The article, “After Years of Living With Grief, Joy Has Moved In,” by Roger Rosenblatt, published in The New York Times on September 27, 2025, truly resonated with me.
Below is the unpublished response I shared with The New York Times to this deeply moving and beautifully written piece.
The Alchemy of Grief
To the Editor:
Re: “Joy Is the Next Stage of My Grief” (September 27, 2025)
What Roger Rosenblatt describes is a monumental shift of emotion, a change that allows his grief to give way to joy when he thinks of his beloved adult daughter. Amy’s death hurled her father into a grief that seemed endless. At some point, mysteriously, this father’s grief collided with joy and allowed him a passageway out of his enduring sadness. An emotional alchemy transmuted his leaden grief into a golden joy so that looking at Amy’s photos made him smile, thinking of times with her with delight and chuckling as he remembered her and her brothers in comic moments.
How can the ineffable sorrow that deluges parents after the death of a child, this thing called grief, be described? How does it work? Is it time-limited? For some, its progression can happen in defined stages: one emotional stage following another. But for most, grief doesn’t fit into stages. It’s a chameleon that comes in different forms, e.g., anticipatory, forbidden, acute or even forgotten for years. Grief’s tenure and intensity are not predicable.
Yet, at some point that is different for everyone who loses a loved one, grief lifts like storm clouds drifting away. The acute pain eventually eases, and sweet memories appear that comfort and delight the bereaved.
Dorothy P. Holinger, PhD
The writer, a psychologist formerly on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, is the author of “The Anatomy of Grief.”
