One book about grief that I found convincing—and strangely consoling—was by Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research. Drawing on work by another researcher, John Bowlby, he argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes speculated that we likewise continue to “search” illogically (and in distress) for a loved one after a death. He states the mourner’s predicament clinically and as
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