The Emerging You: A New Approach to Grief and the Griever
- Nov 26, 2024
- 3 min read
No Rating
In a first, I am reviewing a book without providing a rating. This is for two reasons: 1) I am not, at present, the target audience for it, and 2) I am reading it because I know and work with Nate McClendon. Any rating I give will be suspect. Did I rate it higher because of its merits or because I know and love Nate? Did I rate it lower to avoid accusations of bias? No, best not to rate at all, though I do, of course, have some thoughts to share.
As the title plainly states, this is a book about grief, the grieving process, and a new approach to both. Specifically, Nate is interested in grief as it relates to the loss of a child. This is something deeply personal to him as he lost his 18-year-old daughter, Naomi, in 2014. Though other grief models exist, his own process brought him to the conclusion that they miss something crucial: When a child dies, the parent dies, too. That is, the person he once was ceases to exist. Across a very readable and very relatable 114 pages, Nate walks us through his grieving process, what he learned about himself and others along the way, what he learned from and with others, and the patterns he identified along that way that make up the phases of The Emerging You.
Though I am not unfamiliar with grief or grieving—I have lost my mother, grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, beloved pets—those deaths were almost exclusively part of the natural cycle of life: We are born, we age, and we die. My mother died too young from leukemia, but it had been years since she’d lived her best life. Though it was sad to lose her, when death came it was a relief. Death aside, loss comes in many forms, and we all grieve or experience grief in ways large and small every day. My point is this: I have not suffered grief in the devastating, life-changing way Nate is talking about. As a result, I have never sought out resources (therapists, groups, conferences, books, videos, etc.) to help with the journey, so I can’t compare this one to any others.
What I can say is that The Emerging You can’t but help grievers looking for a framework to, if not guide their journey, then at least provide some markers along the way. Though Nate is a golfer, football feels like an apt analogy here. There are one- and 10-yard markings on the field, and the ball needs to move forward 10 yards for a first down with the goal of stringing together multiple first downs until the end zone is reached. How the ball gets there happens in unexpected ways—sometimes by short, punishing runs; other times by explosive long-yardage plays. Sometimes the ball goes backward for a loss. Grief is like that: linear but not orderly; there are rules but lots of maneuverability within them; and expect the unexpected. After the death of a loved one, no one is ever the same.
Maybe because I’m not actively grieving loss, the biggest lesson I took away from the book is the importance of self-care. We have to take care of our “self”—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—because nobody else can. If we can’t be good to and for ourselves, we can’t be good to and for those who need and depend on us, nor can we be good to and for society as a whole. While not the point of his book, and I know I’m about to extrapolate well beyond anything intended, I know Nate well enough to know how strongly he believes the world needs healing. I submit that we are in the midst of a global grieving, perhaps with environmental collapse as its genesis, and we need to work our way collectively through the phases of The Emerging You—Asking, Answering, and Action—to redefine both ourselves and our world. Only then can a new you, a new me, a new us emerge.
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