This book was co-written by a mother and daughter who lost their husbands to Covid, 41 days apart.

When I saw this on the library's new books shelf, I immediately thought of an old friend with the same title from 50 years ago. However, this is not the one by Granger E Westberg. Good Grief is a contemporary book, examining human loss in the time of Covid.

Two widows, mother and daughter, write from the mother’s living room, letters, poems and reflections on the deaths of their husbands 41 days apart. The bereaved pair are forced to grieve in solitude because of lockdown, yet there are still the diverse encounters with those who would offer kindness and understanding, and at times “the best-meaning of people reduced to incoherence or insensitivity”.

What to say or write, or not, is helpfully offered. “These days my mother and I notice that our sadness is perceived as a mark of failure to process and proceed,” has been said in various ways to many who mourn. Insights about Wuhan, Boris Johnson, Brexit, and care homes take this book much wider than the domestic scene where the mother/daughter conversations start in an effort to make the grieving and coping more visible.

The writing is engaging and down-to-earth, using quirky words like “sadmin” and “dreadtape” to explain the processes that must be followed after a death, along with suggestions about how much better these requirements could be handled.

There is much about grief in this book, and also much about deep love, regret, adjustment, betrayal and pain. Yet in the end they write “grief is our companion, not our curse” and I feel as if I have been companioned to look more deeply at some of my own losses. I have also laughed and smiled and wondered at the stories of what to do with Andy’s shoes, beginning to read books again but only with the help of audio-books, the practicalities of funerals and memorials, the role of Facebook and “algorithms that take me for a funeral hobbyist”, and much more.

In the Conclusion, we read “This is a manifesto for equality” although the Introduction says it is not. The canvassing of what happens around dying has exposed the authors’ shared belief that our treatment of the living defines our attitudes to death and that all deaths matter. Which means that change is needed.

So is this a memoir or a pastoral care handbook? It is certainly a penetrating look at what is defining the third decade of the 21st century. I highly recommend it.

Publisher: Harper Collins, London 2020, second edition 2022