Learn to embrace grief, manage it, and identify coping strategies with this practical, comforting, and inspirational guide.
The beautiful practicality of her teaching has made Pema Chödrön one of the most beloved of contemporary American spiritual authors among Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. A collection of talks she gave between 1987 and 1994, the book is a treasury of wisdom for going on living when we are overcome by pain and difficulties. Chödrön discusses:
• Using painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion, and courage • Communicating so as to encourage others to open up rather than shut down • Practices for reversing habitual patterns • Methods for working with chaotic situations • Ways for creating effective social action
With It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides―as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner―Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing. She debunks the culturally prescribed goal of returning to a normal, "happy" life, replacing it with a far healthier middle path, one that invites us to build a life alongside grief rather than seeking to overcome it.
For those who have suffered the loss of a loved one, here are strength and thoughtful words to inspire and comfort.
Grief. We've all experienced it. And if we're lucky, we've had support to find our way through it. In her book, ... Lisa Keefauver wants to provide that support through her expertise as a social worker and her own deeply personal experience of loss. Keefauver's advice is framed around the concept of the 5 Ws of grief: why you are grieving, what type of grief, who is grieving, where grief comes from and where it goes, and when we grieve. Building from her podcast of the same name, Keefauver asserts that we live in a grief-illiterate world and offers her readers 'a place, time, and space to be seen, validated, and accompanied in your grief.
In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler Ross identified five stages of dying in her book On Death and Dying. Now Kessler introduces a critical sixth stage: finding meaning that can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience. Though his journey with grief began as a child, his life was upended by the sudden death of his twenty-one-year-old son. Here he shares the insights, collective wisdom, and powerful tools he has learned over the decades.
As the Senior Rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone, but also the beauty of what remains.
In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on-healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. She guides you through the pain of early grief and shows you how to to honor your loss. It's common to plow through our feelings in the name of being "OK," but grief is so inextricably tied to love that you don't just "get over it." Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that this constant state of learning requires. It is about learning to love yourself and the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. Lee shows that there isn't only one way to grieve, and so your expression of it should be unique. She shepherds you through your grief as it arises and falls again and again. The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true meaning of legacy. Healing after loss is not about burying pain but about acknowledging it and allowing grief to move through you in order to be whole. How do you manage the holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries? How do you get through the next year or even tomorrow? In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for these complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, after losing her mother, her fertility, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people, Black women in particular, and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: acknowledgement, rest, community, reflection, support, care and more. At its core, Grief is Love explores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we've lost, we can have a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.
The unexpected or sudden death of a loved one is beyond devastating, and can leave those impacted in a state of shock, trauma, and inability to cope. This gentle workbook utilizes an integrative approach drawing on dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), emotional regulation skills, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and narrative therapy to support readers through the grief process, so they can move forward after the sudden or unexpected death of a loved one.
If you've experienced profound loss, the last thing that you want to hear is "time heals all wounds." The truth is that you may never fully heal, and that's okay. You can still move on to live a meaningful life. This guide will help you discover how through a step-by-step, comprehensive process
"Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experiences. While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor specializes in the study of grief, and in The Grieving Body she shares vital scientific research, revealing ... insights on its profound physiological impact. As she did in The Grieving Brain, O'Connor combines ... studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being"-- Provided by publisher.
From grief expert and neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor PhD, The Grieving Brain utilizes cutting-edge research to guide us through how our brains process love and loss-and how we can learn to heal.
This thoughtful collection features prompts, actions and insights that will support you through your ever evolving grieving journey. It offers grounding thoughts, meaningful ideas for honoring your loved ones, and reliable resources to help you navigate the shifting landscape of your emotions.
An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community-practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss.
"Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics." -- From Amazon.com summary.
A groundbreaking exploration of grief and racial trauma through the eyes of a Black end-of-life caregiver. Grieving While Back: An Anti-Racist Take on Oppression and Sorrow approaches grief as something that is bigger than what's already happened to us--as something that is connected to what we fear, what we love and what we aspire towards. Because grief impacts our relationship with ourselves and each other, and our social location determines the amount of harm we are able to inflict against others, systemic oppression can be interpreted as the result of our unprocessed but inescapable relationship to loss.
Through story, poetry, and insightful reflections, reveals how ritual, community, and the sacred restore the original context of grief.
How do you live without your champion and other half? The answer is that you mourn as you loved: heroically, grandly, and fully. In this compassionate guide by one of the world's most beloved grief counselors, you'll find empathetic affirmation and advice intermingled with real-life stories from other halved soulmates. Learn to honor your loved one and your grief even as you find a path to a renewed life of purpose and joy.
The author presents a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father.
It was Memorial Day, 2019, when Geraldine Brooks received news that her husband, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died, far from home, in the middle of his own book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him. Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a thirty-five-year marriage filled with risk, adventure, humor, and love. There, she pondered the ways other cultures deal with mourning and finally seized the time and space she needed for her own grief.
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become best friends, a friendship built of late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking. ... Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend, ... Hua turned to writing.
For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all.
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel ... on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
Built on her wildly popular Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a breathtaking memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38 year old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years, after her terminal cancer diagnosis.
In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice. A memoir decades in the making, Liliana's Invincible Summer tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously romantic young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome--but insecure and possessive--older man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.
Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn Schulz met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn's father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once. Schulz writes with painful clarity about the vicissitudes of grieving her father, but she also writes about the vital and universal phenomenon of finding. The book is organized into three parts: "Lost," which explores the sometimes frustrating, sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking experience of losing things, grounded in Kathryn's account of her father's death; "Found," which examines the experience of discovery, grounded in her story of falling in love; and finally, "And," which contends with the way these events happen in conjunction and imply the inevitable: Life keeps going on, not only around us but beyond us and after us. Kathryn Schulz has the ability to measure the depth and breadth of human experience with unusual exactness and then to articulate the things all of us have felt but have been unable to put into language. Lost & Found is a work of philosophical interrogation as well as a story about life, death, and the discovery of one great love just as she is losing another.
From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence (; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
HeartLight Center
Explore resources and info from the HeartLight Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to providing grief support and education for adults who have experienced a loss, as well as for the volunteer and professional caregivers who walk alongside them.