ABSTRACT
Few psychotherapists choose to devote a career to working with loss and grief simply out of curiosity. Typically, the wellsprings of engagement with such existential issues as death, impermanence and the quest for meaning in their wake run deep, usually deeper than our conscious narratives. Such was the case, at least, for me. When my father opted to end the growing darkness occasioned by his encroaching blindness and financial ruin 10 days before my 12th birthday, the life he ended ushered my mother, brother, sister, and me into another life entirely, one characterized by little of the innocence, predictability, and security that we had long taken for granted (Neimeyer, 2011). Ironically, it also launched me into an experience that made more intelligible the tragedy and transcendence of those people who would later become my clients, whose worlds were often shattered by similar loss. Though I scarcely recognized it at the time, my pursuit of a career in psychotherapy in general and grief therapy in particular represented my intuitive effort to step into the alien terrain into which I was introduced by loss, to map its contours, and if I could, to help survivors—myself included—stretch the boundaries of lives that seemed foreclosed in a single fateful moment by the traumatic loss of another (Neimeyer, 2009).
