Helpful Nonfiction Books

  • It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand by Megan Devine

    Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. 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.

    Our note: Megan also has a great website, a podcast, and a grief journal, check them out.

  • The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary Francis O'Connor PhD

    A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve.

    Our note: surprisingly easy to read, given how much brain science you learn behind why grief feels they way it does - the longing, the disbelief and belief at the same time, the fogginess, why it changes over time. Great use of metaphors to explain how your brain is trying to make sense of loss, you want to go tell your friends, “it’s like . . . “ . Love this book.

  • The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski

    1) Don’t Wait, 2) Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing, 3( Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience, 4) Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things, 5) Cultivate Don’t Know Mind.

    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.

  • Lucy Hone, Karen Reivich

    Resilient Grieving offers an empowering alternative to the five stages of grief—and makes clear our capacity for growth following the trauma of a loss that changes everything.

  • Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose by Colin Campbell

    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.

  • Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations For Working Through Grief by Martha Whitmore Hickman

    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.

    Note: This little book has been a fan favorite for 30 years. These meditations have quotes from authors, poets, philosophers and Christian mystics, and also Christian and Hebrew scriptures.

Memoirs

  • The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

    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 classic.

  • A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

    Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” A Grief Observed an unflinchingly truthful account of how loss can lead even a stalwart believer to lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and the inspirational tale of how he can possibly regain his bearings.

  • All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak: A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter by Caleb Wilde

    As he grieves his grandfather and contemplates his own future, Wilde takes on prevailing dogmas about death: from a narrow Christian view of heaven and hell, to secular assumptions that death is the end, to pop-psychology maxims that say we all need "closure" after our loved ones die.

Everything above we have read and highly recommend. Listed below is on our proverbial “nightstand” - we can’t wait to read and see if it is worthy of your time. But in case you want to leap ahead, we are offering the list to you here.

These recommendations are recommended from the Modern Loss Handbook Resource List:

  1. Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving by Julia Samuel

  2. Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow by Breeshia Wade

  3. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

  4. The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs (on Anticipatory Grief/Terminal Illness)

  5. The AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss by Hope Edelman

  6. Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief by Claire Bidwell Smith

  7. The Beauty of What Remains: How our Greatest Fear Becomes our Greatest Gift by Steve Leder (Judaism)

  8. Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith

  9. The Adult Orphan Club by Flora Baker (Parental Loss)

  10. The Art of Death by Edwidege Danticat (BIPOC) (Parental Loss)

  11. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Parental Loss)

  12. Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder (Parental Loss)

  13. The Dead Mom’s Club (Parental Loss)

  14. Everybody Died, So I Got A Dog by Emily Dean (Parental Loss)

  15. How We Fight For OUr Lives by Saeed Jones (BIPOC & LGBTQ+) (Parental Loss)

  16. Life’s Accessories by Rachel Levy Lesser (Parental Loss)

  17. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (Parental Loss)

  18. The Long Goodbye by Megan O’Rourke (Parental Loss)

  19. My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn (Parental Loss)

  20. Nots on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (BIPOC) (Parental Loss)

  21. OBIT by Victoria Chang (Parental Loss)

  22. My Wife Said You Might Want to Marry Me by Jason B. Rosenthal (Parental Loss)

  23. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss by George A. Bonnano (Science of Grief and Trauma)