Working through grief
British author and therapist Julia Samuel in Hamilton Thursday to discuss her book, Grief Works
Julia Samuel has spent her career examining something the rest of us would rather ignore.
Samuel is a British grief counsellor who has spent the past 25 years working with bereaved families, both in private practice and in hospitals in the United Kingdom. Throughout her career, she has counselled individuals who have lost spouses, children, friends, and who are facing death themselves.
Those experiences form the backbone of her first book, “Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, and Surviving.” The book, which presents 15 real-life case histories of Samuel’s patients, was released in Canada on Dec. 26.
Samuel is stopping in Hamilton Thursday evening for a special appearance at the Hamilton Public Library — her only stop in Ontario — to discuss her book, her work, and our attitudes about grief.
Samuel points out that in an age where we have a world of information at our fingertips, technology can give us “a false sense of our own potency,” she says.
“Fundamentally, the truths of life have not changed. We can’t stop ourselves from dying,” she said. “People often say ‘life is short,’ but they don’t think it’s short for them.”
This attitude makes it extremely difficult for us to respond to grief, Samuel says, both in ourselves and in others. She says that grief isn’t a process that can be avoided or rushed, and if we are to heal, we need to allow ourselves to feel the pain.
She links grief to love, pointing out that the more we love a person and the more they’ve been an integral part of our lives, the more we grieve.
“The love doesn’t die. The person has died and they’re not physically present, but the person continues and is embodied in you in many different ways, and influences and informs your decisions.”
Often, she says, the things we do to avoid the pain — relying on alcohol, or overscheduling ourselves to keep our minds occupied at every moment — end up causing the most damage.
“By pushing it away, that’s much more likely to harm you than if you are getting the support you need to find a way of processing and expressing your grief,” she says.
Samuel, who was born into the Guinness family, says she was naturally drawn to the subject of grieving after watching her family struggle to cope with death. Samuel’s grandparents suffered huge losses as part of the generation that fought in the First World War, and then her parents lived through the Second World War — experiences that led to suppressed grief that was never voiced.
“Their way of responding to death was ‘what you don’t talk about isn’t going to hurt you, so get on, keep going,’” she said.
Samuel also has connections to the British Royal Family — she was a friend of Princess Diana’s and is godmother to Prince George. She says that outpourings of public mourning, like those for Princess Diana, often emerge from our sense of intimacy with the public figure who has died.
“With Diana, people identified with her and felt that she showed herself in a way other members of the Royal Family hadn’t, and they felt like they really did know her. So there is a sense of loss that’s genuine,” she said. “It’s also much more liberating to wail and cry and light candles about someone that actually doesn’t affect your life, and you can actually express lots of other unresolved losses.”
Large-scale mourning also creates a sense of community in an era when those connections are scarce, she says.
“There’s such a sense of isolation and disconnection in our lives that coming forward and mourning someone together — that togetherness, that connectedness, is more powerful now than it’s ever been.”
Samuel’s appearance in Hamilton is being presented by The 100% Certainty Project, a community initiative that aims to start a dialogue about death sponsored by the Division of Palliative Care at McMaster University in partnership with Bryan Prince Bookseller, PX Dermody Funeral Homes, Hamilton Public Library, and Carpenter Hospice. For more information, visit www.talkaboutdeath.ca.
The love doesn’t die. The person has died … JULIA SAMUEL