'Sorrow’s Long Road': A Book Review
A new memoir about grief puts neuroscience and cultural analysis in dialogue.
Updated June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Is there a science of grief? The question orients much of Sorrow’s Long Road, Barbara Blatchley’s moving and insightful account of her late husband’s death from cancer and heart disease.
The memoir, published today, is in part a study of her loss and the time needed to adjust to it. Blatchley and her husband, Chris, had been together for 36 years, and the profound grief of losing him pitches her into more than six years of intense pain, disorientation, and sadness.
The question of whether there’s a science to grief comes at a time when prolonged grief disorder is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a medical condition treatable by drugs . DSM-5 TR (2022) defines extended grief in adults as lasting more than one year, and in children and adolescents for more than six months. For a diagnosis to occur, the grief should “last longer than might be expected based on social, cultural, or religious norms.”
Given the five additional years that Blatchley needed to grieve the loss of her husband, partner, “lover and best friend”—a journey that in her case is ongoing and likely to be life-long—her memoir helps convey that the new diagnosis is highly contingent and that “the ways we express grief are heavily influenced by our culture.”
Prone to turn psychological states into psychiatric conditions, the United States “does not handle death well as a society,” one of Blatchley’s friends and interviewees observes. “People can utter the stupidest things even if they mean to be helpful (‘He’s in a better place.’ ‘You’re young, you’ll find someone else.’ ‘Call me if I can do anything’ when they are the ones who should call or text you and offer X, Y, or Z),” and more.
Adaptive or Maladaptive Suffering?
With the support of her research and thoughtful interviews, Blatchley sets out a quiet but profound argument over the stakes of adaptation to loss and whether cultural and social attitudes to death are a help or hindrance to its expression. As she writes of extended grief, with implications for a still-broader argument about adaptation more generally:
The things we do when we grieve can look maladaptive, but they ultimately are not. They are adaptation; they are what adaptation looks like. Change, as we all know, can be very difficult, and as Kelley Lynn points out in her description of grief, this kind of change is unwanted, unasked for, and dreadful.
A neuroscientist by training and a retired research professor of psychology, Blatchley is broadly critical of the move to medicalize grief, as are almost all those she consults—doctors, friends, neighbors, and colleagues struggling with loss. Her rejecting that tendency doesn’t sideline that grief may induce acute physiological and neurological reactions, among them stress , fear , anger , guilt , exhaustion, difficulty sleeping , acute disorientation, vulnerability to illness, and “fruitless yearning,” and that each can be studied as grief intensifies and eases. “Loss is interpreted by the brain as an emergency, a threat to our continued survival,” she writes. “Our mind sees that something has gone seriously wrong in the world around us.”
In Sorrow’s Long Road, however, the suffering that accompanies extended grieving is not pathologized, but normalized as an unwelcome experience. It is framed as natural, possibly inevitable, certainly as understandable, because, despite its universal properties (tied to our mortality), it is intensely singular in how it manifests itself and when: “We all grieve in our own way and in our own time. Most bereaved find that they eventually reach accommodation with the loss, inasmuch as that can be thought of as recovery. Most do so without requiring medical or clinical intervention.”
Bereavement as “the Altered Life”
Using the latest research on grief to organize her suffering and thinking, Blatchley brings a wealth of insight to topics that are sometimes presented as settled. Regarding the implied linearity of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, for instance, where anger is said to replace denial , and depression to stand between bargaining and acceptance, she observes:
There is however some indication that Kübler-Ross didn’t intend to limit the model to just five stages and didn’t intend the linearity of the model to be the most important take-home message, although that is what has happened. Kübler-Ross was attempting to get physicians and clinicians to start talking about the end of life with an eye toward helping people process both the loss of someone important in their lives and the eventual end of their own life (something that Western medicine still avoids talking about).
After the focus of Freudian psychoanalysis on “grief work” (dominant in the United States from the 1970s to the 1990s), Blatchley prefers the “dual process model” advanced by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999, as it allows the bereaved to oscillate without a timetable between “loss-oriented” and “restoration-oriented” reactions to their loss:
One reason I like this model is that it beautifully describes the hot mess that grieving can be. We’re not working our way through the process one step at a time as much as we are tackling what we can at any given point in the process, dealing with what our fractured emotions can handle, and avoiding what we cannot face at that moment.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has forced a reckoning with grief and loss with heightened urgency. “As of October 2023,” Blatchley records, “we had lost to COVID 1,136,920 people in the United States and 6,972,152 people throughout the world. Added to those figures [is] the always-growing number of the newly bereaved,” as well as the fact that proper memorials weren’t always permitted, resulting in Zoom funerals, distanced bereavement , and “high rates of disenfranchised grief,” or grief that cannot be publicly expressed.
Here, too, Blatchley writes from painful experience:
In 2019, my longest-term friend … passed away, and her memorial service had to wait because of COVID restrictions…. And in 2020, my mother, who was in assisted-living care at the end of her life, passed away with none of us able to be with her in her room at the end. Two of my siblings who lived nearby handled what visiting was possible, but I don’t think Mom ever understood why they stood outside her room’s window and waved and told her they loved her but wouldn’t come in to say hello. The confusion she must have felt breaks my heart.
Grief Stems From Love
The humanizing lesson of Sorrow’s Long Road is that grief is unavoidably a consequence of love and deep attachment . “Think about the time it took to build the bond you shared with your beloved,” Blatchley urges. “Now think about how long it will take to rebuild life without that person. Grieving takes time because love takes time to create.”
Because grief is an unwelcome and unwanted state, recovery from it may be halting and unpredictable. Despite all the sadness, yearning, and confusion, Blatchley concludes, it can still help us regain perspective and rethink our purpose: “Remember: it gets better, it gets easier, but talk to someone if it doesn’t. You are moving forward, not backward, and there is meaning in this loss. Peace.”
Blatchley, B. Sept. 2025. Sorrow’s Long Road: The Science of Grief. New York: Columbia University Press. [ Link ]
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Christopher Lane, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of Medical Humanities at Northwestern University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.