There is no sure route through grieving. Jerusha McCormack provides instead a series of signposts by which we may find our own path to a new life.

"We are all amateurs at grief," she writes, "it comes to us all; we must all go through it. To treat grief as a problem to be fixed, or (worse still) to medicalize it, is to rob us of the extraordinary privilege of encountering this experience on our terms: for each of us has our own way of grieving, and each of us has something special to learn from the process."

"Every loss is unique. Each person grieves in his or her own way. The world is full of invisible sufferers -- those who have lost someone through any manner of catastrophes. Perhaps nothing draws as deeply on individual creativity as grief does. It is a time to rally your own resources, to use them in such a way as to express your grieving as your own, and thus to take possession to it."