The best books about trying to live life after the sudden death of a loved one

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is Didion’s most personal and most heartbreaking work. This was her personal account of loss after the death of her husband, while her daughter was in a hospital.

I read this when I was trying to make sense of my own personal loss. This has helped me greatly in trying to wrap my head around the unthinkable. With her clear and concise writing, her words spoke to me on a personal level about how to soldier when an unexpected tragedy happens. It made me go on and live even for just another day. And then another day. Until the days become weeks and months.

This book was a more cerebral book about grief. Observing grief as if it was something to pick apart and understand. A kind of detachment that I needed when the weight of my own loss was unbearable.

This book helped me understand rather than simply feel (which was overwhelming at that time) what happened. It provided explanations on things I could barely explain to myself. Even though it was a struggle, this book made me see grief from a different perspective other than my own. It also helped me understand where I was in my own process of mourning and provided me some comfort when it was hard to find.

This is a short novel, a slim book that packs a lot in its pages. A fictional work about the loss of a loved one and the emptiness of one’s life. How do you fill your days? How do you go on with your life when every street, every building holds a memory of the one you lost?

This was a deeply emotional work of fiction that speaks to my own empty days after the loss. It felt as if I was walking with the main character as he went through his days trying to find purpose and meaning. It speaks to my own guilt, my own survivor’s guilt. Why am I alive when someone isn’t? How do I rediscover the colors of the world when all I see is black? What does my life, my future hold when every waking day feels like a struggle to get out of bed? Holleran’s book was a meditation on loss and grief, one that I needed to read in the darkness of my solitude.

One fine day, sixteen-year-old Ethan walks down his driveway and then vanishes. This was the short description of the book and I immediately picked it up. Instead of being a thriller, this book deals with the aftermath of Ethan’s disappearance, how his family and friends searched for him with little success. More than that, this was a book without a definitive happy ending.

As I was going through grief, a story that doesn’t wrap everything nicely in a bow was very cathartic for me. This book helped me accept that not everything in life ends in happily ever after. This opened me to the bittersweet nature of life, how loss is very much a part of it, and that not everything has to make sense. Things happen that make no sense at all and that’s the most bitter pill I had to learn to swallow.

A Man Called Ove opens with Ove’s attempt to take his own life. The story immediately lured me in. Who, in the darkest days of their lives, didn’t think of ending it all? It’s not that you want to die. You just want to stop feeling the pain of living.

Equal parts comedy and tragedy, this book had me smiling, laughing, and crying. A touching novel about living again and finding something that’s worth living for, this was the book I needed to find the rainbow after the storm. This was the book I needed to feel hopeful, to pull myself together, and go on with life even if that life has been burdened by loss.