Reading About Grief
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis was the first book I read about grief. The first line was simultaneously like a punch to the gut and a weight being lifted. I tend to speak in metaphor and hyperbole, but describing grief can feel beyond description. I had been trying to explain the feeling of grief by comparing it to the feeling of fear, but no one understood me until I found C.S. Lewis. He was grieving the death of his wife, and I the traumatic loss of my sister. No matter, it was his words about the feelings of grief that resonated. Along with fear, I was feeling the anticipation of something, the urge to run (Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche talks about this in Notes on Grief), the sense that someone was about to tap me on the shoulder, or that I was forgetting something important.
It surprised me that someone else had known exactly this feeling. After reading Lewis, I started copying quotes that spoke to me. I’d never done this before, but I suddenly found myself hoarding quotes in my notes app. I find comfort in being able to check back in for the right words to describe these indecipherable sensations.
Here are a few other quotes from fictional novels that stick with me. Some of them are fiction about grief and loss; some aren’t specifically about grief:
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing--I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.
Laura Imani Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World
Yui came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness. That inside each of us we preserve the fingerprints of those who taught us how to love, how to be both happy and unhappy in equal measure; of those who explained how to differentiate between feelings and how to navigate the overlap, the areas that make us suffer, but that also make us different. Different and special.
Katherine May, Wintering
“But then, that’s what grief is—a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.”
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
“Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.”
adrienne marie brown, Grievers
“The hierarchy of grief is measured in words and silence. The closer the death, the less words can hold it.”
“Grief is an amalgamation of absence narratives, layered over each other.”
Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
“What was love, if not the fear of loss.”
Roshani Chokshi, The Star-Touched Queen
“There is no romance in real grief. Only longing and fury.”
Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood
Nell whacks one of her toes on the pointed white rock under the water. Of course she does. She was bound to injure herself sooner or later; it’s part of the grieving process. Barring bloodletting and clothes-rending and ashes on the head, a person in mourning has to undergo a mutilation of some kind.
Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
“There is no point in saying ‘This too shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold onto grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.”
Lily King, Writers and Lovers
I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.
Samantha Harvey, Orbital
It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead; as in musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game. You have to not stop. You have to keep moving. You have this glorious orbit and when you’re orbiting you’re impact proof and nothing can touch you.
I’ve been a reader my whole life. I take after my mom in that way—we are both compulsive readers and have been known to use reading to dissociate. How many times did we kids try to get her attention when she was reading a book only to be met with silence? It was like she was in a trance. I can be the same way: once I was at a friend’s house for Easter (before any of my big losses). This friend has 8 siblings, most of whom were home for the weekend, and her mom was cooking for all these people while I was sitting in the kitchen reading. She looked up from cutting up a thousand pounds of potatoes and asked, “how can you read with all this noise?” It’s a gift, I guess!
After I discovered the C.S. Lewis book, I started seeking out more books about grief and loss. I read all of the recommended grief support books, like Megan Devine’s It’s OK that You’re Not OK. I hadn’t read a self-help type book since college, but here were authors who knew and could describe everything I was feeling (and still feel, TBH). The grief support books may not have made it to the top of my favorites list (which you can download here), but the authors were speaking my language, so to speak (pun intended). I felt seen in a way that I wasn’t getting when I was out in the world. No wonder I use reading to dissociate. Just like when I was a child reading about imaginary, fantastical places, here, too, could I find a place where I was not alone in my grief and sorrow.
A snippet of my San Francisco Public Library history from the two months after Sarah died (December 18, 2021).
See? I most often read before bed, and even though my focus wasn’t as sharp as before December 18, 2021, I still turned to books for comfort. But now I frequently stopping to copy quotes about grief into the notes app on my phone. To wit (from It’s OK that You’re Not OK):
“When you are broken, the correct response is to be broken.”
“Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and you want love to continue, even here.”
“You are here now, and here sucks.”
“Your grieving person spoke a language that only one other person in the world spoke, and that person died. ”
As I read, I became curious about the nature of grief. What is happening in our bodies and our brains when we experience a traumatic loss or have deep, deep grief? I was constantly repeating “I am not the same” because I really felt like a different person. I am a different person since Sarah died. I found that I especially enjoyed the parts of the books I was reading that touched on the science, so I sought out articles about the science of grieving (here’s one of my most cited from Scientific American. It might be behind a paywall.)
I recently read The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor and can’t stop talking about it. Have I retained all of the scientific terms and exact details of what happens while we grieve? Nope! But I can reassure you that all the things that make you wonder if you’re going crazy, like memory loss, exhaustion, appetite changes, disrupted sleep, and–this was my big one–missing time, are all NORMAL parts of grief and just your brain trying to make sense of your new reality.
I’ve also read some interesting grief memoirs, emotional poetry that deals with loss, and books that try to give comfort to in small snippets and quotes (obviously not my favorite kind, though I know they give comfort to other grievers). The books that stick with me, though, are the ones that describe grief as part of a bigger story that I’ve sunk into. A recent favorite is the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas, especially the first book. A lot of YA novels use grief as a motivator, and Maas does, too, but what she does differently is she doesn’t use the grief as an event to only fuel revenge. She accurately and powerfully makes the grief a part of the characters (and not just the main character). It’s not just a reason for revenge. It’s felt by the characters and becomes a part of who they are.
“She knew the world still passed by, unaffected by the death of a young man, unaware that he’d ever existed and breathed and loved her. She hated the world for continuing on. If she never left this bed, this room, maybe she’d never have to continue on with it…. She didn’t want to go out into a world where he didn’t exist. So she watched the light shift and change, and let the world pass by without her.”
Another type of book written for grieving people that are hit or miss for me are the grief “handbooks.” I LOVE The Modern Loss Handbook by Rebecca Soffer and the Sitting with Sadness deck by People I’ve Loved (okay, it’s not really a book), and use both of those as inspiration for the (Any Grief) Grief Circles and workshops I do. There are some I’ve found too cheesy, too well-meaning (if you know what I mean), too prescriptive, or too boring, but The Modern Loss Handbook is a treasure chest with jewels of inspiration I find each time I pick it up.
I have soooo many more books about grief that I want to read. I still favor fiction, so even if I’m reading a non-fiction grief book, I choose the escapist fiction first. I’m currently reading Can Anyone Tell Me? by Meghan Riordan Jarvis. The book is divided into bite-size chapters that are easily digestible (why do we talk about books using food metaphors?) but jam-packed of information about grief science, support for grievers, and how to support someone who is grieving. I adore this book, but I still pick up the novel on the bedside table first. I am not giving myself too much grief (ha!) over it, though, because I took a course on the book with Meghan. Reading the book is helping me retain the information in the course. I’m also slowly reading some Ada Limón poetry. Poetry, especially poetry about grief, needs to be savored, so no guilt there, either. Really, the only pressure I feel is from my own desire to learn as much as possible about how grief shows up for people, both anecdotally and scientifically.
I made a list of my ten favorite grief books (in no particular order). You can download it here: Tamara’s Top Ten Grief Books.
It’s also on the home page for quick reference. If you click on a book in the download or on any of the links in this post, and then purchase the book from there, I will earn a small commission.
If you want to see more of the books I’ve read or plan on reading, please check out my Bookshop.org shop. I’ll keep adding to and updating the lists there. The top-ten list may also change as I get through the 50 or so books on my To Read—Grief bookshelf.
Let me know what books about grief you’ve found supportive. I’ll add them to my list!
