Wherever love and death meet there is grief. It affects us all regardless of ethnicity age
class or sexual orientation. Grief is universal - it has endured across time societies and
cultures from the earliest human communities to the present day. But the way we deal with grief
is changing. Increasingly we are diagnosing grief as a medical condition to be treated rather
than embracing it as a natural part of being human. In this book Svend Brinkmann gets to the
heart of what it is to grieve arguing that the sorrow we experience after the death of a loved
one is a necessary and meaningful dimension of human existence. However painful it unites us
all. As humans we are uniquely privileged to feel grief. Rather than trying to escape or
smother grief we must allow ourselves to feel and accept it as the price we pay for love.
