My favorite books on grief to normalize mourning and confirm you are not going crazy

Sometimes, as if by magic, a book arrives at exactly the right moment.

When my 7-year-old grandson’s cat was killed by a bobcat earlier this year it was his first experience with loss, and we all struggled to find language to help him. I remembered hearing about Judith Viorst’s book many years ago but had never read it. The Tenth Good Thing about Barney was published in 1971 and is still in print fifty-two years later – for good reason.

After his beloved cat dies, the unnamed boy in the story struggles to think of ten good things to say about Barney at the funeral his mom has organized in the backyard. I won’t give away the tenth thing that the boy finally thinks of other than to say it helped my grandson enormously and all of us along with him. 

Sorrow is plural but grief is singular writes American poet, Victoria Chang, in her latest book Obit.

To me, this phrase resonates all the more powerfully as we find ourselves emerging from the Covid pandemic and assessing the impact it had on us. We were united, around the world, in our sorrow but the way we grieved was unique to each one of us.

This long poem, written after the death of her mother, is an elegy to grief itself. Taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the epigraph at the beginning of the book reads: give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak. This is exactly what the writer has done. 

This book, by the late American essayist, Joan Didion, will not be a surprise choice for many people who are looking for a companion to not just guide them through the grieving process but also to reassure them that they are not going crazy.

I was disheartened in March 2022 when I learned that prolonged grief had been added to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health) and classified as a mental disorder. There is no uniform end date on normal grief and The Year of Magical Thinking exquisitely underscores this idea.

Charting her own journey after her husband’s death, Didion writes openly about grief and how it can seem, at times, as if we are losing our minds when, in fact, it is a normal part of the grieving process. This book is a treasure.

Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley were both hospice nurses when they wrote this book in 1992 and their book, having sold over 500,000 copies, is still a guide for those who find themselves in the presence of the dying.

The authors act as interpreters for the living and help them understand the language the dying often use. As a hospice social worker, it was not uncommon for me to hear the dying speak of packed suitcases or imaginary taxis pulling up to their doors.

This book helped me to engage with that language and to enter the altered reality that the dying often experience. It encourages us to let go of the rational and invites us into the mystery of death and dying in ways that are life-changing. 

This short book by the renowned author of The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic, and essential, book on grief.

Having found love late in life Lewis was devastated when his wife died a short time after their marriage. He rails at God and in a now-famous passage writes that no one ever told him that grief feels so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in my stomach, the same restlessness…

People who are mourning will recognize the rawness of grief and the need to find meaning in what feels meaningless. Lewis writes from inside the experience of grief and carves a path for the reader to understand his or her own experiences.