Sadness and Loss Are Everywhere. Books Can Help.

[Cida]

I thought maybe this might be helpful for some people.



Sadness and Loss Are Everywhere.
Books About Death and Grief Can Bring Hope
“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her new memoir, “Lost & Found.” “But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.”
https://winnquick.com/index.php/2022...an-bring-hope/

[Nov3]

Thank you Cida!

There are some wise writers that navigate the phases and the personal journeys some "may" identify with as they proceed thru the muck of grief.

When the vessel is empty you would think a person would want to fill it with Love again. Yet I can unequivocally say , I wanted to smash that vessel and never have love enter or exit my life again after the loss I had to endure. Little did I know it took the tiniest drops of folks love, compassion, and empathy to bring some level of LIVING. I swear that first year was the walking dead. Going thru motions without LIVING in the world.

[Cida]

I think there are different reasons people might read:
- to feel some comradeship in grief
- to see your incoherent feelings echoed in a more articulate way
- to get some practical ideas of how to deal with your life

And they're all valid reasons.

[upnorthretiree]

Two poems really helped me

Separation
BY W. S. MERWIN
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Ghosting
By Andrea Cohen
How cavalier
people are—

with language
and with silence.

Any ghost will
tell you—

the last thing
we mean

to do
is leave you.

[winterbird]

Great idea for a thread, Cida. Reading how others cope with and express their grief has been extremely helpful. Thank you for starting this thread.
I agree, Nov3
Those poems are beautiful, upnorthretiree.

This poem echoed my feelings once my grief kicked in:
Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself
constantly walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
-Anna St. Vincent Milay

[upnorthretiree]

Love the poem winterbird!

[winterbird]

me too

[seethelight]

Originally Posted by Cida

I thought maybe this might be helpful for some people.



Sadness and Loss Are Everywhere.
Books About Death and Grief Can Bring Hope
“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her new memoir, “Lost & Found.” “But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.”
https://winnquick.com/index.php/2022...an-bring-hope/

The book that helped me considerably was Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss, www.brianweiss.com

This book is about past lives and helped me understand that this life wasn't and isn't the only life we have. Very healing for me.

[winterbird]

Will add to my list seethelight

[KathrynAragon]

It was interesting to me which books I have identified with and have helped me and which haven't. For instance, you'd think I would identify closely with Joan Didion's book "The Year of Magical Thinking," because she experienced a sudden, shocking grief like me - her beloved husband just suddenly dropped over dead from a massive heart attack. Mine did too. However, though I read the entire book, I could not ever get into her mindset. Ironically, it was CS Lewis's book "A Grief Observed" that rang the most true and real to me - and it was written by an older man, who didn't marry for love so to speak, and his wife died a long, slow, expected death from bone cancer. And she was sick with cancer the entire time they were married, which was only for three years!

But I loved this book, in part because it is short and to the point and it was easy to read during the most raw time of my grief (I think the first six months were the most horrible). CS Lewis in fact wrote this book in just a few days. And when he took it to his publisher, the publisher said "We want to publish it, but since it doesn't jive with your long time stated beliefs, we want to publish it under a different name." CS Lewis told them "No thanks, I'll just take it elsewhere." (They published it under his name - LOL.) Anyway, it is simply a collection of his thoughts over the days and months following his wife's death. They're not neat or pretty and often they aren't philosophical at all - they're just his real emotions at the time, and I LOVE that.

So in spite of the many differences between my situation and that of CS Lewis, his book resonated more with me than Joan Didion's, which seemed to be lacking clarity or something, I don't really know but I couldn't relate to what she was saying in it.

Another book that was helpful the first year was "Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief" by Martha Hickman. It just has a short, interfaith type of meditation for each day in it - one page. I loved how it showed me that grief feels the same across cultures, across religions. I mean, I knew that but now I REALLY know it.

I also love love love this haiku by Taniguchi Buson: “The piercing chill I feel:

my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,

under my heel…”