ABSTRACT
This chapter first offers clarification of the meanings of “complication.” It urges the importance of distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary complications in bereavement and grieving as a key to estimating when it is more likely that professional support services will prove useful. Second, the chapter shows how ordinary grieving as relearning the world is “always complicated” through discussion of how bereavement entails complex suffering and how grieving inevitably involves complex responses to that suffering. Third, it shows how grieving is complicated “sometimes more than others” in extraordinary circumstances. In them the authors encounter “special challenges” that add to the mixture of those the authors ordinarily face in ways that adversely affect their effectiveness in responding to them. Throughout the chapter considers what the bereaved themselves and their caregivers, including family, friends, and professionals, can do to meet the challenges of relearning the world and overcoming interference in effectively relearning.
