Four years after Eric died, Muldberg arrived at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan, for her first meeting with Shear. She answered Shear’s questions with as few words as possible. It was as if she were barely present in the small, windowless room. Her face was drawn and clouded; she sat crumpled in her chair, arms crossed tightly around her, as if the weight of her loss made it impossible to sit up straight. It felt to her as if Eric had died just the day before. Shear diagnosed Muldberg with complicated grief, the unusually intense and persistent form of grief she has been researching and treating for almost 20 years.

Grief, by definition, is the deep, wrenching sorrow of loss. The initial intense anguish, what Shear calls acute grief, usually abates with time. Shear says that complicated grief is more chronic and more emotionally intense than more typical courses through grief, and it stays at acute levels for longer. Women are more vulnerable to complicated grief than men. It often follows particularly difficult losses that test a person’s emotional and social resources, and where the mourner was deeply attached to the person they are grieving. Researchers estimate complicated grief affects approximately 2 to 3 per cent of the population worldwide. It affects 10 to 20 per cent of people after the death of a spouse or romantic partner, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent, and it is even more common among parents who have lost a child. Clinicians are just beginning to acknowledge how debilitating this form of grief can be. But it can be treated.

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I first learned about complicated grief while riding the subway in Boston, where I read an advertisement recruiting participants for a study at the Massachusetts General Hospital, which I later discovered was related to Shear’s research. By then, I’d been a widow for about a decade. I was 33 when my husband died and it was fast—just six weeks from when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My grief had a different kind of complication: I was pregnant, and our son was born seven months after his father’s death. By the time I read that subway ad, he was in elementary school, and I was holding my own. I gradually went back to work. Single parenting was overwhelming, but it kept me focused on what was right in front of me. Having a young child is filled with small pleasures and motherhood enlarged my sense of community. I fell in love again. But it still felt like I walked with a limp, and that limp was grief.

Often, I felt that the course of my grief—as it slowed or accelerated—wasn’t within my control. Sometimes I’d buckle, and wait it out. Sometimes I’d push back. Somehow, I knew it was going to take as long as it took. There wasn’t anything to do about it except live. Freud, writing in Mourning and Melancholia, one of the first psychological essays on grief, saw it this way, too: “Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude of life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to a medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.” That’s how it went for me.

I’d be the first to say that my path through grief has been intellectual. I’ve spent years contemplating what grief is. That subway ad made me wonder: Was my grief a disease? To be diagnosed with an illness is to seek—or wish for—a cure. But conceiving of grief as a disease with a cure raises questions about what is normal—and abnormal—about an experience that is universal. Is grief a condition that modern psychology, with its list of symptoms and disorders and an ample medicine cabinet, should treat, as if it were an illness rather than an essential part of being human?