An Essential Distinction

As someone who experienced long-term debilitating grief at one point in my life, I can say firsthand that there is a difference between normal grief (no matter how long it lasts) and the type of grief that prevents one from living a normal life—a grief that does not soften with time as normal grief does. It is not the duration that matters. Rather, it is the intensity and the control that debilitating grief takes of one’s life. It seems that the authors of this article (“One Year to Mourn,” July/August) fail to differentiate between “normal” and “abnormal” grief. The medical profession is attempting to address the latter, and to identify the people who would benefit from its treatment.

As anyone who has suffered loss knows, one never truly “gets over” grief; it becomes part of life. But normally the sufferer is able to continue moving forward through life, to take joy in normal things, and to look toward the future with anticipation. When a person is unable to do that for an extended time, a medical community that recognizes and is able to address that problem is a gift. Nothing in the APA’s diagnostic guide suggests trying to minimize normal grief.

Please, don’t criticize those who are trying to help people who aren’t able to handle debilitating grief on their own. I know from my experience that medical assistance would have helped me. I hope sufferers in the future will be able to benefit from appropriate treatment—whether that be medication, therapy, or a combination—the same as those suffering from depression or other mental challenges.

Suzanne Harris
Spokane, Wash.

Faith and Doubt, Together

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). This quote ranks as perhaps the most analyzed Gospel sentence attributed to someone other than Jesus or an evangelist. In his review of Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone (July/August 2024), Paul Lakeland writes: “Wiman wants something else—not faith one day and doubt the next, but faith and doubt, simultaneously.” This non-sequential, paradoxical description of faith identifies its essential character. As Tomáš Halík writes in Night of the Confessor, “Unless we tell people in time that God dwells in inaccessible light, that prayer is silence for Mystery, and that faith is respecting that mystery and adjusting to it as a mystery, and that any shout of ‘I’ve got it’ is simply proof that one has strayed from the path, then we deceive them and ourselves.”

Spencer F. Stopa
Mesa, Ariz.