100 books like Final Gifts

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the savoring soul who, like Didion, possesses an inherent human desire for a sense of coherence and wholeness after life has torn it asunder.

This book connected me with the concept of the soul and spirit so vividly and personally.

Written as a story, I found every page was a pleasure to read and an extraordinary discovery of life after death, life between life, and the possibility of Spirit Guides. I read this when these things were new to me, and Dr. Weiss’s writing was so simple, clear, and easy to envision.

It felt like a spiritual experience to me when I read this book. I never looked at relationships or myself the same after this book.

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. 

This book, written by psychic medium Laura Lynn Jackson, was gifted to me shortly after the unexpected passing of my sister.

The book validated for me what I already believed: everything happens in the time it’s meant to and everything (and everyone) is connected. Jackson reports story after story about how souls in the afterlife remain connected to their loved ones on earth.

And, for those who are open to the possibility, signs (and messages) are provided when most needed.

A science teacher who knew that my interest in enduring consciousness was tempered with skepticism recommended I read this book after I lost Caitlin. The author is an investigative journalist, and her essays are dense with in-depth, picked-apart examinations of claims of paranormal phenomena. A good chunk of its pages are devoted to over 400 end-notes. Leslie Kean is a smart and down-to-earth narrator, equipped with an objective yet curious sensibility, and I found Surviving Death to be an addicting read that spoke to my skepticism.

Near-death experiences on the surface sound like they have no relationship to politics and economics. However, they allow us to make inferences about a “moral imperative” embedded within the structure of reality itself.

Near-death experiences are instances in which a person’s consciousness has remarkable perceptions—even though the person is sometimes clinically dead. In fact, the experiences are often reported to be “realer” than real. This perplexing phenomenon has been studied extensively by the University of Virginia’s Bruce Greyson, MD, and he explains in his book why many of these profound cases are likely not hallucinations. (And he further explained these concepts to me when I interviewed him for my podcast, Where Is My Mind?).

The life-changing messages from near-death experiences teach us that we are all interconnected at a deep and fundamental level. Many near-death-experience survivors even report that they relived their whole life, and they become each person… show more.

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. 

There are three things that Americans try to avoid talking about: sex, money, and death. This book takes us on a journey to explore the meaning of life and how we find wisdom in its endings.

Examining our habits, culture, and rituals it shows us different ways to face loss. As someone who has never liked to peer too closely into the dark cave to explore the meaning of death, I found the book gently and intelligently leading me by the hand into thinking about loss. Reading it even helped me to reconcile the pain of my mother’s loss and death by Alzheimer’s, shifting my focus to the parts of her that remain with and as a part of me.

I highly recommend it to all humans! 

A quintessential text of death and dying research, this incredibly insightful and compassionate exploration shines a blaring light on all of the hidden contours of a topic we often shy away from.

You’ll almost certainly come away from these pages with a new understanding of the stages of grief (they probably don’t refer to what you were taught they refer) and the importance of honesty and connection when facing mortality. It's an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to better comprehend the human experience.