WHEN WILL IT STOP HURTING? is Glenn Cameron’s very personal account of his grief for his much-loved wife and soulmate, Crystle, his wife of over 30 years who died of brain cancer in March, 2018,. This book is not so much a guide to grief or a plan to assist a person in moving through and out of grief, as it is the author’s relation of his own grieving process. While, as he points out, “not all grief is the same,” he hopes that talking about what he experienced will be of use to others trying to get through life after a deep and profound loss. He is not hesitant to reveal the starkest, most painful parts of his experience, detailing moments of jealousy and anger when he felt like accosting happy couples walking together and forcing them to share his pain, and moments of profound guilt, when he wondered whether or not he’d done everything he could to ease his wife’s pain in her last days, or find the best treatments for her. He even talks about the possibility of suicide, about how tempting it was and how he had to draw himself back from the brink by reminding himself that he needed to be there for other family members. But he also discusses the ways in which he found solace, through regaining faith in an afterlife and developing a New Age spirituality with room for meditation, prayer, and mindfulness.

While his particular methods may not work for everyone, there is comfort to be found for those in mourning, in the knowledge that other people have suffered the same sort of losses as they, and have come through the mourning process if not intact, at least more whole and better able to move on and live again. The book is short, and written in clear, simple language, which may help it be more accessible for those who feel unable to handle anything weighty or complicated. The imagery is powerful and thoughtfully chosen, with the force of real feeling behind it. While this book can’t promise to offer the ultimate solutions to a reader’s grief, or provide a scientific guide to the grieving process or anything of the sort, it does offer a simple, shared human experience, and, after all, as the old proverb says, “grief shared is halved, joy shared is doubled.”

A powerful personal account of one man’s mourning process, WHEN WILL IT STOP HURTING? offers hope to those who have lost loved ones and feel trapped in a forest of grief.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader