Just as everyone who dies is an individual, everyone left behind must find their own way to mourn. But the rest of us can help them, writes Rosita Boland.

Sooner or later, everybody has to cope with the death of a loved one. But the way bereavement affects each person is less predictable. Everyone who dies is an individual, and those who are left behind must find their own individual way to mourn. There's no such thing as a collective vocabulary of grief that will do for everyone. In the same way, people outside the circle of those family members immediately affected - neighbours, friends, colleagues - often do not know what to say.

"You don't recover. You move on," says Jerusha Hull McCormack, talking about the death of her husband, Dara, an economist with the Central Bank, at the age of 53 in 1996. He died unexpectedly four hours after a routine operation for a spot on his lung, from which he did not regain consciousness. Their children, David and Thomas, were 17 and 11 at the time.

The American-born McCormack, a retired UCD English lecturer who is currently a visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, has just published Grieving: A Beginner's Guide. In it, she recounts how she coped with the aftermath of her husband's sudden death after 29 years of marriage. McCormack was 24 when she married the Co Clare-born Harvard student, whom she met at a party in Boston.

"The party was in my apartment and he had been invited along by a friend. When I saw Dara first, he was pulling down my poetry books from the shelves for a better look, and I was immediately intrigued by this tall handsome man with red hair," she recalls.

In her book, McCormack explores some of the wider consequences of being bereaved. What can one say to a bereaved person that does not sound trite and yet acknowledges the life-changing event that has happened to them? "I'm sorry for your troubles" is our national stock phrase. It's a cliché, but death can make the most articulate people tongue-tied, and sometimes well-meant clichés are the best anyone can do. It was when stock phrases were offered thoughtlessly that McCormack got frustrated and angry. She recounts them: Time will heal. You will recover. You'll marry again. Be strong. Keep busy. It is God's will. It's all for the best. It's not the end of the world. I know how you feel.

"I found it so degrading to be offered clichés. So many words associated with death diminish the surviving person," McCormack says. "Death is like childbirth. Everyone is warned in pre-natal classes what childbirth will be like but until you go through it, you don't know what it is. It's a common experience, but it can't be reduced to a common experience. It's different for everyone."

For McCormack, writing the book was "like opening a vein. I didn't think of it as therapy. I thought it might be useful to others". She offers some guidelines to people around those who have been bereaved: "The one big thing you have to remember is that grief is not a problem to be fixed. Nor is the person grieving a problem to be fixed."

McCormack points out that since a person who is grieving is usually extremely vulnerable, take care in your behaviour and language toward them at this time, and do not exclude them from invitations to social events. Whether a bereaved person chooses to come along or not is up to them, but not to be asked is hurtful.

Small, thoughtful acts of kindness, such as bringing around food to the house, or meeting someone at the airport or station after their first trip away after bereavement, are all things that helped McCormack herself.

She looks at a photograph of Dara, which stands on the living room bookcase. "Apart from the birth of my children, the loss of my husband was the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. Grief transforms you. You're never the same again."

Grieving: A Beginner's Guide, by Jerusha Hull McCormack, is published by Darton Longman Todd, €16.85

* The Irish Hospice Foundation's (IHF) second annual seminar series on coping with grief in the workplace begins today at Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin 2. Seminars, on the last Tuesday of the month, start at 12.30pm and run for two hours. They are aimed at section managers and those in human resources departments. Cost: €80 per seminar or €300 for the four. www.hospice-foundation.ie or 01-6793188