Grief is brutal, but there is value in it, experts say. So why do we try to "cure" it?

-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Cody Delistraty wanted to get good at grief. After his mother died of melanoma when he was in his early twenties, he found, as he writes in his new book “The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss,” “There was no control to exert. No blueprint to follow.

” So, feeling frustrated and exhausted, he did just what a mourner who’s also a journalist might do — he investigated. After experiencing firsthand that the aftermath of loss does not progress neatly in five stages, Delistraty began exploring a variety of grief treatments, from approaches as traditional as ritual and community support and as futuristic as AI and memory deletion. His odyssey took him back to the history of our modern conceptions of grief, and coincided with a d new reassessment of the experience within the psychiatric community, with the addition of prolonged grief disorder to the DSM.

Though the loss of his mother and its aftermath “showed me how brutal pain is,” as Delistraty tells me during a recent video chat, it also showed him why grief can be something to “keep with us and to work through, as hard as it is.” Ultimately, it’s not something to be cure or reach the end of. But like a painful chronic condition, it can be managed.

And Delistraty reminds, “It happens to everybody.” This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Related Is grieving too long a disorder? You pose a variant of this question right at the start of the b.