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

You pose a variant of this question right at the start of the book, so let's get into it. Is grief a disorder?

No. Grief is not a disorder. I found the research interesting and I've had trouble exactly coming down on precisely where I think, but I have some broader takeaways. Prolonged grief disorder, as I write in the book, is something that came out of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] by the APA [American Psychiatric Association] two years ago. Clinicians who believe in it said that their reason was to differentiate it from normal grieving. They're characterizing it as lasting 12 months or more, although they say it's really more like six months.

Then it has to meet at least three of the symptoms happening every day for at least a month. That’s a sense of meaninglessness, marked sense of disbelief, identity disruption, numbness, that sort of thing, and it has to be outside your cultural contingencies. So if you're celebrating the Day of the Dead as a Mexican, you're not suffering from prolonged grief disorder.

It's obviously had a ton of opponents. When I was on the phone with different researchers and talked to different people over Zoom, both sides were super passionate about it. I do think everyone is acting in good faith. People want the best for people who are grieving in these very intense, persistent, and as prolonged grief disorder people say, unchanging ways. What is tricky is diagnostic culture more broadly. Putting something like grief into a lens of medicine is always going to be tricky, and is always going to elicit pretty intense feedback and responses.

"The average bereavement time off in the U.S. is five days."

I took the questionnaire to get confirmed possibly for prolonged grief disorder, but I wasn't myself confirmed. I never walked around with that label. I can see how that legitimacy would be valuable to someone, though. Just think of the fact that the average bereavement time off in the U.S. is five days. You tell your boss you’re grieving, and they say, “Sorry, deal with it.”

If you say, “I have prolonged grief disorder,” are they going to respond differently? Are our family members going to respond differently? That is more of an indictment, though, of how we treat people who are grieving than it is of any one diagnosis. The conclusion I've come to is to be careful with how much we center grief within diagnostic culture, while still understanding that there are possibly valuable avenues within........

© Salon