Bereavement

I have been a pharmacist since 1989. Anyone who has stood behind a pharmacy counter for that long learns that grief often arrives quietly, in ordinary clothes. It comes as a husband collecting a prescription for a wife who is dying at home. It comes as a daughter returning a bag of medicines that will not be needed now, unsure whether she is supposed to say why. It comes as a regular customer who stops coming, and a neighbor who mentions, almost in passing, that he has died.

For more than twenty years of my working life, from 2002 to 2023, I was involved in health work in Thailand and along the border with Myanmar. I lived for around fifteen of those years in Chiang Mai. I worked among people whose ways of mourning were very different from one another and from the ones I grew up with. Some were Buddhist, some Muslim, some Christian, and some held animist beliefs about the spirits of the dead and the places they belong to. Some families gathered for days. Some buried their dead quickly and quietly. Some grieved people whose deaths had never been confirmed at all.

What struck me, again and again, was not how differently people grieved. It was how often they were told, by someone, that they were grieving wrongly. Too much or too little. Too soon or too late. Too much belief or not enough. Laughing when they should be solemn, or still solemn when everyone else had moved on.

This book grew from that observation. I wanted to ask a simple question honestly: how do we go on living without someone we love? I also wanted to answer it without handing anyone another set of rules to fail.

This academic edition sets out the research and its limits alongside the philosophical argument. I want readers to be able to examine the evidence and question the conclusions. References can help us become more careful about what we say; they cannot tell us everything about a particular person’s loss.

The illustrative situations in these pages are ways of thinking through a question, not disguised accounts of individual patients or families. Where the book discusses real places and organisations, its claims depend on the dated sources identified in the text.

If you are reading this because someone you love has died, I am sorry. I do not know your loss, and this book cannot know it either. What I hope it can do is make a little more room for you: room to remember honestly, to ask for help, to change, to stay the same, and, when it comes, to enjoy something again without feeling that you have betrayed anyone.

Stuart Corlett

Carterton, New Zealand

2026