Claire Bidwell Smith found out at 14 that both her parents had cancer. She spent the next ten years interweaving a halting journey to maturity with their declines and deaths (her mother when she was 14 and her father when she was 24). The many aspects of her grief led to a memoir, The Rules of Inheritance, which will soon be made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. She is also a grief counselor and former hospice counselor, using her own experiences to inform her work. As she says, she doesn’t find this work sad, as people think it would be, but rather, “the deeper the grief, the more evi
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