Feeling Grief and Grieving: A Discussion of Suhrida Yadavalli’s “Mourning and the Capacity to Be Alone: Cultural and Existential Rituals in Loss”

I would like to thank the Journal Editors for presenting me with the opportunity to discuss this paper and in particular, I want to thank Suhrida Yadavalli for writing such a beautifully human account of both the grief and grieving she encountered in the loss of a dear friend. In her paper, Yadavalli brings us to questions concerning what it is about the universal problem of loss that makes some people find the strength to persevere through the adversity entailed in profound loss while others give up in the face of such adversity. She wonders with us about what certain subjective experiences might compel some individuals to reach the point where they would contemplate or, at times, even act on ending their life. And finally, in facing her own horrific loss of a deeply well-loved friend, she wonders how it is that we are able to proceed with our lives in manners that move us toward the capacity to continue to make meanings in our lifelong journeys despite such profound losses. She eloquently describes, in an unpretentious manner, the experience of personal loss that we, our patients and all human beings must face at different moments throughout the course of our lives.

Very early in her paper, Yadavalli draws us into her own world of experience, telling us of having made friends with a group of fellow immigrants from diverse countries of origin. It is a touching story of a group of people forming friendships in the common experience of what Robert Heinlein (1961) so aptly termed being “stranger(s) in a strange land”. How fortuitous, adaptive, and richly grounding it was that this group of people were able to come together and create a shared experience which, at least for Yadavalli, had aspects of what being in a good family feels like. We have the sense that for Yadavalli, this was not an equivalency of her family of origin. Rather, it contained aspects of some of the good parts of her good enough family of origin experience: a shared sense of commonality, the sense