A review of The Hole in Your Life by Bob Rich – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

The Hole in Your Life
Grief and Bereavement
By Bob Rich
Loving Healing Press
June 2025, Paperback, 102 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8896560517

It would be a rare person whose life hasn’t been touched by grief. As Nick Cave* put it in a recent Red Hand File newsletter: “I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world – to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you.”  Of course there are griefs that we can recover from relatively easily and those that threaten to destroy us. The difference between those impacts is often down to time, as grief is a shapeshifter, morphing and transforming, moving through phases, but it is also about changing perception. Dr Bob Rich is an expert on the subject. He has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years, both in a clinical practice and through extensive volunteering of his services in multiple forums. He also has firsthand experience of the most intense kind of grief, having recenly experienced the loss of his own daughter Natalie to liver cancer in December 2024. The Hole in Your Life, Rich’s 20th book, is dedicated to Natalie and draws heavily on both personal experience and Rich’s extensive clinical understanding of the many pathways grief can take.

The book offers very practical ways of moving more quickly through the phases of grief to get to a place of some equanimity, where the pain has at least become bearable rather than a blockage. I particularly like the suggestion, fairly close to the start of the book, of scheduling the grieving process; allowing for a few hours a day each day in which you give yourself permission to cry, rage, or grieve in any way.  The rest of the time you can get on with things and even have some enjoyment with the knowledge that there will be time to feel the feelings. As with all of the suggestions in this book, there are several real-life anecdotes of people this has worked with:

This worked remarkably well for Rose, for me, and for everyone else who has given it an honest go. As long as you meticulously keep the appointment, the grief (or other consuming worry) is willing to wait for it.

Grief needs to be experienced. It needs to be felt—but not 24 hours a day.

Rich provides information about the nature of grief and the many forms it can take.  In this instance he uses Elizabeth Harper Neeld’s model of grieving from her book Seven Choices: Finding Daylight after Loss Shatters Your World. This is a more fluid model than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ more well-known stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The Seven Choices model is not a progression but rather a “back-and-forth, up-and-down process that can progress toward resolution if we make the right choices—or fail to do so if we don’t.” (14) These choices are Impact, Second Crisis: Stumbling in the Dark, Observation, The Turn, Reconstruction, Working Through, and Integration. As with all aspects of The Hole in Your Life illustrates these stages with a wide range of anecdotes, both personally and from Rich’s practice.

The Hole in Your Life is a welter of tools and information that will help not only the grieving but carers or anyone who wants to offer support. In the e-book version, there are twenty-five hyperlinks to stories, additional information, personal reflections and chapters from some of Rich’s other books. These add extra depth to the book, making it quite an extensive resource.

There is also a philosophical quality to the work with overarching world view that life is temporary (we all know this), that, in a Hindu or Buddhist sense, souls return, and that suffering can be managed through mindfulness:

I am not a body, a mechanism of meat and bone and nerves and hormones, but a passenger in such a thing, for now. I find this immensely comforting. If this is true, then death is not the end of a book, but only the end of a chapter. (43)

While these perspectives may not suit everyone, and certainly won’t help in the earliest stages of shock, they are comforting ways to manage the later stages and reframe the pain. The stories, anecdotes, poems, exercises, and personal reflections are never facile, and always have the bigger picture in mind. Ultimately, the message of The Hole in Your Life is that we are always in one form of grief or another – that grief and love are both part of what it means to be a human. Rich talks about finding meaning in our loss and making sense of it by using the pain to make us a better person, or in the words of Nick Cave again:

Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

*https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling/