Field Notes from Grief

Field Notes From Grief: The First Year is drawn from the pages of the journal that Judith Gold Stitzel kept the year following the death of her husband Bob after forty-six years of their shared life. The entries begin a few days before Stitzel’s husband died and are accompanied by collages by artist Claudia Giannini. Like the entries of different lengths, the collages—one for each month of the year—allow readers frequent pauses to reflect on their own lives and losses.  

What differentiates this book from self-help books and from other accounts of survival and recovery are the immediacy and self-revelation the journal format allows, the frequent humor in Stitzel’s exploration of the incongruities and rhythms of grief, and her exploration of “the couple”—that remarkable entity—and how it does and does not continue after death.  

Field Notes from Grief does not attempt to explain or educate but to share the rawness of experience while providing evidence to all who grieve, or fear grief, that they will once again want to go on.