace I feel now” (p. xiv).
Both editions of Resilient Grieving show the reader how to figure out “your brave new world” (2024, p. 181). My copies are filled with notes in the margins where I had “ah-ha!” moments and gained so much insight about how to live with this monster called grief.
Here are three of the many things I learned from reading Lucy Hone’s work:
There are things you can do to assist yourself while grieving; you don’t have to be passive about it. She says, “Grief reactions are what happen to us (how we experience loss) and grief responses are how we choose to respond to that loss” (2024, p. 76).
There’s nothing wrong with laughing, even while you’re grieving, so don’t feel guilty. It’s actually helpful. My favorite chapter in her book is titled, “Positive Emotions.” In this chapter, Hone makes it clear that there is plenty of validation in current grief literature for the importance of acknowledging sadness and feeling the pain of grief, but what most grief authors don’t tell us is that positive emotions have “transformational power … especially while we are grieving” (p. 88).
One really easy and helpful strategy is to find three good things a day and write them down. (I was amazed at how helpful this suggestion was for me.)
Lucy Hone’s books showed me that resilience is all about making choices in the way we grieve, and can make a huge difference in the way we feel and live after someone we love dies. It made me feel so much better to have validation for wanting to do something about my grief, rather than just letting it happen to me. That put me in charge and in control, which was a refreshing change in the way I looked at my new life.
Both editions of Hone’s books are powerful. In fact, in my book, Grab Life by the Bungees and 50+ Other Ways to Find Humor, Hope, and Happiness After Your Partner Dies, I recommended her 2017 book as one of the most helpful in all that I read and in the personal research that I did after my husband died.
I’m so glad I found out about Resilient Grieving.
References
Hone, L. (2017). Resilient grieving: Finding strength and embracing life after a loss that changes everything. New York: The Experiment.
Hone, L. (2024). Resilient grieving: How to find your way through devastating loss. New York: The Experiment.
