The Brooklyn Rail

About a month before my brother’s death, a slim paperback book arrived in the mail: a review copy of Cody Delistraty’s The Grief Cure. In the coming weeks, I pored over its first chapters at a leisurely pace, highlighting insights and dog-earing pages. But when the news came, I returned to the book with a newfound urgency. In the humming darkness of a Boeing 787, on a redeye flight to the West Coast for his funeral, I turned each page over like a stone, desperate to reveal some hidden knowledge that would help me make sense of my grief. This feeling of helplessness—and the nagging suspicion that with enough information, the pain of loss can be understood, processed, even cured—is the same thing that drove Delistraty to write the book: a wide-ranging journey into the new frontiers of grief, born of his own desire to reconcile the death of his mother.

Though grief is both universal and inevitable, our collective experience of it is characterized by confusion and misunderstanding—because while there are countless medical resources dedicated to preventing death, there is little recourse available when the unimaginable actually occurs. Delistraty and his family approached his mother’s treatment with rigor, practicality, and diligence. “We had plans. We acted; we hoped; we prayed; and we strategized her recovery,” he writes. “But when she died: nothing. The expertise dried up.”

In the wake of a loss, we are instructed to be gentle with ourselves, to go through the five stages, to seek therapy, or lean on the people around us for support. The emphasis, often, is on moving forward—but while we’re all forced to reckon with the consequences of death, it’s rare that everyday people seek to understand their grief with the same conceptual rigor, scientific guidance, and expert advice that’s leveraged in an effort to prevent it. That’s what makes The Grief Cure so novel: while countless literary heavyweights have written about their own experiences with loss, and scientists are working to develop treatments for grief, few books bridge the gap between the personal experience of grief and the broader societal context that surrounds it.

Analyzing the study of grief from a cultural, social, and political perspective, Delistraty combines historic insight with information about emerging experimental treatment modalities—enlisting the help of technologists, therapists, researchers, and marketers to better understand his experience and with it, the experiences of others. Along the way, he attempts a series of ad-hoc cures like psilocybin and bibliotherapy, and seeks insight from numerous sources, from sex workers working with grieving clients to the neuroscientists attempting to pioneer new techniques like memory deletion. He looks back through the history of grief and toward its future, investigating applications of new technologies like AI and emerging pharmaceutical drugs like propranolol, which has been shown to reduce symptoms of PTSD, and naltrexone, which treats the symptoms of grief as a form of addiction. Then, partway through his journey, the American Psychiatric Association enters the fray, issuing an update that reclassifies prolonged grief—an experience of grief that persists for over a year, with symptoms that affect the subject’s ability to reintegrate with everyday life—as a mental health condition.

This creates new opportunities, and potential pitfalls, in the treatment of grief, sparking questions like, Is it dangerous to pathologize grief? Is this label born of a broader trend, in which diagnostic culture reframes non-medical issues as medical ones? If so, who stands to benefit, and who will be harmed? Will this reclassification allow those suffering to seek specialized, targeted, possibly pharmaceutical treatment, or could it further stigmatize an experience that is both ancient and unavoidable?

These are just a few of the topics Delistraty explores in The Grief Cure. Merging personal essay with reportage, he synthesizes the various historic paradigms through which grief has been understood, challenging the dominant cultural narrative around it and investigating the new ways this universal experience is being defined, talked about, and treated. He also chronicles his own experience with loss, taking the reader with him on two parallel journeys: his mission to understand grief intellectually, and his efforts to grapple with its emotional impact firsthand.

In the haze of my own grief, I found myself returning often to the book in the hopes that, by consuming other people’s stories of grief, I might chart a course to healing. In the end, Delistraty’s decade-long quest to cure his own grief yields no single antidote—but in chronicling the experience with emotional acuity, scientific insight, and surprising levity, he provides readers with a guide for how they might approach their own. As he observes, everyone experiences grief differently, and what brings solace for one person might further isolate another. But while it is difficult, if not impossible, to build consensus around an issue that is at once universal and individual, what we can do is build community, share knowledge, and be present with one another and ourselves. “There is no substitute for going through it,” Delistraty writes. “At the end of it all, what worked best for me was something far plainer and more challenging than I’d expected: sitting, simply, with the ones I love.”