Pull Up A Chair

Some Books About Grief and Loss

So I’m at Barnes and Noble with B this afternoon buying vinyl. We just got our first turntable, a milestone for any Millennial mom’s family, and we were excited to get some albums to play on it.

Of course, since I’m in a bookstore, I need a therapy session, and by “therapy session” I mean, “a fifty-minute hour in which I do nothing but look at books, flip through books, trail my fingers along the spines of books, and generally surround myself with books.”

(Side note: The day of Ryan’s big surgery, December 15 2022, I knew I would lose my entire mind if I sat in the lobby of the hospital all day, so my dad, my father-in-law, and I went Christmas shopping. We returned to the hospital just in time to get the call from the surgeon that Ryan was done, they’d removed about 40% of his tongue and reconstructed it with forearm tissue, and that he was still in the OR because there was a line for recovery rooms.

Me: Oh, that’s great. Thank you. When can I see him?

Doc: See him? He’s still under anaesthesia.

Me: No, I know. But I’d like to see him.

Doc: Well, he’ll spend about an hour in the recovery room, and then they’ll send him up to his room in the ICU.

Me: OK, so in about an hour?

Doc: He’ll be asleep until tomorrow morning.

Me: No, yeah, I know.

Doc: Why don’t you just go home?

What I thought about saying: Hey Doc, is there anyone in your life that you, you know, love?

What I actually said: Yeah, I’d just like to see him.

So we’d already gone Christmas shopping. We had an hour at least to kill before I could go up and see Ryan. And my Dad said, “Well, is there a bookstore nearby?”

There was. A great one, in fact: Elliot Bay Book Co. A big landmark indie with creaky wood floors and warm lights and a coffee shop in the back. I got a tea and we shopped a little more, but mostly I had a therapy session: A fifty-minute hour surrounded by books. It was exactly right.)

ANYWAY, back to present day, I’ve got a few new records in my hand and I wander over to the psychology section where they’ve got a little paper label on the lower shelves marked “Grief/Loss.” And as I’m skimming the titles to see if they’ve gotten anything new since I was last here (3 days ago), a BN bookseller walks over with a customer and says, “Yes, right here, where this lovely human is sitting, is where we have our grief and loss books. Maybe you two can… chat.”

Right, I forgot to tell you, I’m sitting on the floor in the bookstore. Because I am in therapy. And in therapy you should be comfy.

I look up at the customer and say, “Pull up a chair! Are you looking for something in particular?”

She says, “I heard about this one on a podcast,” and points to a book. “But I’m open to your recommendations. Have… you… read a lot about this?”

I hear the question she’s not asking and say, “My husband died in September. Between my in-laws, my friends, and me, we’ve got a pretty good reading list going.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “We just lost my sister-in-law. Pancreatic cancer.”

“I am so sorry,” I say.

“Effing cancer,” she says.

“Fucking cancer ,” I say.

“Yeah. Fucking cancer,” she says.

So anyway, these are the books I recommend to her.

Now I’m recommending them to you, in no particular order. Some of them are extremely specifically about grief. Some are not. All have helped me in some way.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Katherine May

I bought ten copies of this book after I read it, and I’ve given it to so many people I love. May describes the importance of “wintering” with so much compassion and reverence for slowing down and withdrawing when the season demands it. It helps me be kind to myself when I’m struggling.

Banger quote:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion

This is the story of a death, but it’s also the story of Didion’s love and the life she shared with her late husband, John Dunne.

Banger quote:

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl

This is the one for me right now.

Frankl’s book is like a weighted blanket: heavy and perfect. I love how frankly he tells of suffering, trauma, and horror. Yes, that is how it was for him. Yes, he still lives. Yes, he will suffer more, because he is still alive, and because life contains suffering even as it contains beauty and love. That’s what it is.

Banger quote:

“Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

A Heart That Works
Rob Delaney

Delaney’s two-year-old son Henry died of a brain tumor. This memoir is absolutely gutting, big-hearted, riotously funny, and brimming with love. Truly, you will sob. You will laugh. Or at least I did.

Banger quote:

“My favorite historical response to someone hearing about a “big” death comes from the character Henry Clerval in Mary Shelley’s masterwork, Frankenstein. When Henry learns that his best friend Victor Frankenstein’s young brother William has been murdered, he says, “I can offer you no consolation, my friend. Your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?” Perfect. There is no consolation. The disaster is irreparable. I’ve read Frankenstein twice since our Henry died. It is my companion in grief. It should surprise no one who reads it that Mary Shelley was a bereaved mother.”

Second banger quote because this is my substack:

“I must confess I now find it difficult to truly and fully relax around people who haven’t had some significant tragedy and pain in their lives. Just another one of the many things that make me a fun hang.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Francis Weller

I’ve been reading this one off and on for a couple of years. From time to time, I pick it up and read a few pages. Then I digest them. It’s a beautiful, meditative book.

Banger quote:

“Coming to trust the darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land. Our arrival here is rarely a chosen thing. We are thrown into the darkness or are carried there on the back of a blue mood. What we make of this visit is up to us. Recalling that the darkness is also a dwelling place of the sacred allows us to find value in the descent. In this place of lightlessness, we develop a second sight.”

Healing Your Grieving Heart Series: 100 Practical Ideas
Alan Wolfeldt

Okay, this one was recommended to me by a friend and neighbor. I’m not gonna lie, the subtitle felt very HGTV. 100 practical ideas? Are we mourning or reimagining our entryway? Are we healing our grieving heart or figuring out how to make a food dehydrator worth the price tag and counter space?

But despite my skepticism, this one was a real help in the days and weeks after Ryan’s death. This series has books for different losses: Healing the spouse’s grieving heart, the child’s grieving heart, the friend’s grieving heart, the parent’s grieving heart, etc. The books are slim and accessible. No artistry. No faffing about with adjectives or metaphors.

Each of the 100 practical ideas takes about half a page to describe in bullet points—perfect for someone whose attention span has been obliterated by an existential pipe bomb. The ideas range from “Identify three people you can turn to anytime you need a friend,” to “Talk out loud to your spouse,” which I was already doing but which was nice to see written down in a book that I bought for actual money, because it made me feel like I was “doing grief right.” Of course, idea #9 tells you to “Let go of destructive myths about grief and mourning,” like the myth that it is possible to “do grief right.”

Banger quote:

“I find that after a death, you can usually divide the people you know into three groups. The neutral group won’t harm you in your grief, nor will they generally be of much help. The harmful group will make you feel worse by what they say or do. (Yes, sometimes these can even be family members or best friends.) And the helpful group will be available to you and supportive of your need to mourn. Try to spend time with those who help and set boundaries with those who are harmful to you right now.”

(See? No fluff, just good advice that normalizes the crap circus that is grief.)

(FYI, I don’t have a financial arrangement with bookshop.org or anything, just wanted to make it easy for you to find something good to read if you were at sea.)

Other books I have enjoyed, learned, or gotten comfort from throughout Ryan’s diagnosis, treatment, and death:

• Maybe You Should Talk To Someone - Lori Gottlieb
  Reminded me everyone is fighting their own battle.

• It’s OK that You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand - Megan Devine
  Recommended by Ryan’s dad. When you feel alone in grief and like you don’t have a place in our culture, this book helps you frame your grief as necessary, sacred, allowed.

• The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments - Hadley Vlahos

  Death is a very scary thing, but it’s also incredibly normal.

• It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying is Cool Too) - Nora McInerny

  A funny cancer wife! My people!

• Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted - Suleika Jaouad

  A vivid and beautifully written portrait of cancer treatment and the life that follows.

• The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

  Reminded me that what makes our lives beautiful is simply that they are OURS.

• The Lives We Actually Have - Kate Bowler

  A book of common prayers for the real shit we deal with.

• Isola - Allegra Goodman

  A girl kills a polar bear in it to survive. If she can kill a polar bear, I can deal with this.

Now please enjoy this picture of an alarmed kitten and a book.