Usually I don’t recommend books about life and family because I don’t consider myself an expert. But family issues come up for almost all my clients. They put off career change and even take a leave from their own businesses. And they’re frozen with grief.

But I ran across a book, Death Benefits by Jeanne Safer, Ph.D. I can relate to it (although my parents died quite a while ago). I have watched my friends and clients go through loss. Nearly all seem to have a mixture of relief and guilt at feeling this relief.

The subtitle is, How Losing a Parent Can Change An Adult’s Life – For the Better. So it’s a little awkward to recommend this book to friends. “Here’s a book that…um…helps you realize how much you’re freed up when your parents die.” But the book is so good it’s worth the social risk.

Safer writes well and she keeps the book focused, with a clear theme. She doesn’t sugarcoat the message or urge people to look for kindness and goodness inept parents. Her exercises are few and simple. They’re more like coaching than what I think of as therapy, but I suspect they’re very powerful.

It’s hard to pick out the highlights because (rare for me!) I really liked every chapter. I would call a reader’s attention to the chapter on “the last taboo,” noting that many people are embarrassed to admit their feelings about the loss. The chapter on religion is particularly sensitive to two diverse responses — turning away from a parent’s religion or returning to a faith that was once abandoned.

In the section on disposing of “stuff,” I could note that you don’t have to do this yourself. You can hire people who will go through furniture and clothing, sorting out what can be sold, what is valuable ad what should be given away. Look under “estate sales” or advertise for help on craigslist.

Safer is a psychologist, so she doesn’t explore the broader implications of our new understanding of parent-child relationships. Our society is still set up to demand contributions — financial and psychological — from children, even when parents have been indifferent, incompetent, or even abusive. Company policies and legal systems support and even demand parent-child relationships. We need to recognize that families are not what they used to be, and probably they never were.