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The co-editors of this insight-rich volume have assembled a panel of experts from diverse disciplines to create a work that is true to its title. I was invited by the Book Review Editor of our Journal to review this book because he was aware that I had lost an adult daughter to suicide earlier this year . I can report that, through the tears, reading this collection of essays—some scholarly, others quite personal—brought a measure of solace to a grieving heart. The quotation from C. S. Lewis on the very first page of Adele Tutter's stirring Prologue—“Grief is the cost of love”—signals the depth of the experience that lies on the literary road ahead for the intrepid reader.
The book begins with an incisive Foreword by psychoanalyst Daria Colombo that eloquently articulates the main idea contained in the pages that follow: that the lacerating pain of loss—“the hardest task forced upon us by life”—can be a spur to growth. Then, in her cogent, literate Prologue, co-editor Adele Tutter further develops the theme of loss as a stimulus to creativity, describing the bivalent nature of crushing grief: near despair and an almost simultaneous sense of liberation. She cites Freud and his reactions to the deaths of his father, his 27-year-old daughter, her 5-year-old son three years later, and his mother. Within a few years of the death of his father in 1896 Freud began his self-analysis, formulated the Oedipus complex, and completed The Interpretation of Dreams . Nine years after the death of his daughter and six years after the death of his grandson he remained “inconsolable”; indeed, he wrote to Ernest Jones that after the death of the little boy he had become “tired of life permanently.” And, yet, following the death of his mother a few years later he wrote in a letter to a friend of a feeling of release, of being “free to die” now that his mother had died, and newly aware that “the values of life will somehow have changed noticeably in the deeper layers” (p. xxxii). (He had