No Tragedy in Tears: Journeying Towards Contented Living Beyond Grief

This is not intended to be a handbook for managing grief. Grief is deeply personal and the many paths towards its resolution uniquely engage each person. Yet, hearing about how different people experience grief and its resolution, if that occurs, is helpful. Three journeys are described here. In the first two, the circumstances of the loss are very unusual. The first journey is a direct record of James' lived experience during the year after his first wife died in 1982 and of his progress towards resolution during the years that followed. The second records events when James' mother-in-law was born in 1921, events often recounted as part of her family's history, events which profoundly affected her influence on major decisions James and his first wife made many years later. The third tells of how James finally journeyed beyond the grief of losing his first wife by building a new and fulfilling life in another country with his second wife and their son.