Grief Collection

  I took this photo  3 months after  my son's death, hoping to be able to do what that tree had done – re-establish a thriving life after a devastating blow. When that blow had landed, o ne of the first things I had wanted to know was how long it usually takes for extreme distress to start easing. Of course, grief, like any personal experience, is very individual: no one could tell me how long it was going to be until my despair lessened – or even if it would. But I knew,  from decades  of developing evidence-based information for suffering people, that research should be able to provide better answers than I was reading in information for grievers. I wrote recently at The Atlantic   about my frustration with the conflicting information I was seeing on the course of grief. This research collection is the basis for the statements I made there. This post is organized into a pyramid with several layers. First, there's a short summary of what I found. That's fo...