Death Studies. Volume 25, Number 8, December 2001, pages720-724
A Parent's Journey into Grief - Gili's Book reviewed by Kathleen R. Gilbert, Ph.D. 
--- " As I read Gili's Book, I was struck by what a unique reading experience it is. It is made up of two principal parts, and these two parts are written in different styles, with the first more personal and evocative. I felt my affective side more engaged throughout Part 1 and my intellectual side more engaged in Part 2. --- Part 1--- has the feel of a conversation between a mother and her daughter. In it we learn that Gili was a gifted and sensitive child who had hoped to grow up to be a child psychologist. --- While reading this first part --- I almost felt like I was eavesdropping on an intimate exchange of thoughts and feelings between two people who share a unique connection. The depth of love that passed (and still passes) between these two is clear, as is the depth of the author's anguish at her daughter's sudden, brutal, and untimely death in an automobile crash. --- As one reads Part 1, one feels the rawness of the author's pain, the ?never-ending story' of her grief, as she copes with, shrinks from, and grows through and with the pain of her grief. She clearly demonstrates the model of parental bereavement that she portrays in the second part of the book. --- Unlike many other accounts of parental bereavement that I have read over the years, Kagan (Klein) does not present herself as heroically overcoming her grief and moving on to a point where her grief is resolved - the ?I made it, you can too' story of the hero triumphing over insurmountable odds. Given our propensity in western society for a happy ending, I assume that the author has experienced pressure from others to ?get over it and move on.' I also wondered about the response she had received after the publication of her book, from well-meaning others. Here, we get sense of the ?ongoing-ness' of parental grief, which is much more consistent with the stories parents have told me in my own research on parental bereavement (e.g., Gilbert & Smart, 1992). --- She clearly has been weakened and empowered by her loss and grief. --- In the second part of the book, Kagan (Klein) combines the insights from her own bereavement with her knowledge and skills as a clinician, researcher, and theorist. --- Chapter 8 details the Readjustment Model of Parental Bereavement: Inward and Outward Steps. In this model, the emphasis is on progressive readjustment, rather than on stages through which parents would be expected to pass as they moved toward some sort of final resolution. Here, grief is not a linear process. There is no sense of an end point in this model. Instead, the emphasis is on the parent's present state of being. Parents can and likely will re-experience previous grief states, of the same or even increased intensity, at different points in their readjustment to their loss. --- What I found particularly meaningful about this is that many models focus on the outward steps, but parents actually may be doing a great deal of ?grief work' without anyone else being aware of it. --- Throughout the book, concepts and phenomena that are unique to parental loss and bereavement are presented. One I particularly resonated with was the dual image of the child --- the ?real image' of the child that is fixed in time, and the ?shadow image' of the child, which is the evolving image of what the child might have been. --- Chapter 8 ends with recommendations for counselors and other mental health professionals.--- These recommendations --- are clear and well thought out. In sum, Gili's Book is an excellent resource for bereaved parents and for those who hope to help them. I strongly recommend it for personal and professional libraries.