This book provides a path to rethink our relationship with grief. It encourages readers to see their grief as a natural response to death and loss, rather than an aberrant condition needing transformation. It’s OK That You’re Not OK shows readers how to live with skill and compassion during their grief, but it isn’t just a book for people in pain: this book is about making things better for everyone.
Grief hurts. Don’t do it alone. Learn to navigate any loss—a parent, a friendship, a job, a miscarriage—at your own pace with the help of a licensed grief and trauma therapist.
Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss.
Inspiring hope, solace, and courage in living through our losses, author Martin Prechtel, trained in the Tzutujil Maya shamanic tradition, shares profound insights on the relationship between grief and praise in our culture--how the inability that many of us have to grieve and weep properly for the dead is deeply linked with the inability to give praise for living.
Grief overload is what you feel when you experience too many significant losses all at once, in a relatively short period of time, or cumulatively. In addition to the deaths of loved ones, such losses can also include divorce, estrangement, illness, relocation, job changes, and more. The good news is that through intentional, active mourning, you can and will find your way back to hope and healing.
This book shows the reader how to open to the immensity of living with death, to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next.
After someone close to you dies, whether this happened many years ago or recently, it can be difficult to feel whole again. This loss can result in an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty, sadness, and loneliness. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to feel to feel better over time.
A journey into the field of music-thanatology: what it is, and how it uses live harp and voice to bring beauty, peace and compassion to the dying and their loved ones.
A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’s honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” A Grief Observed is an unflinchingly truthful account of how loss can lead even a stalwart believer to lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
A celebrated journalist, bestselling author (The Night of the Gun), and recovering addict, David Carr was in the prime of his career when he suffered a fatal collapse in the newsroom of The New York Times in 2015. Shattered by his death, his daughter Erin Lee Carr, at age twenty-seven an up-and-coming documentary filmmaker, began combing through the entirety of their shared correspondence—1,936 items in total—in search of comfort and support.
If we wish to understand loss experiences we must learn details of survivors' stories. The new version of How We Grieve: Relearning the World tells in-depth tales of survival to illustrate the poignant disruption of life and suffering that loss entails. It shows how through grieving we overcome challenges, make choices, and reshape our lives.
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, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity.
After the focus on planning and outpouring of love from family and friends in the immediate aftermath following the loss of a loved one, we are left to enter a new version of our lives where someone important is missing. The short, poignant meditations given here follow the course of the year, but it is not a necessity to follow them chronologically. They will strengthen, inspire, and give comfort for as long as they are needed.
The cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project and pioneer behind the compassionate care movement shares an inspiring exploration of the lessons dying has to offer about living a fulfilling life.
After a loved one dies, each day can be a struggle. But each day, you can also find comfort and understanding in this daily companion. With one brief entry for every day of the calendar year, this little book by beloved grief counselor Dr. Alan Wolfelt offers small, one-day-at-a-time doses of guidance and healing.
In Lead Me Home, Carleen Brice gently guides you through the strange terrain of grief to the promise of home-a place where we have not only survived our losses, but are wiser and stronger because of them.
In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid price, Alexander tells a love story that is, itself, a story of loss.
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.
Renegade Grief is an indispensable resource for people at any stage of the grieving process and with Carla’s candid and compassionate guidance, you learn that life after loss isn’t about the futile attempt of arriving at some other side.
After a suicide, loved ones painfully struggle to make sense of the unexplainable tragedy. The Gift of Second comes alongside loss survivors and helps navigate the common pitfalls for those left behind. It offers hope and encouragement to guide survivors through this desperate time.
For more than 35 years, Dr. Kirk has been studying, teaching, and researching the literature of black suicide. In this landmark study, he discusses several theories about suicide.
Reach out and grab the hand of multiple award-winning author and grief counselor Gary Roe. Let him walk with you through this uncharted, forbidding territory.
Author and resilience/well-being expert Lucy Hone, a pioneer in positive psychology and bereavement research, was faced with her own inescapable sorrow when, in 2014, her 12-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. By following the strategies of resilient grieving, she found a proactive way to move through her grief, and, over time, embrace life again.
Unthinkable. Unbelievable. Heartbreaking. Whatever words we choose, they all fall far short of the reality. The loss of a child is a terrible thing. How do we survive this? Can we? Shattered: Surviving the Loss of a Child was written to help.
When your baby dies, you find yourself in a life you never expected. And even though pregnancy and infant loss are common, they're not common to you. Instead, you feel like a stranger in your own body, surrounded by well-meaning people who often don't know how to support you.
This book is a simple book of love written for you, a grieving loss mom, from other loss moms who have also heard those life-altering, soul-shattering words, “I’m sorry there is no heartbeat” or “I’m sorry, your baby is gone.”
This book is a simple book of letters written for you, a grieving loss dad, from other loss dads who are living and surviving after the death of their precious child.
No matter where you are in your grieving process, The Unspeakable Loss provides a space to mourn in your own way, and helps you understand how the death of a child affects siblings, other family members and friends, recognizing that we each grieve differently.
Three Minus One: Parents' Stories of Love and Loss is a collection of intimate, soul-baring stories and artwork by parents who have lost a child to stillbirth, miscarriage, or neonatal death, inspired by the film Return to Zero.
In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit.
Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair.
The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the effects of monopolies in a death-care industry now dominated by multinational corporations.
The definitive resource on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death. This edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.
Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts—of wisdom, faith, and love—that the dying leave for the living to share.
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.
In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist 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.
A hospice doctor and caregiver shares the 7 inspirational lessons she has learned from the dying—and gives a daily spiritual practice to help live them.
Weaving the details of her own experiences as a caregiver through stories of her patients, their families, and their distinctive lives, Dr. Mannix reacquaints us with the universal, but deeply personal, process of dying.
This book presents a model for grief counseling based on Dr. Wolfelt’s “companioning” principles. This book advocates a model of “companioning” the bereaved, acknowledging that grief forever changes or transforms the mourner’s world view.
In this book, Halifax offers lessons from dying people and caregivers, as well as guided meditations to help readers contemplate death without fear, develop a commitment to helping others, and transform suffering and resistance into courage.
Caring for someone as they approach the end of their life is not the same as caring for someone who is going to get better. Whether the patient is at home, in a nursing home or hospital this kit will give you the valuable information you need to understand the dying process.
The purpose of this handbook is to provide nurses, coaches, and other health care professionals with opportunities for reflection and inspiration in their work. In this book you will find fresh ideas, tools, and reflective practices that encourage you to explore your personal beliefs and values about aging, advanced illness, and dying. It is intended to inspire you to reimagine the end of life as a vital part of how we become fully human.
This important volume of work by experts in ethics and end-of-life care examines issues of hospice care for children and teens; voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) and medical aid in dying (MAiD).
Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying, treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends, caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government.
Written to help readers feel more in control of an experience that so often seems anything but controllable. Get advice for how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you’d hoped, and how to talk to your children about your will.
Based on Butler’s experience caring for aging parents, and hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated our fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths, The Art of Dying Well also draws on the expertise of national leaders in family medicine, palliative care, geriatrics, oncology, and hospice.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal 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.
A heartwarmingly true story of a college student and the professor that becomes his mentor. It's unceasingly reassuring that life can and should revolve around love. This charming narrative appeals to a general audience for its honesty and approachability.
During her treatment for cancer, Mary Anne Schwalbe and her son Will spent many hours sitting in waiting rooms together. To pass the time, they would talk about the books they were reading. Once, by chance, they read the same book at the same time—and an informal book club of two was born.
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, Nina asks: What makes a meaningful life when one has limited time? Brilliantly written and exceptionally moving, it’s a “deeply affecting memoir, a simultaneously heartbreaking and funny account of living with loss and the specter of death.
In this at-times-heartbreaking yet heartwarming book, author and illustrator Iris Gottlieb explores death from all angles—from the physical, such as the ways your remains could be handled, to the emotional, including grief and grappling with your own mortality.
Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with people with addiction on Vancouver’s skid row, this #1 international bestseller radically re-envisions a much misunderstood condition by taking a compassionate approach to substance abuse and addiction recovery.
The third edition of the Handbook of Thanatology is an accessible volume that offers essential knowledge in the field of thanatology in a format that is practical for both novices and those with extensive experience in the field.
Providing an overview of the myriad ways that we are touched by death and dying, both as an individual and as a member of society, this book will help readers understand our relationship with death.
In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie—man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates decades after its writing.
Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, The Worm at the Core offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the choices we make in life—and a pathway toward divesting ourselves of the cultural and personal illusions that keep us from accepting the end that awaits us all.
Staring at the Sun is a profoundly encouraging approach to the universal issue of mortality. In this magisterial opus, capping a lifetime of work and personal experience, Dr. Yalom helps us recognize that the fear of death is at the heart of much of our anxiety.
This book explores interviews and conversations to give the reader a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, medical professionals and the patient's family.
Practical and inspiring, this book helps you learn how to navigate encounters with death, dying, and bereavement. The authors emphasize ways that individuals and families can cope with life-threatening illness, grief, funerals, and other death-related topics -- including how to communicate constructively in the face of death.
The Body Keeps the Score uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning.
The book provides a foundation for understanding, assessing, and responding effectively to grief and loss. The content is designed for students and professionals who find themselves working in proximity to loss, trauma, and grief in various capacities.
Encompassing new content on the treatment of grief, loss, and bereavement, the updated and revised fifth edition of this gold-standard grief therapy book continues to deliver the most up-to-date research and practical information for upper-level students and practitioners alike.
The 14 chapters in Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, all published here for the first time, focus on recent thinking in this important area, helping initiate issues and lines of argument that have not been explored previously.
In The Law of Human Remains, Tanya Marsh, a nationally recognized expert in the law of human remains and cemetery law, collects, organizes, and states the legal rules and principles regarding the status, treatment, and disposition of human remains in the United States so that attorneys and courts can more easily discover, understand, use, and ultimately critique and reform the law.
This book is designed to help jumpstart that process by outlining the history, structure, and doctrines of the common law of burying grounds in the United States.
Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths.
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead.
In The Next World, historian of religions Gregory Shushan explores the relationships between extraordinary experiences and beliefs in life after death. Drawing on over two decades of research into cross-cultural afterlife beliefs and extraordinary experiences, The Next World presents not only an accessible overview of Shushan's work, but also takes a bold new step in psychical research.
The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss.
The ultimate death compendium, featuring the world’s most extraordinary artistic objects concerned with mortality, together with text by expert contributors.
Paul Koudounaris photographed more than seventy sites for this book. He analyzes the role of these remarkable memorials within the cultures that created them, as well as the mythology and folklore that developed around them, and skillfully traces a remarkable human endeavor.
The astonishing story of how the dead live on in memorials and traditions across the globe, from Ethiopia and Nepal to Cambodia and Rwanda, told through arresting images and captivating narration
Everyone has questions about death. In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers the most intriguing questions she’s ever received about what happens to our bodies when we die.
Through frank and accessible testimonials, Lynne Hughes and the kids of Comfort Zone Camp share the most difficult parts of their losses and offer their own experiences.
It Won't Ever Be the Same is a validating and reassuring book that speaks directly to teens experiencing grief, providing them with tools to understand, express, and cope.
But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family.
Alternating between reality and magic, past and present, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a luminous debut novel about finding oneself through family history, art, bravery, and love.
When Griffin’s first love and ex-boyfriend, Theo, dies in a drowning accident, his universe implodes. Even though Theo had moved to California for college and started seeing Jackson, Griffin never doubted Theo would come back to him when the time was right.
Told from three diverse points of view, this story of life and love after loss is one Angie Thomas, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give, believes
Where are you guys? Text me back. That's the last message Carver Briggs will ever send his three best friends, Mars, Eli, and Blake. He never thought that it would lead to their death. Now Carver can’t stop blaming himself for the accident and even worse, a powerful judge is pressuring the district attorney to open up a criminal investigation.
One day, the children find a bird lying on its side with its eyes closed and no heartbeat. They are very sorry, so they decide to say good-bye. In the park, they dig a hole for the bird and cover it with warm sweet-ferns and flowers. Finally, they sing sweet songs to send the little bird on its way. A beautiful book to share with children beginning to grapple with loss.
Losing a loved one can be one of life’s most traumatic experience and certainly can have a profound effect on children through Adulthood. This book explores the theme of Grief in a lighthearted and soulful way with the aim of helping young readers embrace hope, comfort, and guidance through varying complex emotions.
Gentle and reassuring, What Does Grief Feel Like? shares the many ways people can grieve when a loved one dies and validates children’s unique grief experiences. Open-ended questions throughout the book invite children to share what they are thinking, feeling, and going through.
Ida, Always is an exquisitely told story of two best friends—inspired by a real bear friendship—and a gentle, moving, needed reminder that loved ones lost will stay in our hearts, always.
A comforting story written from the perspective of a young child to help kids identify, experience, and process feelings of grief after losing a loved one.
When a loved one dies, it can be hard to know how to explain it to a young child, particularly if you are grieving the loss yourself. Written at a developmental level that is appropriate for two- and three-year-olds, the story explains death; lets children know that it is okay to feel sad; and reassures children that they can still love the person who died, and the person who died will always love them.
Loss becomes remembrance in this book that offers tender ways to pay tribute to, and meaningfully incorporate, a loved one’s lost presence into present and future life experiences. Be it departed friends, family, pets, and more, memories can carry us beyond the precious moments we have together to keep the ones we loved before in mind forever.
When Someone You Love Has Died is an award-winning, heartfelt, and compassionate children's picture book that gently addresses the topic of death and the experiences that come with it. Through sensitive storytelling and beautiful illustrations, this book offers reassurance and comfort while guiding young readers through the process of understanding and coping with their emotions during a difficult time.
This is a true story of how a cardinal offered hope to a grieving family struggling to adjust to their loss. It encourages anyone experiencing loss to pay attention to Mother Nature’s gifts as she teaches us to be hopeful without forgetting those we love.
When someone you care about isn't here anymore, your love for them continues… What do you do with that love when that someone isn't here to give it to? Everywhere, Still is a book about loss and grief--whether that loss is permanent or temporary. And it's a reminder that there is always a way to stay close with the people who are biggest in our hearts, no matter how far across space and time they may be.
A book of comfort for grief and loss appropriate for all ages. When a loved one passes away it can be very difficult to talk about good memories and the lasting impact of their love. This book helps commemorate the loved ones that are no longer here and cherish the love and guidance that their presence has left us with to help cope with sadness, loneliness, separation and difficult emotions.
When our pets aren't with us anymore, an Invisible Leash connects our hearts to each other. Forever. That's what Zack's friend Emily tells him after his dog dies. Zack doesn't believe it. He only believes in what he can see. But on an enlightening journey through their neighborhood—and through his grief—he comes to feel the comforting tug of the Invisible Leash. And it feels like love.
The book includes a guide for adults and a list of discussion questions to help children and adults talk honestly about the difficult emotions that arise after the sudden loss of a loved one. Through conversations, pictures, sculpture, playacting, and more, children can share their fears, learn how to cope, and receive appropriate reassurance about their own safety.
Talking about Death is a classic guide for parents helping their children through the death of a loved one. With a helpful list of dos and don'ts, an illustrated read-along dialogue, and a guide to explaining death, Grollman provides sensitive and timely advice for families coping with loss.
Through captivating stories and thoughtful analysis, Maria Trozzi explains how to handle the difficult job of talking with children and adolescents about loss.
This sensitive and life-affirming story will lead young readers to ask their own questions about life, death and how we remember those who have gone before us.
With realistic, hopeful illustrations by Ard Hoyt,this tender tale offers an accessible lens to young children learning to understand and cope with the mixed emotions that come with the loss of a loved one.
In this informative book, illustrated by Annika Le Large, children will marvel at the flowers different cultures use to represent death. They will find out about eco-friendly burials, learn how to wrap a mummy, and go beneath the streets of Paris to witness skull-lined catacombs!
In a curiously heart-warming and elegantly illustrated story, a duck strikes up an unlikely friendship with Death. Duck and Death play together and discuss big questions.
Adrian Raeside captures the special bond between humans and their pets, and with marvelous illustrations, brings a gentle humour to a story that will resonate with children and pet lovers of all ages.
Our cats occupy a unique space in our hearts. When they’re gone, the loss can be devastating, the grief profound. P.S. I Love You More Than Tuna gives us an opportunity to give friends, loved ones, or ourselves tangible comfort during the grieving period, when so many of us feel isolated and misunderstood after a beloved pet dies.
If the loss of a feline friend has hit you particularly hard, know you are not alone. In Soul Comfort for Cat Lovers, you will find validation, coping insights, and practical wisdom conveyed with spiritual warmth.
Understanding the depth of your bond and learning to celebrate rather than mourn your years together helps memorialize your pet. It also equips you with perspective and the capacity to love again.
Filled with heartwarming stories and practical guidance on such matters as taking care of yourself while mourning, creating rituals to honor your pet's memory, and talking to children about death, Goodbye, Friend is a beautiful and comforting book for anyone grieving the loss of a beloved animal.
In this invaluable guide and touchstone, New York Times bestselling author Jon Katz addresses the difficult but necessary topic of saying goodbye to a beloved pet. Drawing on personal experiences, stories from fellow pet owners, and philosophical reflections, Katz provides support for those in mourning.
