There is a brilliant article in The Atlantic about a family whose son died on 9/11. It is a story about grief. I listened to it while eating lunch. So powerful.
WHAT BOBBY MCILVAINE LEFT BEHIND
Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11
From the article:
Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you’re all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can’t help each other. You each have to find your own way down.
It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines’ marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: “That suggests everyone will make it down,” she told me. “Some people never get down the mountain at all.”
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