Book Review - The road to recovery

• Title: Grieve if you must
  
• Arthur: Grace A. Kelly
  
• Publisher: Northern Caribbean University Press
  
• Reviewer: Keisha Hill

GRIEF IS a natural response to loss. Sometimes it may feel as if the sadness will never let up. While these feelings can be frightening and overwhelming, they are normal reactions to loss. Grace Kelly, chair of the Department of Behavioural Sciences at Northern Caribbean University and president of the Jamaica Association of Guidance Counsellors in Education, has sought to assist persons experiencing grief with healthy ways to cope, with her book, Grieve If You Must.

Kelly advises that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and offers a 21-day plan for personal grieving, healing and restoration. She does so by adding a personalised flair to understanding the grief process and providing a narration of her riveting experiences of grief and traumatic loss.

Grieving, she states, is a personal and highly individual experience, and how one grieves is dependent on many factors including personality, coping style, life experiences, faith and the nature of the loss. The book offers to persons in grief a therapeutic lifeline as, according to Kelly, trying to ignore the pain or keep it from surfacing will only make it worse in the long run.

Kelly relies heavily on psychological interventions, including guided imagery and other therapeutic strategies from theology, through different stages, in addressing the grieving process.

Stimulating exercises

Although many books and articles have been written in an attempt to assist persons in the grieving process, Kelly goes a few steps further to include stimulating exercises to assist in decreasing the emotions associated with grief for them to become less intense and accepting the loss and start to move forward.

Perhaps what would have added more value to readers - outside of comments expressed in the dedication, foreword, preface, and reviewers' comments - are comments from some of the persons she has met on her travels abroad who have had success stories based on steps advocated in the book.