Writing Widowhood: The Landscapes of Bereavement by Berman,J. (2015): Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and 19th-Century American Authors by Bush,H. L. (2016)

Reviewed by: Paul A. Metzler, Book Review Editor, OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, MO, USA

Read together, these two books will provide a poignant glimpse into the grief experience of five widows who are distinguished contemporary writers and five 19th-century bereaved parents, also eminent authors and leaders of their day. Thanks to the literary research and keen observations of Jeffrey Berman, PhD, and Harold L. Bush, PhD, these 10 noted writers’ publications about their experiences with death and grief are brought forward to our time to illuminate our own experience of love and loss. Thanatologists will find in these two books compelling stories as Berman and Bush highlight how these 10 authors lived through the wounds of grief yet transmuted their grief into art and insight for others. In contrast to the plethora of self-help books available in our day, these writings by grievers who many would acknowledge are among the finest writers of their age provide an experience-grounded entrée to both the universal and the deeply personal in grief.

Berman, a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany, has covered similar literary terrain before (see Berman, 2010, 2013) and has a substantial list of other publications exploring loss, grief, and end-of-life. In Writing Widowhood, he has examined the spousal loss memoirs of Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Godwin, Joan Didion, and Kay Redfield Jamison. Each author’s early life as well as other published work are detailed, including any considerations of death in her writing before becoming widowed. He then looks at the “aesthetic and psychological richness of each memoir” (p. 6), to help the reader to understand how writing was not only the professional life of these five women but was also an essential activity in their ability to cope with grief and loss.

Berman has impressive familiarity with bereavement theory as it has developed in the last decades and is able to apply it insightfully to the memoirs that he researched. A strength of this book is the diversity of the type of deaths that each of these widows experienced. For instance, there is the wrongful death of Sandra Gilbert’s spouse, Elliot, due to apparent neglectful medical care; the sudden cardiac death of Joan Didion’s husband, writer John Gregory Dunne; and the anticipated death of Kay Redfield Jamison’s husband Richard Wyatt from lung cancer. I found myself appreciating the many personal details he highlights about these women and their publications both before and after their spouses’ deaths. Those biographical details gave depth and nuance to the poignant accounts each of these women wrote regarding their spousal loss. His concluding chapter offers numerous comparisons and contrasts among the five grieving widows whose works he has examined. The only truly odd tangent in the book was his decision to include in the last few pages a consideration of the end-of-life memoir of Susan Gubar, a distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at Indiana University who published and continues to blog about her diagnosis and dying process from metastatic ovarian cancer. This change of focus from widow memoirs seemed an unnecessary loss of continuity.

Bush, a Professor of English at Saint Louis University, wrote Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors out of his own experience of grief following his son’s death in 1999. He includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all of whom wrote during the 19th century in America. As his title suggests, our contemporary appreciation for how continuing bonds with a deceased loved one foster healing and meaning (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996) is indeed not a new idea. His engaging exploration of the correspondence and publications of these five well-regarded Americans illustrates how each was transformed by parental grief and sought to “insure that the legacy of their child must never dwindle away into oblivion” (p. 2). Like Berman, Bush has a wide familiarity with the bereavement literature, as well as psychology and the culture of the 19th century which enabled him to write this engaging and insightful book.

Each of the five chapters reviews and analyzes the anguish as well as the constructive endeavors that the loss of a child engendered for these five individuals. Most compellingly, Bush notes that these individuals each had a direct involvement in the civil rights struggle of their era and actually “undertook a social justice agenda” (p. 14) as a specific memorial and legacy to his/her deceased child’s life. He is able to illustrate that despite the trauma of a child’s death each “managed to live steady, productive lives that helped shape the rise of a mighty nation” (p. 194).

Reading this book can be a source of great insight, inspiration, and solace to contemporary parents grieving the loss of a child. Bush’s detailing of the grief process at work in these five individuals will also help bereavement specialists to gain clearer longitudinal perspective about the common course of parental bereavement over the last two centuries.