The Trimesters of Grief: or Are You Gonna Listen to What Is Going on in Here?

Summary

there are
over eight billion people
on earth
and none of
them are you.

How does someone survive the unsurvivable?

In 2024, 80,000 people in the US lost their lives to overdose. It is estimated that 48.5 million people in the US are currently struggling with addiction. Many families of those with addiction hide in the shadows. But they don’t have to.

When Katie Rizzo’s life was turned upside down by the death of her oldest son from opioid addiction, as a scientist and writer she fell back on what she knew: documenting, looking for patterns, and poetry. In The Trimesters of Grief, Rizzo shows how grief mirrors pregnancy, from whole-body fatigue to brain fog to the need to tell everyone about this precious life-a life that is now gone. And then it is time to “deliver” grief and let it sit beside us.

Part memoir and part self-help book, The Trimesters of Grief suggests ways to communicate and nurture grief. Other cultures embrace grief as a natural part of life; perhaps it’s time for us to also learn to hold life in one hand and grief in the other.