Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith navigates a life steeped in grief

An only child, she was 14 when both her parents were diagnosed with cancer. She was a college freshman when her mother died; her father died four years later. Her first serious relationship was with a man falsely accused of killing his sister. A close friend died at age 22.

Her life seemingly was surrounded by death, so it’s not surprising she became a grief counselor. But she also became a writer. “The Rules of Inheritance” (Penguin Group) is her memoir.

“I thought I was going to write a book about grief,” Smith said from her home in Los Angeles shortly before Christmas. “Then, the more I wrote, the more it was about my own story. And I realized the best way for me to share my thoughts about grief was to use my own story as an example.”

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously divided grief into five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and Smith uses that concept to structure her book. Jumping back and forth in place and time from her childhood in Sandy Springs to college in Vermont to waitress jobs in Manhattan to writing gigs in Los Angeles, Smith struggles to come to terms with her loss. Along the way, she engages in careless behavior that becomes increasingly more reckless.

At one point, while on a writing assignment, Smith travels alone to a remote island in the Philippines to dive with thresher sharks. During a moment of clarity, she realizes her behavior is questionable. “I have no idea what it is I’m trying to prove to myself with this trip,” she writes, “but I’m about to find out.”

One of the problems, Smith said, is there’s no road map for grieving.

“A year is nothing if you’ve lost a parent or a spouse or a child,” she said. “It takes a long time to heal after a loss like that. Death is hard to talk about. It’s hard to face and it’s scary and sad.

“On the other hand, if we woke up every morning thinking about how we’re going to die, we couldn’t face the day. We need to find something in the middle. Unfortunately, I think we lean toward thinking we should get over it fast.”

Combining her careers as grief counselor and writer was a natural fit, Smith said.

“They both involve storytelling and personal narrative,” she said. “As a therapist, you help people figure out their own personal narrative.”

Smith credits her English teacher at the Galloway School, Pearl McHaney, now a literature professor at Georgia State University, with helping her envision a future as a writer.

“She would always bring amazing writers into school and she would introduce me as the school poet,” Smith said. “When I sold my book to Penguin and I called her to tell her; it was one of the greatest moments of my publishing career.”

Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” one of the biggest literary breakouts of 2012, was also a memoir about grief over the death of a parent. Dave Eggers launched his career with “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” a best-selling memoir about raising his little brother after the death of his parents. Clearly, the topic strikes a chord with readers. But that doesn’t surprise Smith.

“I think that narrative has always been appealing. My daughter is 3 years old, and I’m always reading her fairy tales and stories where there is a dead parent or a missing parent. It’s incredible how many of them there are,” she said. “There’s something about losing that parent, that guidepost, that forces a person to figure out who they are. To triumph from that, to make it out of that is so challenging, and it can be inspiring.”

Smith is at work on her second book, also informed by death. It’s a spiritual memoir about the afterlife.

“I don’t have a pre-existing belief system, and I have a lot of anxiety about losing my daughters or them losing me. So I’ve taken a Kabbalah class. I’ve seen a bunch of psychic mediums. I’ve done some past life regressions. And I just went to an afterlife awareness conference in Arizona,” Smith said. “I’m on a quest to figure out what I believe happens next.”