Grief reads
The best books on losing loved ones remind us that you can find strength if you don’t run away from it
You’ll find it wherever there’s death, and wherever there’s massive change. The coronavirus brings both. It’s grief. When you’re under grief ’s power, you feel it will last forever, and in a sense it does. Grief is the pain that never stops hurting. It just sticks around long enough for you to get used to it. It alters everything in its path, from familial relations to the spiritual outlook of staggered survivors.
Not surprisingly, grief has been the subject of a great many books, from novels and memoirs to how-to-heal guides. I’ve read several of them during the last year, ever since my significant other was diagnosed with a terminal brain illness. I’d be lying if I said they were all good. The best ones, however, pack the kind of wisdom and insight that can shift perceptions and even save lives. We’ll be discussing some of those here. If you don’t see your favorite, you are warmly encouraged to make and share your own list. No two people grieve the same.
I actually stole that last observation from David Kessler, whose latest book, “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief,” blends piercing knowledge, personal experience and a sincere desire to help. Kessler is uniquely qualified to write about how we might find meaning in grief. He was protégé of and then collaborator with Elisabeth KüblerRoss, perhaps the most influential death and grief thinker of them all. Then, tragedy: His 21-year-old son, David, died of an accidental overdose in 2016. Kessler found himself navigating the waters of grief with a heart rubbed raw.
Kessler takes as his touchstone Viktor Frankl, who chronicled his own journey as a Holocaust survivor in “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl posited that it’s up to us to find meaning in order to survive and transcend the unfathomable. With this book, Kessler gives us a guide to doing just that. He’s also a mainstay on Facebook, where he’s been hosting daily grief groups during the pandemic. He’s a godsend made for these upside-down times.
So, too, is Joanne Cacciatore.
She had me from page one of “Bearing the Unbearable,” in which she describes the aftermath of her baby daughter’s death: “I remember asking how the world could continue spinning after such a tragedy.” I remember that feeling well, the anger at life as it goes on. But “Bearing the Unbearable” is about Cacciatore only in a peripheral sense.
A grief counselor, professor and Zen priest, Cacciatore writes with the same uncommon sensitivity she shows her clients. Her book includes her visits with the bereaved and her philosophical excursions into matters of death and grieving. She gently suggests that we don’t run away from grief, even when every instinct tells us to: “The only alternative to distraction is being with grief — one painful, terrifying moment at a time.”
Gordon Livingston dramatizes this moment-to-moment quality with stark moral clarity in his memoir, “Only Spring.” Livingston created a journal as his 6-year-old son, Lucas, battled and then succumbed to leukemia. This was barely a year after his older son, Andrew, took his own life. You can feel Livingston’s humility and rage rise from the page as he considers his shattered world. At times he could be a modern-day King Lear: “I feel old and defeated. What have I done, what have any of us done, to deserve this? If there is no answer to this question, then what am I to make of such a randomly cruel universe?”
This is among the most salient and brutal queries posed by grief. It speaks to life’s absurdity, and the reality of a world in which a widely beloved child can die in slow motion through no fault of anyone. “Only Spring,” like most grief memoirs, took evident heroism to write. It’s the work of a man trying to make sense of the senseless. Livingston struggles mightily to find meaning in his cosmic misfortune. He knows it’s his only chance of staying whole.
If Livingston wrestles with God between the lines, C. S. Lewis brings the battle to the fore in “A Grief Observed.” The towering Christian intellectual of the 20th century, Lewis challenged his God head-on when his beloved wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer. Crises of faith hurt all the more when the believer is as passionate and committed as Lewis. “Is it rational to believe in a bad God?” he asks. “Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?”
But Lewis also comes down from the mountain and offers observations that any griever can relate to: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” Indeed, grief is a self-aware, self-perpetuating beast. If by chance you forget about its existence from time to time, it’s always ready to remind you that it’s right here and won’t be going anywhere soon. Lewis actually wrote “A Grief Observed” as a series of journal entries, but because it’s Lewis it read like a masterpiece.
In the fiction realm, one book hits closest to our collective home. Albert Camus’ “The Plague” is nominally about a pestilence that strikes a coastal town in North Africa. There are daily death counts, shortages of equipment, bickering government officials and unscrupulous smugglers. But there’s also one of Camus’ favorite themes: the impulse of human beings to do their best under the worst of conditions — not for glory, not for profit, but because it’s the right thing to do.
“There’s no question of heroism in all this,” says the novel’s conscience, Dr. Rieux. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency.”
Grief hurts like nothing you thought possible. It turns your world upside down and shakes it without mercy. But in piercing your vulnerability it can also bring you closer to the good. You might eventually find a new source of strength. Perhaps you’ll even write about it someday.