2. Feedback on the Book: Through Grief We Grow

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Must read 🏆

Laura Hattersley is Senior Copyeditor for Focus on Fabulous Magazine and Proofreader for Qbook, International. She has 3 English Language teaching certifications from Cambridge University, and has presented research papers on Linguistic theory and Ethnography at Purdue University (Indiana, USA).

Review source available here.

Through Grief We Grow by Brian Vachon is a beautifully measured exploration of grief, born out of what began as therapeutic writing and evolved into a deeply reflective work of memory, research, and meaning. Vachon traces his emotional journey with grace, weaving together journal-style reflections, his therapy sessions with Laura, and psychological research, to paint a full portrait of loss. These elements don’t feel separate: they are intertwined pathways leading him — and the reader — toward a clearer understanding of how grief reshapes not just our days but our identity.

What makes the book especially strong is how Vachon uses his conversations with Laura to illuminate his inner life. Rather than using therapy as a way to “fix” himself, he leans into it, allowing Laura’s questions and his own answers to bring forward deeper truths about how loss affects the stories we tell ourselves. At the same time, he doesn't stay in the therapy room. He brings in grief theory, research on complicated and ambiguous loss, and reflections from his own journals. This back-and-forth between lived experience, therapy, and study creates a tapestry in which his grief becomes both personal and universal.

Reading about Vachon’s attempts to rebuild meaning made me think of my own parents, whose gradual decline has become its own form of anticipatory grief. There is a particular loneliness in watching those we love diminish, a loneliness that rarely fits neatly into society’s definitions of mourning. My own grief has felt like a slow, creeping thing: the gradual fading of loved ones and the strain of watching life change minute by minute. Vachon's work has offered me the clarity and research I need, and will need, as death draws closer.

If the book has a trade-off for some, it's in its pace. Those who want a step-by-step grief workbook may find it less directive than they hoped: the structure leans more toward insight than instruction. But for me that reflective quality has been unexpectedly impactful. For me it feels like a reference book I can return to on an ongoing basis, as I go through my own grief journey.

Through Grief We Grow offers the rare permission to linger — and to find, within that lingering, something quietly transformative. It earns its five stars not by promising closure but by offering a grounded, thoughtful space in which grief can be understood, named, and gradually transformed.