I’ve sat in many grief circles and listened to fellow grievers share their pain at being abandoned or misunderstood by their friends and families as they grieve. Often we suffer the secondary loss of community because our culture has not taught us how to grieve or how to be a friend to those in grief. My wife and I found some invaluable tools that helped us communicate our needs to our community, and keep them close on our grief journey. One of those tools is grief books. I’ve read dozens of them, and while everyone responds to grief books differently, I think these five books are the very best.
I wrote
Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose
This book expertly explains the need to actively grieve, as opposed to avoiding the pain of grieving.
Dr. Cacciatore shares stories from grievers she has helped and she beautifully explains the complicated emotions we all go through as we grieve. I mailed copies of this book to my entire family right after my children were killed. It opened up the conversation of grief and made it clear that we were going to talk about Ruby and Hart and our grief openly.
If you love, you will grieve—and nothing is more mysteriously central to becoming fully human.
A 2017 Indies Finalist from Foreword Reviews.
When a loved one dies, the pain of loss can feel unbearable—especially in the case of a traumatizing death that leaves us shouting, “NO!” with every fiber of our body. The process of grieving can feel wild and nonlinear—and often lasts for much longer than other people, the nonbereaved, tell us it should.
Organized into fifty-two short chapters, Bearing the Unbearable is a companion for life’s most difficult times, revealing how grief can open our hearts to connection,…
Devine does a wonderful job of validating our feelings and our needs as we grieve.
It is filled with many wonderful pieces of wisdom about grief. The most helpful insight she offered me was the distinction she drew between the healthy pain of grief versus the unnecessary and unhelpful suffering that so often accompanies grief.
She provides practical advice on how to be kind to ourselves as we grieve. We can’t “fix” our grief and loss, but we can be kind to ourselves on this difficult journey.
As seen in THE NEW YORK TIMES * READER'S DIGEST * SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH * HUFFPOST
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When a painful loss or life-shattering event upends your world, here is the first thing to know: there is nothing wrong with grief. "Grief is simply love in its most wild and painful form," says Megan Devine. "It is a natural and sane response to loss."
So, why does our culture treat grief like a disease to be cured as quickly as possible?
In It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound…
This book is a wonderful practical guide to grieving that is accompanied by charming illustrations from the author. This might make it sound child-like or cutsie, but it’s not at all.
It’s an honest and fierce guide that doesn’t use any cheesy aphorisms or simplistic clichés about grief. It tells it like it is, but with kindness and hope. It helped me feel not so alone.
Welcome to the Grief Club--a place where one human who experienced a terrible loss, Janine Kwoh, is at the door to welcome other humans who are grieving. It is not an instruction manual, or a step-by-step playbook, or a memoir. It is, rather, a fresh, empathetic approach to all of the surprising, confusing, brutal, funny, and downright bizarre parts of grief. Combining her own experiences with grief--the author's partner died when both were in their late 20s--with what she learned from others in her "grief club," Kwoh uses brief writings and observations, hand-drawn illustrations, and diagrams to explore all the…
Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. He was moved through several of the most notorious Nazi death camps. He emerged with a theory about the meaning of life that is profound and inspiring.
He believed that the real human drive is not for power or for sex, but for meaning. And that our search for meaning starts outside ourselves, with other people. In other words, we all ultimately want to help other people. This idea was key to me in my early grief, because life initially felt meaningless after the crash.
Without Ruby and Hart in the world, it felt like I had no reason to live. Frankl helped inspire me on my journey back to meaning and purpose.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
This is a collection of poems, most of which were written shortly after the death of her son by suicide. They are all about grief and love. They feel so true and honest and heartbreakingly naked.
Reading these poems makes me want to write poems about my own grief, because her words are so exactly right and to the point. I feel seen in these poems. She inspires me to articulate my own feelings, and have my own honest encounter with my grief.
In All the Honey, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer holds both fine, honest sensuality and slow explorations of soul. What is shared here is a way forward in life, a fierce openness that refuses nothing—that knows damage and healing, darkness and radiance, sorrow and winged resurgence, reflection and laughter and learning.
When Colin Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, he was thrown into a grief so deep he felt he might lose his mind. He found much of the common wisdom about grief unhelpful. Drawing on what he learned from his own journey, Campbell offers a path for processing pain that is active, vocal, and truly honors loved ones lost.
Full of practical advice on how to survive in the aftermath of loss, Finding the Words teaches readers how to actively reach out to their community, perform mourning rituals, and find ways to express their grief, so they can live more fully while also holding their loved ones close. Campbell shines a light on a path forward through the darkness of grief.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
