Edward Bell

About

The one thing I would want every new client to know is that there is no such thing as doing this correctly. People arrive braced for assessment, half expecting me to tell them they are behind schedule or reacting disproportionately to what happened. Mourning looks different in every household I have ever encountered, and the variation is enormous and entirely normal. Some people cry daily for a year, others hardly at all and then come apart at an odd moment eighteen months later, and neither of those indicates anything whatsoever about how much they loved the person. We work with what you are actually experiencing rather than what you think you ought to be. Caregiving was the background of my childhood and watched the adults near me handle loss in completely incompatible ways, all of which turned out to be survivable. That stayed with me. If you have been quietly grading your own performance, you can put that down here.