personal essays on grief

Essays About Grief: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts

Discover our guide with helpful examples of essays about grief and inspiring writing prompts to help you begin writing about this sensitive and emotional topic.

Grief is a human being’s normal but intense and overwhelming emotional response to painful events like the death of a family or friend, disasters, and other traumatic incidents. To cope, we go through five stages of grief : denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

Writing about grief can trigger strong emotions. However, many also find acknowledging the subject helpful in processing their feelings. Grief is a sensitive topic that covers morals and beliefs. It requires empathy and awareness. 

5 Essay Examples

• 1. Death And Stages Of Grief  by Anonymous on IvyPanda.Com

2. Loss And Grief by Anonymous on GradesFixer.Com

3. coping with grief by writer faith, 4. the main stages of overcoming grief by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. stages of grief and people’s perception of grief based on age by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is grief, 2. the best way to handle grief, 3. grief and depression, 4. when grief becomes dangerous, 5. books about grief, 6. a personal experience with grief, 7. art inspired by grief, 1. death and stages of grief   by anonymous on ivypanda.com.

“… Ignoring various philosophical and religious views, death can practically be interpreted as a complete cessation of the body’s vital functions. When faced with the death of loved ones, as well as with other traumatic events, a person usually experiences grief.”

This essay expounds on the five stages of grief defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and what people go through in each phase. The author uses the story of the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff who lost his son Eric in an accident. The piece further discusses how Nicholas went through each stage, including believing in God’s promise that his son would have eternal life in heaven. The writer believes that grief doesn’t usually follow an order and sometimes appears random. Such as in Wolterstorff’s situation, where he experienced depression before the bargaining phase.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

“The loss of a loved one will always be a painful personal journey, and a coping experience that no one is ready for or can prepare for till it happens. The after effect or grief is always personal for everyone that loses a loved one.”

The author presents different poems that reflect her loss and sadness for her mother’s passing. She connects to the poem “ The Courage That My Mother Had ” and values the things her mother left behind. There are times when grieving individuals think they are healed, but one event can bring back the pain in an instant. The writer believes that grief doesn’t end after the acceptance phase. It’s because whenever we think of our loved ones who have already passed away and relive the memories we had of them, we always wish they were still with us.

“Grief is an emotion that unfortunately, we all come to experience at some time or another. However, that terrible feeling can open the door to acceptance and appreciation. Mourning and reflecting upon a tragic event can cause one to look at an issue through a different perspective, and maybe even help them to accept it.”

Faith’s essay demonstrates how tragedies can cause people to unite and support each other. Processing grief teaches the bereaved to be stronger and appreciate the people who offer comfort and encouragement. It also teaches us not to take anything for granted by cherishing even the simple things in life. Faith sees grief and terrible events as negative experiences, but they can lead to positive results that steer people to be grateful.

“Grief is one of the most complicated processes which is to be combated. Some people are able to cope with grief individually, others need assistance. There are even cases when people need professional help to cope with grief.”

The essay contains various passages that discuss the five stages of grief. The author believes denial is the root of grief in all phases. The author supposes that people can overcome grief through several methods, such as reading the bible, getting support from family and relatives, accepting the loss, and learning to live with it.

“The intensity and duration of grief may depend on many factors, such as the personality of the individual, the relationship to the deceased, and the circumstances of the death. Unexpected, sudden, or accidental death can be extremely shocking. Death of one’s child at any age is difficult to accept.”

The essay discusses how various factors, such as relationship, age, and cause of death, affect grief’s intensity and duration. It mentions that grief can last years and that losing a child at any age is the most challenging case to accept. 

The author presents various scenarios showing how these elements influence the state of grieving. For example, a person grieving the loss of their spouse may hear their voice and feel their presence in the room. 

7 Prompts for Essays About Grief

Simply defining grief in your essay won’t make it stand out among the rest. To make your piece enjoyable, describe grief in a way that probes your readers’ feelings and imagination. You can personify grief or compare it to another familiar feeling to give you an idea. For example, you can say grief is a stranger persistently reaching out to you to make you remember hurtful memories.  

We deal with grief in our own way; some take it in their stride, while some become a wreck. Use this prompt to enumerate excellent ways to deal with this heavy emotion. Ask yourself what you’ll do if you can’t get over grief and research thoroughly. Pick the most effective methods of overcoming grief and support your findings with relevant data.

There are many effects of grief, and depression is one of the most significant. Loneliness can negatively affect how a person thinks and acts, but grief makes depression worse. Write an essay with a series of situations that show how grief can lead to depression and ways to prevent it.

Here are some essays about depression to give you an idea of how to write this topic.

Grieving is a normal reaction to losing a loved one but it can turn dangerous when the individual grieving stops normally functioning for at least a year after the death. For this prompt, include reasons people break and let grief consume them, such as extreme depression and fatigue. Add signs and symptoms that can help others detect when someone’s grief becomes unsafe for the individual and the people around them.

In your essay, recommend books, documentaries, or movies detailing grief. These books can be accounts of those who already went through the grieving process and are sharing their experiences. For example, Every Word You Cannot Say by Iain S. Thomas is a delicate book that guides readers into acknowledging their feelings. Detail why these books are helpful for people grieving and recommend at least three books or other forms of media that the reader can use to cope.

Share an encounter you had with grief. Describe what you felt and narrate how you grappled with the situation. For instance, if you have ever helped someone suffering from grief, explain the step-by-step method you used and why you decided to help that person. Even if you don’t have any personal experience with grief, you can interview someone who has gone through it. Remember that it’s a delicate subject, so your questions should be diplomatic.

There are many mediums people use to process their strong feelings. One is through creating art. When writing your essay, list arts made by grief or inspired by grief. Add comments on how the artist managed to relay the loss and grief through the art. You can also share your favorite art you think best depicts grief. Like Vincent Van Gogh’s 1890 painting called “ Sorrowing Old Man .”Learn about transition words for essays to improve your work.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

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• Coping With Grief

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Sheryl Sandberg’s essay on grief is one of the best things I’ve read about marriage

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When my closest friend got married a few years ago, I asked her if anything felt different after the ceremony. "Yes," she said. "Realizing that my best-case scenario is now that I die first." Her tone was flip, and we both laughed. But there was truth to what she said.

I love my husband so much that I hesitate to write about him — it feels unseemly, like bragging. It is impossibly painful to even imagine life without him: his presence is the source of my greatest joy in life, just as the idea of losing him is one of my worst fears. The best-case scenario is that I die first.

Sheryl Sandberg lost her beloved husband, Dave Goldberg, 30 days ago. To mark that occasion, she has written one of the best essays I have ever read about what it feels like to confront that terrible fear, and to deal with the profound grief that comes from losing someone you love. Her description of her grief since Goldberg's death feels true not just as a statement of what it is like to lose someone you love, but also what it means to deeply love someone, and the value that our loved ones hold in our lives.

A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi recently told me that the most powerful one-line prayer he has ever read is: "Let me not die while I am still alive." I would have never understood that prayer before losing Dave . Now I do. I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning.

Strangely enough, the perfect companion piece to Sandberg's essay is not about loss, but about the joy of having children. Michelle Goldberg (no relation to Dave Goldberg) wrote in New York Magazine last week about what inspired her and her husband to grow their family.

"Not long ago," she writes , "I learned the Arabic word Ya'aburnee . Literally, 'you bury me,' it means wanting to die before a loved one so as not to have to face the world without him or her in it."

Goldberg realized that those words captured her feelings for her husband, and that having a child would be a way to bring more of him into the world — and a way to hold on to part of him if someday she lost him.

Goldberg and her husband now have two children, and they have enriched her life, she writes, in ways she would never have believed possible. "Before there was one person in the world for whom I would use the word Ya'aburnee , and now there are three."

Reading Sandberg's essay with Goldberg's is a reminder that the pain of loss is a worthwhile price to pay for the joy of love and marriage. Although Sandberg's husband has died, the life they built together still remains. Her essay closes with a moving promise to support what they built, and the children they had together, even as she mourns him:

I can’t even express the gratitude I feel to my family and friends who have done so much and reassured me that they will continue to be there. In the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me endless and empty, only their faces pull me out of the isolation and fear. My appreciation for them knows no bounds. I was talking to one of these friends about a father-child activity that Dave is not here to do. We came up with a plan to fill in for Dave. I cried to him, "But I want Dave. I want option A." He put his arm around me and said, "Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of option B." Dave, to honor your memory and raise your children as they deserve to be raised, I promise to do all I can to kick the shit out of option B. And even though sheloshim has ended, I still mourn for option A. I will always mourn for option A. As Bono sang, "There is no end to grief . . . and there is no end to love." I love you, Dave.

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Notes on Grief

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In memoriam: James Nwoye Adichie, 1932-2020

From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria. On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. “Move your phone a bit, Daddy,” one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying that he hadn’t had dinner because they’d had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village’s ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. “ Ka chi fo ,” he said. (“Good night.”) His last words to me. On June 10th, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone.

My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon; he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day; he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor, and so how can this be? But there he is. Okey is holding a phone over my father’s face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. I stare and stare at my father. My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says that she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, “No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.” My husband is saying, “Breathe slowly; drink some of this water.” My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. Later, my brother Kene will jokingly say, “You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes.”

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual, and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy?

In my American home, I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise, and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it.

“I just thought about how Daddy was always turning off the radio and I was always turning it back on. He probably thought it was wasteful in some way,” I tell Okey.

“Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba. I’d so happily let him now if he’ll just come back,” Okey says, and we laugh.

“And I will start to wake up early, and I’ll start to eat garri , and I’ll go to Mass every Sunday,” I say, and we laugh.

I retell the story of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale, where I say, “Daddy, will you have some pomegranate juice? And he says, ‘No, thank you, whatever that is.’ ”

Pomegranate juice became a standing joke. All those standing jokes we had, frequently told and retold, my father’s expression this minute utterly deadpan and, in the next, wide open with delighted laughter. Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh, remembering my father, but somewhere in the background of the laughter there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. But how is it that in the morning he was joking and talking, and at night he was gone forever? It was so fast, too fast. It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world. Throughout the lockdown, my father and I talked about how strange it all was, how scary, and he told me often not to worry about my doctor husband. “You actually drink warm water, Daddy?” I asked one day, surprised, after he said with sheepish humor that he’d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent the coronavirus infection. He laughed at himself and told me that warm water was harmless, after all, not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare, when people were bathing in saline before dawn. To my “How are you, Daddy?,” he would always respond, “ Enwerom nsogbu chacha .” (“I have no problems at all. I’m perfectly fine.”) And he really was, until he wasn’t.

Messages pour in, and I look at them as through a mist. Who is this message for? “On the loss of your father,” one says. Whose father? My sister forwards a message from her friend, saying that my father was humble despite his accomplishments. My fingers start to tremble, and I push my phone away. He was not. He is . There is a video of people trooping into our house for mgbalu , to give condolences, and I want to reach in and wrench them away from our living room, where already my mother is settled on the sofa in placid widow pose. A table is in front of her like a barrier, to maintain social distance. Already friends and relatives are saying that this must be done and that must be done. A condolence register must be placed by the front door, and my sister goes off to buy a bolt of white lace to cover the table, and my brother buys a hardcover notebook, and already people are bending to write in the book. I think, Go home! Why are you coming to our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true? Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit. I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies. Needle pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old, older than my father and alive and well. My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too—why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up, afraid of tomorrow and all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and people are inviting me to speak somewhere and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

Grief is forcing new skins on me, scraping scales from my eyes. I regret my past certainties: Surely you should mourn, talk through it, face it, go through it. The smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. I cannot think too much; I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look. Of course, the effort is its own grieving, and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking, but imagine the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare. Often, too, there is the urge to run and run, to hide. But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief—when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement—I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, my fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobs. For the first time in my life, I am enamored of sleeping pills, and, in the middle of a shower or a meal, I burst into tears.

My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away: June 10, 2020, was the worst day of my life. The week before June 10th, while running around playing with my daughter, I fell and hit my head and suffered a concussion. For days, I felt unmoored, sensitive to sound and light. I did not call my parents daily as usual. When I finally called, my father wanted to talk not about his feeling unwell but about my head. Concussions can be slow to heal, he told me. “You just said ‘concoction’; the word is ‘concussion,’ ” my mother said from the background. I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them, because I would have sensed that he wasn’t only mildly unwell, and I would have insisted that he go to the hospital much sooner. I wish, I wish. The guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could have happened and all the ways that the world could be reshaped, to prevent what happened on June 10th, to make it un-happen. I worry about Okey, a stalwart, sensitive soul, whose burden is different from ours because he is the one who was there. He agonizes about what else he could have done when my father that night started to show discomfort, telling him, “Help me sit up” and then saying, no, he would rather lie back down. Okey says that my father prayed, calmly, quietly, what sounded like lines from the rosary in Igbo. Does it comfort me to hear this? Only in the sense that it must have comforted my father.

The cause was complications from kidney failure. An infection, the doctor said, exacerbated his long-term kidney disease. But what infection? Of course, I wonder about the coronavirus. Some journalists had come to our house to interview him a few weeks before, about the case of the billionaire who wanted to take our home town’s land—a dispute that consumed my father these past two years. Might he have been exposed then? The doctor doesn’t think so, even though he was not tested, because he would have had symptoms, and nobody else around him had symptoms. He needed hydration, and so he was admitted to the hospital and put on I.V. fluids. Okey stripped the tatty hospital bedsheets and brought sheets from home.

Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always at the back of my mind feared this day. But lulled by his relative good health, I thought we had time. I thought it was not yet time. “I was so sure Daddy was nineties material,” my brother Kene says. We all did. But did I sense a truth that I also fully denied? Did my spirit know, the way anxiety sat sharp like claws in my stomach once I heard that he was unwell, the hovering, darkening pall that I could neither name nor shake off? I am the Family Worrier, but even for me it was extreme, how desperately I wished that Nigerian airports were open so I could get on a flight to Lagos, and then on a flight to Asaba and drive the hour to my home town to see my father for myself. So I knew. I was so close to my father that I knew, without wanting to know, without fully knowing that I knew. A thing like this, dreaded for so long, comes at last, and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened; my father is gone; my madness will now bare itself.

How quickly my life has become another life, how pitiless this becoming is, and yet how slow I am to adapt. Okey sends me a video of an elderly woman who walks through our front door, crying, and I think, I have to ask Daddy who she is. In that small moment, what has been true for the forty-two years of my life is still true—that my father is tactile, inhaling, exhaling, reachable to talk to and to watch the twinkle of his eyes behind his glasses. Then, with a horrible lurch, I remember again. That brief forgetting feels like both a betrayal and a blessing. Do I forget because I am not there? I think so. My brother and sister are there, face to face with the desolation of a house without my father. They can see that he is not at the dining table for breakfast, on his chair backing the window’s light, and that after breakfast he is not settled on the sofa in his midmorning ritual of napping, reading, and napping again. If only I could be there, too, but I am stuck in America, my frustration like a blister, scouring for news on when the Nigerian airports will open. Even the Nigerian authorities don’t seem to know. A report says July, then August, then we hear it might be in October, but the aviation minister tweets to say “may be earlier than October.” Maybe, maybe not, like playing yo-yo with a cat.

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less. “On the demise of your father.” Demise. A favorite of Nigerians, it conjures for me dark distortions. “He is resting” brings not comfort but a scoff that trails its way to pain. He could very well be resting in his room in our house in Abba, fan whirring warm air, his bed strewn with folded newspapers, a sudoku book, an old brochure from a funeral, a Knights of St. Mulumba calendar, a bag filled with his bottles of medicine, and his notebooks with the carefully lined pages, where he recorded every single thing he ate, a diabetic’s account-taking. “He is in a better place” is startling in its presumptuousness and has a taint of the inapt. How would you know—and shouldn’t I, the bereaved, be privy to this information first; should I really be learning this from you? “He was eighty-eight” so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. “It has happened so just celebrate his life,” an old friend wrote, and it incensed me—how facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. “Find peace in your memories,” I used to say. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.”

What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple “I’m sorry,” because in its banality it presumes nothing. Ndo , in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is “sorry,” with a metaphysical heft. Concrete and sincere memories from those who knew him comfort the most, and it warms me that the same words recur: “honest,” “calm,” “kind,” “strong,” “quiet,” “simple,” “peaceful,” “integrity.” My mother says that Ayogu called her to say that my father was the only boss who “never gave him any trouble.” I remember Ayogu, tall with a genteel manner, my father’s driver when my father was the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Nigeria, in the nineteen-eighties. Was it Ayogu, or was it the other driver, Kevin, the charming firebrand, of whom my father once calmly said, when I had asserted with the haughtiness of a seven-year-old that I wanted my driver to take me to school, “He is my driver, not your driver.”

There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief, the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema and “stop crying” a refrain. But I am not ready. I talk only to my closest family. It is instinctive, my recoiling. I imagine the bewilderment of some relatives, their disapproval even. At first, it is a protective stance, but later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief.

My parents’ cold-weather clothes hang in the closet of the guest room that my daughter calls “Grandpa and Grandma’s room.” I touch my father’s puffy olive jacket. In the drawer are his maps of Maryland, just as he has maps of New England in a drawer in my sister’s Connecticut home. During the months that he and my mother spent yearly in the U.S., he would study his beloved maps, the boundaries of counties, what was north and south of what, and trace every journey, even trips out to brunch. Scenes from my father’s last visit: He is walking up and down the driveway, his daily morning exercise, no longer as briskly as before, and he has decided to keep count with stones, and so we find a pile of stones near the front door. He is getting cookies in the pantry, blithely unaware of his trail of crumbs. He is standing right in front of the television, his code for “you all need to stop talking,” watching Rachel Maddow, whom he calls “bright,” while shaking his head at the imbroglio America has become.

I reread “Biography of Nigeria’s Foremost Professor of Statistics, Prof. James Nwoye Adichie,” by Emeritus Professor Alex Animalu, Professor Peter I. Uche, and Jeff Unaegbu, published in 2013, three years before my father was made professor emeritus of the University of Nigeria. The printing is uneven, the pages slightly askew, but I feel a euphoric rush of gratitude to the authors. Why does this line—“the children and I adore him”—from my mother’s tribute soothe me so; why does it feel pacifying and prophetic? It pleases me that it exists, forever declared in print. I rummage in my study for the old letters he sent from Nigeria when I first came to the U.S. to attend college, and when I find them there is an intense pathos to looking at his handwriting. It tells his story, that handwriting, the curvy script of a certain kind of colonial African education, prudent and proper, Latin-loving and rule-following. Nnem ochie, he called me. (“My grandmother.”) He always ended with “Your dad” and his signature. He wrote his signature even on our birthday cards, which made my siblings and I laugh. “Daddy, it’s not a university memo,” we’d say. I look everywhere for the piece of paper on which he drew for me our family tree going back four generations, and I cannot find it—and that I cannot find it causes me distress for days, boxes and files flung open, papers thrown aside. I look at old photographs, and from time to time my whole body swells with a sob. My father often looked stiff in photos because he grew up knowing photography as a rare and formal event at which you dressed up and sat, uncomfortable, before a man with a tripod. “Daddy, relax; Daddy, smile.” Sometimes I tried pinching his neck. There is a photo of him I remember taking. He is at our messy dining table in Nsukka, at the house on the campus of the University of Nigeria where I grew up. Our head-rubbing ritual began there. I was in secondary school when his bald patch first appeared, and I would come up behind him at the dining table and rub it, and he, without pausing in whatever he was saying, would gently slap my hand away. I watch videos, saved on my computer, that feel like revelations because I do not remember them, even though I made some of them. We are having breakfast in my Lagos home, and I am pretending to be a Nigerian journalist asking my father about his courtship with my mother while he ignores me with a small smile on his face. We are in our house in Abba, and my daughter, who is three years old, is crying because she wants to skip breakfast and play, and my father holds her and tells her nanny to take the food away and let her play.

In my study, I find his old sudoku books, the squares filled with his numbers, upright and confident, and I remember us driving to a bookshop in Maryland to buy these some years ago. He bought me one to try because “it’s very good,” but trying the first puzzle revived my hatred of mathematics, and I remembered my father coaching me and how he said, as I stalled in solving a long equation, “Yes, you’re getting there; don’t doubt yourself; don’t stop.” Is that why I believe now in always trying? It is, of course, too easy to draw simple causative lines. It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.

In secondary school, my friends and I once took a problem to the timid new mathematics teacher, Mr. O., and, glancing at the thorny problem, he hastily said that he needed to go and get his four-figure table, even though the problem didn’t require a four-figure table. We left his office, roaring with teen-age mirth. I told my father about this, expecting his laughter. But he didn’t laugh. “The man is not a good teacher, not because he didn’t know how to solve it but because he didn’t say he didn’t know.” Is that how I became a person confident enough to say that I don’t know when I don’t know? My father taught me that learning is never-ending.

Often I hailed him by his title “ Odelu-Ora Abba, ” whose literal translation is “One Who Writes for Our Community.” And he would hail me, too, and his hailing me was a love-drenched litany of affirmation. “ Ome ife ukwu ” was the most common. (“The One Who Does Great Things.”) I find the others difficult to translate: “ nwoke neli ” is roughly “the equivalent of many men,” and “ ogbata ogu ebie ” is “the one whose arrival ends the battle.” Is he the reason I have never been afraid of the disapproval of men? I think so.

No one was prepared for how deeply besotted with sudoku my father became after he retired, much to my mother’s irritation.

“He won’t eat,” she would say, “because he’s busy playing sudoku.”

“You don’t play sudoku,” he would reply mildly. “It’s not Ludo.”

And I would quip, “James and Grace, bickering since 1963.”

My mother’s first words when Okey walked into her room on the night of June 10th and turned on the light and told her were “How can?”—Nigerian-speak for “it can’t be, that’s impossible.” And then she added the words that seared their way into our hearts on that Zoom call: “But he didn’t tell me anything.” Because he would have told her. They were like that. If he was going to leave us forever, he would have told her, and so his not having told her meant that it could not be true. She was in the hospital until a few hours before and had come home to get some sleep and then return for the trip to the kidney specialist in Onitsha. “I already brought out his sweater in case he gets cold,” she said.

Their courting story charmed me. It began on a farm in 1960, with neither of them present. A relative of his was boasting about the bright young man who had just started teaching at a university and was looking for an educated wife. A relative of hers said that she was educated and beautiful, fair as an egret. Fair as an egret! Another standing family joke.

“Daddy, so you just get up and drive to a town you don’t know to ‘see’ a girl you heard about?” I teased often. But it was how things were done. My mother liked his quietness. When her family at first resisted because he wasn’t as flashy or as wealthy as her other suitors, my mother said that she would not marry anyone else. I called him D.O.S., Defender of Spouse, for how quick he always was to support my mother. One afternoon, when she was a deputy registrar—she became the first woman to be the registrar at the University of Nigeria—he came home gleeful, chortling while loosening his tie, swollen with pride about her speech at the university senate meeting. “Mummy was fantastic,” he told my brothers and me.

Okey tells me that he slipped Daddy’s watch into his pocket that night and sends me a photo, the blue-faced silver watch that Kene bought a few years ago. We were amused that my father started wearing it right away; we bought him things that he never used because, he said, his shirt from 1970 or his shoes from 1985 were still perfectly fine. I begin to look at the photo of the watch often, day after day, as if in pilgrimage. I remember it resting on my father’s wrist and my father often looking at it. This is an archetypal image of my father, his face bent to his watch, checking the time, a hyper-punctual man; for him, being on time was almost a moral imperative.

Childhood was my father downstairs on Sunday mornings, ready for Mass an hour before everyone else, walking up and down to hurry us up. In those years, he seemed remote. My mother was the warm, accessible parent, and he the man in the study writing statistics and talking to himself. I was vaguely proud of him. I didn’t know then that he was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, but I knew that he had become a full professor long before the fathers of my friends, because there was a boy at school who called me “Nwa Professor” (“Professor’s Child”). In my later teen-age years, I began to see him, to see how alike we were in our curiosity and our homebody-ness, and to talk to him and to adore him. How exquisitely he paid attention, how present he was, how well he listened. If you told him something, he remembered. His humor, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged.

My best friend, Uju, tells me how my father turned to her at the end of my Harvard Class Day speech, in 2018, and, in a voice more powerful for being muted, said, “Look, they are all standing for her.” I weep at this. Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter. His pride in me mattered, more than anyone else’s. He read everything I wrote, and his comments ranged from “this isn’t coherent at all” to “you have outdone yourself.” Each time I travelled for speaking events, I would send him my itinerary, and he sent texts to follow my progress. “You must be about to go onstage,” he would write. “Go and shine. Ome ife ukwu! ” Once, I was travelling to Denmark, and, after wishing me a safe journey, he added, in his deadpan tone, “And when you get to Denmark, look for Hamlet’s house.”

I not only adored my father in that classic manner of a daddy’s girl, but I also liked him so much. I like him. His grace and his wisdom and his simplicity and how utterly unimpressionable he was. I liked his luminous, moderate faith, strong but worn lightly. If you expected my father to stay a weekend anywhere, you had to find the nearest Roman Catholic church. When I first moved to Maryland, I worried that St. John the Evangelist, in an interfaith center in Columbia, with a guitar-playing choir—would be off-putting to him, nothing like his stained-glass Catholicism, but he pronounced the priest “very good” and happily went every Sunday. I liked that his response to power was a shrug. He worshipped integrity. He was indifferent to, if not distrustful of, grand flourishes.

“I have eight cars,” my sister’s wealthy suitor once boasted, and my father replied, “Why?”

He was not materialistic, and this would not be so remarkable if he were not a Nigerian living in Nigeria, with its hard-nosed grasping ethos, its untrammelled acquisitiveness from bottom to top. I liked his sense of duty. There was something in his nature that was capacious, a spirit that could stretch; he absorbed bad news, he negotiated, compromised, made decisions, laid down rules, held relatives together. Much of it was due to his having been born the first son in an Igbo family and having risen to its mesh of expectations and dispensations.

I liked, too, his appreciation for the properness of things. His meticulous record-keeping, the rows of files in his cabinet: each child had files for primary, secondary, and university records, and every domestic helper who ever lived with us had a file. Once, in the middle of watching an American newscast, he turned to me and asked, “What does this word ‘nuke’ mean?” And when I told him, he said, “Nuclear weapons are too serious to be given nicknames.”

“You have a particular laugh when you’re with Daddy, even when what he says isn’t funny,” my husband said. I recognized the high-pitched cackle he mimicked, and I knew that it was not so much about what my father said as it was about being with him. A laugh that I will never laugh again. “Never” feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

Last Christmas, at a housewarming party in my sister Ijeoma’s country home, my father was the patriarch and cynosure, seated in the middle of the living room, blessing the kola nut, sipping a little champagne, even though he hardly drank, and telling stories. Relatives arrived and went straight to pay him homage. He received a WhatsApp message sometime that afternoon but said nothing about it until we were back home, at night. He handed me his phone and said, “Read this. It appears this man has truly gone mad.”

“This man” was the billionaire out to seize the vast expanse of ancestral land that belongs to my hometown, Abba. Land is the jewel of Igbo cosmology, and who owns land is often about stories—whose grandfather’s grandfather farmed it, which clan migrated and which was indigenous. Land is also the thorn in so many disputes; I know of extended families torn apart while fighting over a piece of land not big enough to park a car on. The land in question has been farmed by Abba people for decades, but, at the end of the Biafran war, with the whole of Igboland in disarray, an old order gone and a new yet to be formed, the town next to ours suddenly claimed that it was theirs. Abba went to court, and the case has been tied up for years. Many people in Abba believed the billionaire was responsible for the arbitrary arrests and detention of villagers, to scare the town into giving up its claim to the land. A market was bulldozed. Compound walls were broken. (His brother disputed the claims in an interview with the Guardian .) Nobody in Abba was close to having the wealth and political connections of the billionaire, but there was a straight-talking businessman, Ikemba Njikoka, who was funding my home town’s legal expenses and speaking publicly about the billionaire’s conduct. He himself had been threatened. The WhatsApp message on my father’s phone had been forwarded by Ikemba Njikoka, saying that “you” would be arrested at a town hall meeting this weekend.

My father, not WhatsApp savvy, did not realize that it was a forwarded message and thought that he was about to be illegally arrested. He had spent the day silently burdened by this.

“Daddy, you should have said something earlier,” I said.

“I didn’t want to spoil Ijeoma’s day,” he said.

It angers me that my father’s last months were beclouded by the actions of a diminutive self-styled philanthropist drunk on oil wealth and bereft of scruples. It angers me, how worried I was for my parents’ safety, especially in late 2019, when the billionaire began a brazen campaign against my home town. “This is wrong ,” my father said often, with a moral shiver, as though it were unfathomable that a wealthy Nigerian man would act this way. Just as when he talked about exam cheating—a phenomenon so common in Nigeria as to be ordinary, but each occurrence my father heard or read about left him newly appalled. His was a kind of naïveté, an innocence of the just. When my brothers and I surprised him on his eightieth birthday, arriving at our parents’ flat in Nsukka from the U.S. and the U.K., he kept looking at my mother in bewilderment, that she could have “lied” to him. “But you said some friends were coming. You didn’t say the children were coming.”

“Mama is sad because Grandpa died,” my four-year-old daughter says to her cousin. “Died.” She knows the word “died.” She pulls tissues out of a box and hands them to me, and her emotional alertness moves, surprises, impresses me. A few days later, she asks, “When will Grandpa wake up again?”

I weep and weep and wish that her understanding of the world were real. That grief was not about the utter impossibility of return.

One morning, I am watching a video on my phone of my father, and my daughter glances at my screen and then swiftly places her hand over my eyes. “I don’t want you to watch the video of Grandpa because I don’t want you to cry,” she says. She is hawkeyed in her vigilance of my tears.

A scene from my daughter’s first months: My father is hurrying upstairs. My daughter is a howling baby downstairs in my mother’s care, and he has been sent up for the pacifier, whose name he does not remember, and so he urgently gestures to his mouth and tells me “mouth plug!” Months later, my daughter’s potty training has reached the milestone of pee, and now she has been cajoled to sit on the potty and do more than pee, a rapt audience of family watching her, and my father wanders in and mildly asks, “Would any of you go if you had so many people watching you?”

The dictates of Igbo culture, this immediate pivot from pain to planning. Just the other day, my father was on our Zoom call, and now, on this Zoom call, we are supposed to plan. To plan is to appease the egos of church and traditional groups and to get a burial date approved, which cannot be during the New Yam Festival—or any other community ceremonial—and must be a Friday, because the parish priest buries the elderly only on Fridays. But the most important thing is “clearance”—it is a word thrown about in English, “clearance.” Clearance attests to how deeply, how forcefully communitarian Igbo culture remains. Clearance means that any outstanding dues to the age grade, the town union, the village, the clan, the umunna , must be paid; otherwise, the funeral will be boycotted. A potent threat, the shunning of a funeral. To most Igbo people, at least those of my father’s generation, an almost existential fear is to be deprived of a proper funeral. It is common to hear stories of grieving families outraged by the manipulation of village groups who ask for money, this their only chance to exercise a trifling power. My father was diligent with dues, so Okey runs around to get all the receipts. There are long lists of what each group expects from us. How many coolers of rice, whether a gift of a chicken or a goat will be presented, how many cartons of beer. I look at the lists askance. It’s not a bloody party. I don’t care what we wear or what the caterer cooks or what groups come or don’t come, because I am still sinking. But I have to care; these things mattered to my father. “Think of what Daddy would want,” Chuks says, comforting me.

My grandfather died in the Biafran war, in a refugee camp, buried in an unmarked grave, and one of the first things my father did after the war was to organize a belated funeral ceremony. And so I try to remind myself that my father would want things done as they are done. There is much I find beautiful in Igbo culture, and much I quarrel with, and it is not the celebratory nature of funerals that I dislike but how soon they have to be. My mother says that some widows have come to tell her what the custom is. First, the widow will be shaved bald—and, before she can continue, my brothers promptly say that this is ridiculous and not going to happen. I say that nobody ever shaves men bald when their wives die; nobody ever makes men eat plain food for days; nobody expects the bodies of men to wear the imprint of their loss. But my mother says that she wants to do it all: “I’ll do everything that is done. I’ll do it for Daddy.”

A friend sends me a line from a novel I wrote: “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.” How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.

Imagine dreading a burial and yet longing for it to pass. We have settled on a date, September 4th, and the bishop has kindly agreed to say Mass. It will be a COVID -compliant ceremony, face masks will be required, and guests will be served in the homes of various neighbors, to maintain social-distancing rules. I am to draft the invitation. Writing “burial” is impossible for me. My best friend, Uju, types it because, at first, I cannot. But a day before we print, there are rumors that the Nigerian airports will no longer open in August. The news is haphazard—even basic information is uncoördinated—and it is all the more confounding because in neighboring countries the airports are open. Nigeria, as usual, making everything more difficult than it should be. The incompetence is iridescent, splaying, touching, tainting with its many-pronged evil shine. Disillusionment with the land of my birth has been my life’s constant, but an animosity this astringent is new. I felt something like it only once before, when my father was kidnapped, in 2015, by a group of men in collusion with his driver, who told him to ask his famous daughter to pay the ransom. Of the men who threw him into the boot of a car and left him for three days in a forest, only his driver has been caught. I have never been as grateful for my father’s dual Nigerian-American citizenship—thanks to my older sisters, who were born in America—as I then was. The Nigerian government was spiritless while the American ambassador checked in and called and sent a counsellor and a kind investigator, who coached my mother on how to talk to the kidnappers. And after Okey dropped a bag full of cash under a tree in a remote area, my father was released, rattled but calm—that capacious thing in him again.

“They didn’t pronounce your name properly, so I told them the correct pronunciation,” he told me. He seemed visibly upset only when he told us how the kidnappers had said, “Your children don’t love you” and how he had responded, “Don’t say that about my children.” After the kidnapping, my father said that he could no longer live in Nsukka; he wanted to move to “the village,” our ancestral home town Abba.

“I don’t ever want to be on that road again,” he said of the pothole-riven way where the kidnappers had cut him off and where his driver, pretending to be shocked, had stopped the car. The kidnapping brought out a new vulnerability in him, a vulnerability that was willingly laid bare, a softening of his carapace. With his vulnerability also came an old-man stubbornness, the occasional cantankerousness, which sometimes annoyed but mostly amused us.

And so September 4th is impossible. The Nigerian government announces that the airports will now open in late August, and my mother returns to the church to get a new date. It is now October 9th. The next day, a Nigerian newspaper reports that the government has said that the opening is tentative—maybe, maybe not. My mother is desperate for a firm date. “After the burial, we can begin to heal,” she says. I am heartsick to see her look so brave and so drained.

The waiting, the not knowing. All over southeastern Nigeria, mortuaries are over-full because the coronavirus has delayed funerals. It doesn’t matter that this mortuary is supposed to be the best in Anambra State. You have to visit often and tip the morticians; there are horror stories of loved ones being brought out of mortuaries looking unrecognizable. Every week, Okey goes to check on things and emerges wounded. It is as if every week he witnesses again this so fiercely unwanted transubstantiation. I have to brace myself to hear. Or I don’t want to hear. “Maybe stop going?” I suggest to him. “Let’s get somebody not close to us to go.” And Okey says, “I’ll go every week until we are able to lay him to rest. Daddy would do the same for any of us.”

One night, in a vivid dream, my father comes back. He is sitting on his usual sofa in the living room in Abba, and then at some point it becomes the living room in Nsukka. The hospital made a mistake. What about my brother Okey’s visits to the mortuary? Also a case of mistaken identity. I am ecstatic but worried that it might be a dream, and so, in the dream, I slap my arm to make sure that it is not a dream and still my father is sitting there talking quietly. I wake up with a pain so confounding that it fills up my lungs. How can your unconscious turn on you with such cruelty?

My mother tells a story of my father, in our university house in Nsukka, in the nineteen-eighties, once jumping out of the bath and dashing, still wet, to his study because he had finally figured out a problem. He loved academics but not its politics. “When I was made deputy vice-chancellor,” he told me, “I couldn’t wait to leave all the squabbling and get back to teaching.” He studied mathematics at Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university college, then affiliated with the University of London, and when he went to the University of California, Berkeley, to do a Ph.D. in statistics, on a USAID scholarship, he felt his British training was at odds with the American way. He faltered. He decided that he would leave the program and return to Nigeria, but his adviser, Erich Lehmann, encouraged him, telling him that he, too, had come to the U.S. with British training. “He was a very kind man,” my father said often, one kind person admiring another. He and my mother were asked to dinner at Lehmann’s home, and they dressed up in Nigerian abada , and on the way a little boy pointed at my father and said, “he’s wearing funny clothes”—a story that still amused my father decades later.

He returned to Nigeria with my mother and my sisters shortly before the Biafran war started. In that war, all his books were burned by Nigerian soldiers. Mounds of charred pages in a pile in my parents’ front yard, where they once grew roses. His colleagues in America sent him books to replace those that were lost; they even sent him bookshelves. I remember my father telling me how much he admired the great African-American mathematician David Blackwell, and, in my novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,” a character whose books have been lost in the Biafran war is sent books from America, with a note that reads, “For a war-robbed colleague from fellow admirers of David Blackwell in the brotherhood of mathematicians.” I now do not remember whether I made up that line or whether my father got a similar note.

In 1984, my father taught for a year at San Diego State University, and he spoke fondly of his friend Chuck Bell, an African-American academic who helped him get settled. One day, he recounted, Bell opens the fridge in my father’s apartment to get something to drink, sees a crate of eggs, and shouts, “Jim!” My father, alarmed, asks what is wrong, and Bell says, “You can’t eat eggs. They’ll kill you—too much cholesterol. You must throw them away now.”

My father told this story wryly, as if to say, “Of all the things to tell me not to eat!” and “Who knows what Americans will come up with next!”

“You can’t eat eggs!” I’d say to my father at breakfast as he spooned egg sauce onto a slice of yam.

I last saw my father in person on March 5th, just before the coronavirus changed the world. Okey and I went from Lagos to Abba. “Don’t tell anyone I’m coming,” I told my parents, to ward off visitors. “I just want a long weekend of bonding with you two.”

The photos from that visit make me weep. In the selfies we took just before Okey and I left, my father is smiling and then laughing because Okey and I are being goofy. I had no idea. I planned to be back in May for a longer visit so that we could finally record some of the stories he had told me over the years about his grandmother, his father, his childhood. He would finally show me where his grandmother’s sacred tree had stood. I had not known this part of Igbo cosmology—that some people believed that a special tree, called an ogbu chi , was the repository of their chi , their personal spirit. My father’s father was kidnapped in his youth by relatives and taken to be sold to Aro slave traders, but they rejected him because of a large sore on his leg (he walked, my father said, with a slight limp), and, when he returned home, his mother looked and saw that it was him, and, crying and screaming, she ran to her tree to touch it, to thank her chi for saving her son.

My father’s past is familiar to me because of stories told and retold, and yet I always planned to document them better, to record him speaking. I kept planning to, thinking we had time. “We will do it next time, Daddy,” I’d say, and he would say, “O.K. Next time.” There is a sensation that is frightening, of a receding, of an ancestry slipping away, but at least I am left with enough for myth, if not memory.

On March 28th, my favorite aunt, my mother’s younger sister Caroline, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, in a British hospital that was already locked down because of the coronavirus. A joyous woman. We were stunned by sadness. The virus brought close the possibility of dying, the commonness of dying, but there was a semblance of control if you stayed home, if you washed your hands. With her death, the idea of control was gone. Death could just come hurtling at you, as it had with her—perfectly fine one moment, and the next she had a very bad headache, and the next she was gone. A dark time inexorably darkened. She lived with my parents for many years before I was born, and, to my sisters, she was more a big sister than an aunt. I look back now at my father saying that her death was “shocking” in a voice strained by that shock, and I imagine the universe further plotting sinisterly. In June, he would go, and a month later, on July 11th, his only sister, my Aunt Rebecca, heartbroken about the brother she had spoken to every day, would go, too, in the same hospital as my father. An erosion, a vile rushing of floods, leaving our family forever misshapen. The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.

Why does the image of two red butterflies on a T-shirt make me cry? We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve. I don’t particularly like T-shirts, but I spend hours on a customization Web site, designing T-shirts to memorialize my father, trying out fonts and colors and images. On some, I put his initials, J.N.A., and, on others, the Igbo words “ omekannia ” and “ oyilinnia ”—which are similar in meaning, both a version of “her father’s daughter” but more exultant, more pride-struck.

Have T-shirts ever offered such escape? Often, I pause to cry. Often, I think about what he would think of them. He viewed my interest in fashion, especially my less conventional choices, with an accepting amusement. He once said, of a pair of balloon-cut trousers I wore to an event, “ Nke dika mmuo .” (“This one looks like a masquerade.”) “Masquerade” is perhaps not the word I would have chosen, but I did see his point. He would approve of some of these T-shirts, I think. It is design as therapy, filling the silences I choose, because I must spare my loved ones my endless roiling thoughts. I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter : it is an act of resistance and refusal, grief telling you that it is over and your heart saying that it is not, grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying that it is present.

It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have? One day, Okey sends a text that reads “I miss his dry humor and how he would do a funny little dance when he was happy and how he would pat your cheek and say ‘never mind.’ ” It makes my heart leap. Of course, I remember how my father always said “never mind” to make us feel better about something, but that Okey has remembered it, too, makes it feel newly true. Grief has, as one of its many egregious components, the onset of doubt. No, I am not imagining it. Yes, my father truly was lovely.

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.

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By Lauren Collins

By Alexander Maksik

By Gabe Fowler

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Book Reviews

Sloane crosley mourns her best friend in 'grief is for people'.

Heller McAlpin

Between 2008 and 2018, Sloane Crosley published three collections of personal essays that were as snappy and tart as Granny Smith apples.

She frequently dined out on her own foibles, including the ongoing challenge of keeping her stuff together — apartment keys, wallets, cigarette lighters. She also addressed more serious subjects, such as her mixed feelings about remaining single and childless into her late 30s.

In Grief Is for People, her first full-length book of nonfiction, Crosley drills much deeper to examine the greatest pain she has known: the loss of her best friend (and former boss) to suicide in July 2019. Her new book is a meditation on loss and grief that combines her verbal alacrity and mordant wit with moving descriptions that capture the ache of sleepless nights in which "the hole in my heart was like a wind tunnel that whistled straight through until dawn."

Her friend was Russell Perreault, whom Crosley identifies in this book exclusively by his first name. The head of publicity at Knopf's Vintage paperback division, Russell hired Crosley in 2004, when she was 25 and he was 37. Among other things, Grief Is for People offers an insider's account of the role of publicists in publishing, a business that changed markedly — and not for the best — during Russell's decades of "resurrecting literary lions, of keeping them alive in the press."

Author Interviews

Sloane crosley on her memoir 'grief is for people', mourning and magical thinking.

Although Russell was not as difficult as one of Crosley's earlier bosses (whom she skewered hilariously in I Was Told There'd Be Cake ), he was not an easy person to work for. "He was an excellent mentor so long as you didn't expect anything resembling patience," she writes. He had a "blunt managerial style" and "zero facility for office politics." In the years before she left publishing to write full-time, he taught her how to generate attention for authors — and deal with crises like the mess that arose around the paperback launch of James Frey's factually questionable A Million Little Pieces .

But in the early years of their working relationship, Russell, whom she describes as "pathologically social and abrasively generous," invited Crosley and other assistants to the Connecticut home he shared with the man she refers to as his "longtime partner." (A quick Google search turns up Perreault's husband, Reed Maroc.) Swimming, poolside lounging, barbecues, and thrifting at local flea markets were on the agenda — until the weekend houseparties ended abruptly, without explanation. Crosley assumes Russell's partner had decided he'd had enough.

Over the years, Russell and Crosley became so close "there was no daylight between our professional and personal lives and we did not see how this could turn into a problem." Oddly, Crosley does not question what such closeness to her boss and another man's husband said about her — or him. On weeknights when Russell was in town and his partner was in the country, they attended publicity events, operas, and dinners together. Their texts were filled with snappy repartee. He was the dedicatee of her 2018 book, Look Alive Out There .

'Look Alive Out There' Elevates Its Anecdotes With Humor And Feeling

One of the hardest writing decisions is where to begin a story. Crosley chooses to start her tale of grief one month to the day before Russell's death, when a thief entered her West Village apartment through her bedroom window via the fire escape while she was out on a brief errand. The thief made off with 41 pieces of jewelry — including an amber amulet and a domed tourmaline cocktail ring, both of which Russell admired, and both of which were part of her minimal legacy from a grandmother with whom she wasn't close. "All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way," she quips.

Crosley is taken by surprise at how upset she is over this theft and the violation of her personal space. She comes to see it as a harbinger of the far more devastating sense of loss following Russell's death. It strikes her that, just as there are no "bereavement groups for stuff" — because "Grief is for people, not things" — there's no way "to game grief in advance."

Crosley can't get her beloved friend back, but as a sort of proxy, she becomes obsessed with tracking down and retrieving some of her stolen jewelry. These scenes recall her account in Look Alive Out There of her risky dealings with the shady character who held her up for ransom after stealing her website domain name and primary email address.

Grief Is for People is loosely structured on the stages of grief — denial, bargaining, anger, depression. Crosley chronicles her attempt to wrap her head around her losses. "People like Russell, and people like me now, we don't know where sadness belongs," she writes. Like Joan Didion, she turns to literature for elucidation — William Styron, Kay Redfield Jamison, Albert Camus, George Sand, along with Didion. (She does not mention Sarah Manguso's The Guardians, another memoir about losing a close friend to suicide.)

By wrangling her complicated friend onto the pages of this elegiac book, Crosley holds onto what she can. The result is a noteworthy addition to the literature of grief.

How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear

T he phone call from my daughter in North Carolina came at six o’clock in the morning, unusually early for her. “I’m pregnant,” Maggie announced, her voice bubbling with delight.

From 1,600 miles away I put down my mug of smoky dark-roast coffee and gave a shout. Her news was the last thing I would have expected as I sat in my rented house in Albuquerque, watching roadrunners skitter over the xeriscaping in the front yard, stabbing at the dried mealworms I’d just put out for them. 

Maggie and her husband, Jimmy, together for 11 years and married for eight, had been on the fence about having children. Four years into their marriage, they decided to try for a baby. But after years passed, they both assumed and then accepted it wasn’t going to happen.

Read More: What My Family Taught Me About Loneliness

I’d looked on with a mixture of curiosity and a small bit of envy as friends welcomed one grandchild after another. My oldest son, Liam, in his early 40s, was at the time unattached. I’d resigned myself to the possibility of never knowing that particular brand of joy, although I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually be someone’s grandmother.

And yet, here I was, trying to wrap my head around the idea. I walked through the house, my brindle Boxer dogging my footsteps as I did a quick inventory of room after room. In the next couple of days, I began packing up my belongings and arranging for housing with dear friends back home. 

During one of our phone calls, my daughter had asked, “What do you want your grandmother name to be?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed. 

Meanwhile, I worked to tamp down a rising anxiety. My second child, Cooper, had been born 40 years ago with a heart defect. When he was 4 days old, he had closed-heart surgery to repair a coarctation of the aorta. What we didn’t know — what no one could have known then, with limited ability to see inside an infant’s heart — was there were other, more deadly defects hidden within, two holes in the wall separating the atria. When he was 6 weeks old, he died quietly at home in my arms as I held and rocked him, unaware he was slipping away from me.

Read More: I Got Divorced. But My Family Is Still Whole

When Cooper died, Liam was 2 1/2. To say I became an overly anxious mother would be an understatement. I monitored every bump and bruise, each sniffle and fever. Nightmares of childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses pushed their way into everyday activities. After all, I now knew that the worst was possible. 

Then I became pregnant again. After Maggie was born, I slept with her on my stomach most nights, and when she finally transitioned to a crib, I’d go into her room in the morning, half-expecting to find she’d died.

The grip on my heart gradually released, though, as my healthy children grew into their wonderful selves with nothing more than the usual list of childhood maladies and injuries. And now here was my baby having a baby. My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread.

My daughter sent me the first ultrasound photos of “Little Bean,” a nickname they’d given in the earliest days when a pregnancy app indicated the developing clump of cells was the size of a vanilla bean.

I peered at the mottled, blurry image of my grandchild at 8 weeks gestation. “What am I seeing?” I asked.

“Here,” she texted and sent a second photo, this one with a red arrow pointing to a small darkish blob with a hazy dot in it like a dandelion tuft. “The brighter spot is the heart,” she wrote.

I peered at the picture, trying to imagine the fuzzy image as a beating heart. Something in me broke open, then just as quickly slammed shut. 

Some years before, during my tenure at the domestic-violence and rape crisis agency, a co-worker had asked if I’d mind holding her newborn while she attended a short meeting. I happily took her baby boy in my arms, cooing and grinning at him, and brought him into my office. Sinking into the chair, the first thing I did was check to make sure he was breathing, as easily as one might check to make sure his socks were still on. Hot tears of sorrow and anger spilled down my cheeks at my automatic reaction to holding an infant. 

This is how trauma lives in the body, tentacled through our sense memory. So much of the terrible night my son died remains a blur. What I have recalled all too well is the cold stillness, the weight of his tiny form, and the shock of him being so utterly gone.

Little Bean turned out to be a girl and with the given name June. All ultrasounds and other tests revealed her to be developing as she should. But I couldn’t shake the sense of dread.

“So much could go wrong,” I worried aloud to a friend.

“And so much could go right,” was her loving response.

Read More: We Didn't Have Much Money. My Daughter Still Deserved Joy

Maggie was induced early one morning, and labor progressed slowly over the course of the day. At 9:37 that night I witnessed the moment my daughter pushed her baby girl into the world, a 7 ½-lb. miracle with downy dark hair and an adorable button nose. My son-in-law said I should do the honors — the obstetrician handed me the scissors, and I cut the cord, severing June from the warm, liquid world of her mother’s womb, and officially welcoming her Earthside.

But after her first breath, the newborn cry, that plaintive, sharp wail all parents wait for, didn’t come. The nurses took June from my daughter’s arms and continued to rub and stimulate her as she blinked in the glare of the bright room, but her blood oxygen levels remained concerningly low.

“We’re going to take her to the nursery,” one of the nurses said. My son-in-law followed. My daughter, unable to leave the bed because of the epidural, looked at me from across the room.

A chest X-ray confirmed a suspected pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest. Because we live in a small town with a small hospital, June would need to be transported to an NICU an hour and a half away. Watching my daughter and son-in-law say a tearful goodbye to their newborn was one of the most wrenching scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The next morning my daughter was discharged, and I drove her to see her baby girl at the hospital where my son-in-law already was.

The neonatal specialist assured them that the small hole in her lung would likely heal on its own, and three days later they brought June home. “Just forget this happened,” the doctor said. All signs pointed to complete health.

But I was in a tailspin that I couldn’t seem to pull out of. 

Those first weeks I’d come to their house on Friday, taking charge of June at midnight after my daughter nursed her, and giving her the 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. bottles, watching her mouth as she suckled, stroking her soft skin. Did I feel like her grandmother? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Friends had described a dizzying happiness at being “in the best club ever.”

What I felt too much of was terror, deathly afraid of the small bundle I held, continually monitoring her rosebud lips for signs of a bluish tint, watching to make sure her chest was rising and falling, panicking when it seemed too long between breaths. The urge to tumble helplessly in love with my granddaughter was in full battle with the freshly resurfaced memories of the night my son died. I kept my fears to myself, not wanting to foist my unease on my already traumatized daughter and son-in-law, who were struggling to return to the normalcy of welcoming this new baby into their lives after her scary start. 

One afternoon, talking on the phone with a friend while driving in town, I heard myself say, “The doctors assured them the hole in her heart would heal.” There was a stunned silence as I realized what I’d said. “I mean her lung,” I said and hung up, pulling into a grocery-store parking lot where I sat with my face in my hands, weeping. In that moment, I knew I had a choice — release the dark grief or risk missing one of the most light-filled times of my life. 

“That was that baby,” I told myself. “This baby doesn’t have any holes in her heart. This baby is fine.” I offered myself a mantra to try. “That was then, this is now.” Whenever the old trepidation would rise, I’d repeat the words, reminding myself of the distance in years and reality between the death of my son and the life of this sweet, healthy baby girl. Gradually, my heart unwound.

One afternoon, while my daughter napped in the next room, I snuggled little June close and rocked her. I leaned down to listen to the sound of her quiet breathing, this time not from fear but wonder. She looked up at me with deep blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes and stared as if memorizing my face. Unable to look away, I let her hold me in the power of her wide-open gaze.

“The brighter spot is the heart,” my daughter had written to me all those months ago, and now baby June and I sat basking in the light of a love big enough to hold it all — yesterday’s grief, today’s joy, and all the beautiful and uncertain tomorrows. 

Outside, a soft breeze blew, and a shard of sunlight shot through the trees. I kissed my granddaughter’s forehead and began to sing.

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Here’s the way I found support in my journey through grief

Personal essay by Emily Halnon, CNN

(CNN) — When my mom died, I spent a lot of time trying to stuff away my grief. Like, cramming another pile of bills into the junk drawer, so no one could see the mess inside.

I went to a friend’s house for dinner a month after her funeral. I hovered on the outskirts of the evening. Snippets of conversation floated around me, but my brain was foggy with grief. I couldn’t quite grasp onto anything through the haze.

My gaze caught on a framed photo of my friend and her mom, snapped in front of a rose bush in Eugene, Oregon, their arms pulled tight around the other.

The picture reminded me of the last time my mom visited me in Oregon. She posted Facebook updates from all three of the airports between Vermont and Eugene. A photo of a book cracked open on her lap in Salt Lake City, a coffee cup next to her. “Three hours and 17 minutes until I see my girl.”

When I picked her up, she bounced through the terminal to get to me. We spent the weekend running along the Willamette River, visiting covered bridges in the foothills of the Cascades, finding the best pastries in a 50-mile radius. She raced a half-marathon. She was 64. I thought we had decades left together. A thousand more miles to run.

The memories unleashed a rush of grief. I walked to the bathroom at my friend’s house as fast as I could, trying to conceal why I needed an escape route. My throat tightened. My eyes grew glassy with tears.

I slid into the bathroom, sat on the lid of the toilet and shoved a handful of toilet paper into my eyes. An ache gnawed at my heart. I pictured my friend and her mom. I thought about all the years and visits and miles I had lost with my mom. I swallowed back a sob, aware of the thin door between me and a room full of laughing people.

It was a familiar move. One I pulled at work, at the climbing gym, in the line at the brewery on the north side of town. I tried to hide my grief, so others didn’t have to see it. I bit my lip and pinched my eyes when I felt a wave of tears coming on. I pretended I was OK when I was anything but. I learned to almost never provide an honest answer to the question, “How are you doing?”

My grief made people uneasy

My mom had been sick with a rare uterine cancer for 13 months before she died. I’d already been the Sad Girl for too long. I felt the ways it was uncomfortable for people to be too close to my hardest emotions. And the ways society wanted me to grieve in isolation and to accelerate my journey through loss.

I’d faced many uncomfortable silences and quick goodbyes when someone wanted their own escape route away from me. I’d had friendships fade over the last 14 months and watched coworkers avoid my cubicle when I got back from any trip to Vermont.

A relationship ended when my then-boyfriend didn’t want anything to do with my emotional reality.

“I just don’t think you’re being positive enough,” he said after my mom was diagnosed with an aggressive, late-stage cancer. I’d just learned my mother would probably die within a year. Positivity felt like it was on another planet.

When my mom died in January 2020, I felt moved to do something to celebrate her life and her bold and brave spirit. She’d run her first marathon at 50. She learned how to swim when she turned 60, so she could do her first triathlon. She jumped out of a plane that same year to celebrate her birthday. And she lived through her 13 months of cancer with extraordinary courage and joy.

My mother felt the weight of cancer, but she insisted on continuing to live in her wholehearted way. She walked the dirt roads around her house in Vermont nearly every day she was sick, even through the harsh side effects of chemotherapy. She’d text me and tell me about the friends who joined her and how blue the sky was over the rolling hills.

“It’s what keeps me going,” she said.

Running in my mother’s honor

I decided to run the 460-mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail that crosses Oregon —and to try and do it faster than any human before me. My mom was every reason I was a runner because I watched her run that first marathon and felt wildly inspired to do one myself. I got hooked on exploring my limits through running and kept going.

Doing a big run in her honor felt like an obvious path to take through the upheaval of her death. But when I started training for it, I wondered if it was a terrible idea to attempt such a huge run while trudging through the heaviest grief.

On one of my first days of training, I went through the motions to get ready. Every move was weighed down by grief. I laced my shoes like my fingers were dragging through molasses. I walked out the door like I was wading through mud, questioning my decision.

I headed to the wooded hills behind my house. When I stepped onto the soft dirt that weaves through the pine trees, I exhaled. My breath flowed through me like a river, finally escaping the logjam that’d kept it wound tight inside me.

The soft dirt cradled my footsteps as I ran. A breeze rustled pine needles and wrapped around me. I remembered bringing my mom to this trail and felt a hot tear roll down my cheek and fall to the earth below. The fierce longing for her was lockstep with me on the trail.

As I ran, I thought about that first marathon I did with my mom.

I had gone out way too fast and hit a wall of fatigue about halfway through the race, where I felt like I couldn’t keep going. As I struggled, I saw my mom bounce past around mile 14 — and I was amazed that her stride was strong and confident.

I called to her, “Mommmmm!” like I was 5 years old again and wailing for my mother. But the race was too crowded for her to hear me.

I cried again, “Mommmm!”

I made no attempt to hide how I was feeling in that moment. Very few people do, while running a marathon, or any long distance on the roads or trails. If you stand on the sides of a marathon course, you’ll see the rawest human emotions on display.

It’s one of the things I love most about running.

No hiding your grief when running

Like, in a 100-mile race, you’re pretty much guaranteed to hit a low. Almost no one makes it to the finish line without getting slapped with something rough: debilitating self-doubt, obliterated muscles, a sour stomach, crushing overwhelm.

And when that happens, we don’t run to the bathroom to hide our feelings behind a closed door. We confront those lows in front of our fellow runners, our friends, the volunteers, the spectators.

When I bonked at mile 40 of my first 100-mile run, I told members of my crew, “I’m having a hard time right now,” and they didn’t flinch in the face of my struggle. They helped me into a camp chair, brought me slices of quesadilla and stayed by my side. They held space for me to work through my low.

When we stand on the start line of a marathon or a 100-mile race, we embrace the vulnerability that goes with the distance. We know it might get hard. We know we might turn into a running billboard, advertising our toughest moments. And we run straight into that reality. We promise the humans standing alongside us that we’ll bear witness to what they endure and not turn away from them.

There are so few spaces that invite that kind of emotional honesty — and create space for it.

Pressure not to feel grief

I got five days of bereavement at work. In this culture, there’s an expiration date on our time as the Sad Girl, in the company of anyone but our closest friends and family. There’s pressure to travel quickly from the center of Griefville to the streets of perfectly OK. Even though I am not.

On the trail, I am free to feel my feelings. When I step into the woods, I’m like a snake shedding my skin, leaving a more tender part of me exposed. I can let my guard down and allow my rawest emotions to bubble to the surface.

I was worried the Pacific Crest Trail run would be too much. But as I kept training, I discovered that running was one of the best places to process my grief. I could move through my sorrow, instead of swallowing it back and trapping it inside me. Running gave me something I desperately needed after losing my mom. Something that’s way harder to find than it should be.

Running gave me a place where I didn’t have to stuff anything away, where I could let my love for my mother and my grief over losing her far too soon unfold with the miles and take up as much space as the ground beneath my feet and the wide, open sky above.

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Perspectives on Death and Dying : Grief

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Introduction

Grief is universal, but the individual's experience with grief is unique and unpredictable. The materials selected for inclusion in this section attempt to cover a wide range of accounts while de-emphasizing the theoretical models of grief (aside from Kubler-Ross). With that in mind, this section provides less academic material and instead welcomes those seeking to understand & explore grief through the human experience.

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What is grief?

Myths and facts about grief and grieving, the grieving process, the 5 stages of grief, symptoms of grief and loss, types of grief and loss, finding support for grief and loss, taking care of yourself as you grieve, coping with grief and loss stages of grief, the grieving process, and learning to heal.

Whatever loss you’ve suffered, there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. But by understanding the types and stages of grief, you can find healthier ways to cope.

Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. Often, the pain of loss can feel overwhelming. You may experience all kinds of difficult and unexpected emotions, from shock or anger to disbelief, guilt, and profound sadness.

The pain of grief can also disrupt your physical health, making it difficult to sleep, eat, or even think straight. These are normal reactions to loss—and the more significant the loss, the more intense your grief will be.

Coping with the loss of someone or something you love is one of life’s biggest challenges. You may associate grieving with bereavement, the death of a loved one—which is often the cause of the most intense type of grief—but any loss can cause grief.

The most common sources of grief are:

• Bereavement
• Death of a pet
• Divorce or relationship breakup
• Loss of health
• Losing a job
• Loss of  financial stability
• A miscarriage
• Loss of a cherished dream
• A loved one’s  serious illness
• Loss of a friendship
• Loss of safety after a trauma
• Selling the family home

Even subtle losses in life can trigger a sense of grief. For example, you might grieve after moving away from home, graduating from college, or changing jobs.

Whatever your loss, it’s personal to you, so don’t feel ashamed about how you feel, or believe that it’s somehow only appropriate to grieve for certain things. If the person, animal, relationship, or situation was significant to you, it’s normal to grieve the loss you’re experiencing. Whatever the cause of your grief, though, there are healthy ways to cope with the pain that, in time, can ease your sadness and help you come to terms with your loss, find new meaning, and eventually move on with your life.

The grief of losing a loved one

Whether it’s a close friend, spouse, partner, parent, child, or other relative, few things are as painful as losing someone you love. After such a significant loss, life may never seem quite the same again. But in time, you can ease your sorrow, start to look to the future, and eventually come to terms with your loss.

The pain will go away faster if you ignore it

Trying to ignore your pain or keep it from surfacing will only make it worse in the long run. For real healing, it is necessary to face your grief and actively deal with it.

It’s important to “be strong” in the face of loss.

Feeling sad, frightened, or lonely is a normal reaction to loss. Crying doesn’t mean you are weak. You don’t need to “protect” your family or friends by putting on a brave front. Showing your true feelings can help them and you.

If you don’t cry, it means you aren’t sorry about the loss.

Crying is a normal response to sadness, but it’s not the only one. Those who don’t cry may feel the pain just as deeply as others. They may simply have other ways of showing it.

Grieving should last about a year.

There is no specific time frame for grieving. How long it takes differs from person to person.

Moving on with your life means forgetting about your loss.

Moving on means you’ve accepted your loss—but that’s not the same as forgetting. You can move on with your life and keep the memory of someone or something you lost as an important part of you. In fact, as we move through life, these memories can become more and more integral to defining the people we are.

Grieving is a highly individual experience; there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. How you grieve depends on many factors, including your personality and coping style, your life experience, your faith, and how significant the loss was to you.

Inevitably, the grieving process takes time. Healing happens gradually; it can’t be forced or hurried—and  there is no “normal” timetable for grieving . Some people start to feel better in weeks or months. For others, the grieving process is measured in years. Whatever your grief experience, it’s important to be patient with yourself and allow the process to naturally unfold.

How to deal with the grieving process

While grieving a loss is an inevitable part of life, there are ways to help cope with the pain, come to terms with your grief, and eventually, find a way to pick up the pieces and move on with your life.

• Acknowledge your pain.
• Accept that grief can trigger many different and unexpected emotions.
• Understand that your grieving process will be unique to you.
• Seek out face-to-face support from people who care about you.
• Support yourself emotionally by taking care of yourself physically.
• Recognize the difference between grief and depression.

Speak to a Licensed Therapist

BetterHelp is an online therapy service that matches you to licensed, accredited therapists who can help with depression, anxiety, relationships, and more. Take the assessment and get matched with a therapist in as little as 48 hours.

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced what became known as the “five stages of grief.” These stages of grief were based on her studies of the feelings of patients facing terminal illness, but many people have generalized them to other types of negative life changes and losses, such as the death of a loved one or a break-up.

The 5 stages of grief are:

Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”

Anger: “ Why is this happening? Who is to blame?”

Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will ____.”

Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything.”

Acceptance: “I’m at peace with what happened.”

If you are experiencing any of these emotions following a loss, it may help to know that your reaction is natural and that you’ll heal in time. However, not everyone who grieves goes through all of these stages—and that’s okay. Contrary to popular belief,  you do not have to go through each stage in order to heal. In fact, some people resolve their grief without going through  any of these stages. And if you do go through these stages of grief, you probably won’t experience them in a neat, sequential order, so don’t worry about what you “should” be feeling or which stage you’re supposed to be in.

Kübler-Ross herself never intended for these stages to be a rigid framework that applies to everyone who mourns. In her last book before her death in 2004, she said of the five stages of grief: “They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but  there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss.  Our grieving is as individual as our lives.”

Grief can be a roller coaster

Instead of a series of stages, we might also think of the grieving process as a roller coaster, full of ups and downs , highs and lows. Like many roller coasters, the ride tends to be rougher in the beginning, the lows may be deeper and longer.

The difficult periods should become less intense and shorter as time goes by, but it takes time to work through a loss. Even years after a loss, especially at special events such as a family wedding or the birth of a child, we may still experience a strong sense of grief.

While loss affects people in different ways, many of us experience the following symptoms when we’re grieving. Just remember that almost anything that you experience in the early stages of grief is normal—including feeling like you’re going crazy, feeling like you’re in a bad dream, or questioning your religious or spiritual beliefs.

Emotional symptoms of grief

Shock and disbelief. Right after a loss, it can be hard to accept what happened. You may feel numb, have trouble believing that the loss really happened, or even deny the truth. If a pet or someone you love has died, for example, you may keep expecting them to show up, even though you know they’re gone.

Sadness. Profound sadness is probably the most universally experienced symptom of grief. You may have feelings of emptiness, despair, yearning, or deep loneliness. You may also cry a lot or feel emotionally unstable.

Guilt. You may regret or feel guilty about things you did or didn’t say or do. You may also feel guilty about certain feelings (feeling relieved when a person died after a long, difficult illness, for example). You may even feel guilty for not doing more to prevent your loss, even if it was completely out of your hands.

Fear. A significant loss can trigger a host of worries and fears. If you’ve lost your partner, your job, or your home, for example, you may feel anxious, helpless, or insecure about the future. You may even have panic attacks . The death of a loved one can trigger fears about your own mortality, of facing life without that person, or the responsibilities you now face alone.

[Read: Dealing with Uncertainty]

Anger. Even if the loss was nobody’s fault, you may feel angry and resentful. If you lost a loved one, you may be angry with yourself, God, the doctors, or even the person who died for abandoning you. You may feel the need to blame someone for the injustice that was done to you.

Physical symptoms of grief

We often think of grief as a strictly emotional process, but grief often involves physical problems, including:

• Lowered immunity
• Weight loss or weight gain
• Aches and pains

Since the experience of grieving following the loss of someone or something important to you tends to be unique to you, it’s difficult to label any type of grief as either “normal” or “abnormal”. However, there are types of grief that fall outside the expected symptoms and reactions described above. These include:

Anticipatory grief

As the name suggests, anticipatory grief develops before a significant loss occurs rather than after. If a loved one is terminally ill, for example, you have an aging pet, or you know that your retirement or job loss is imminent you may start grieving your loss before it has fully unfolded.

[Read: When a Loved One is Terminally Ill]

Like conventional grief, anticipatory grief can involve a mix of confusing emotions, particularly anger. Some people even equate it to giving up hope and refuse to allow themselves to grieve before their loss has occurred. However, anticipatory grief can also give you chance to prepare for your loss, resolve any unfinished business, or say your goodbyes, for example.

Disenfranchised grief

Disenfranchised grief can occur when your loss is devalued, stigmatized, or cannot be openly mourned. Some people may minimize the loss of a job, a pet, or a friendship, for example, as something that’s not worth grieving over. You may feel stigmatized if you suffered a miscarriage or lost a loved one to suicide .

Disenfranchised grief can also occur when your relationship to a deceased is not recognized. Some people may consider it inappropriate to grieve for a work colleague, classmate, or neighbor, for example. As a close friend or same-sex partner you may be denied the same sympathy and understanding as a blood relative. This can make it even more difficult to come to terms with your loss and navigate the grieving process.

Complicated grief

The pain at a significant loss may never completely disappear, but it should ease up over time. When it doesn’t—and it keeps you from resuming your daily life and relationships—it may be a sign of complicated grief.

Complicated grief usually arises from the death of a loved one , where the loss has left you stuck in a state of bereavement. You may be unable to accept your loved one has gone, search for them in familiar places, experience intense longing, or even feel that life isn’t worth living.

If you’re experiencing complicated grief and the pain from your loss remains unresolved, it’s important to reach out for support and take the steps that will enable you to heal.

The pain of grief can often cause you to want to withdraw from others and retreat into your shell. But having the face-to-face support of other people is vital to healing from loss. Even if you’re not comfortable talking about your feelings under normal circumstances, it’s important to express them when you’re grieving.

While sharing your loss can make the burden of grief easier to carry, that doesn’t mean that every time you interact with friends and family, you need to talk about your loss. Comfort can also come from just being around others who care about you. The key is not to isolate yourself.

Turn to friends and family members. Now is the time to lean on the people who care about you, even if you take pride in being strong and self-sufficient. Rather than avoiding them, draw friends and loved ones close, spend time together face to face, and accept the assistance that’s offered. Often, people want to help but don’t know how, so tell them what you need—whether it’s a shoulder to cry on, a listening ear, or just someone to hang out with. If you don’t feel you have anyone you can regularly connect with in person, it’s never too late to build new friendships .

Accept that many people feel awkward when trying to comfort someone who’s grieving. Grief can be a confusing, sometimes frightening emotion for many people, especially if they haven’t experienced a similar loss themselves. They may feel unsure about how to comfort you and end up saying or doing the wrong things. But don’t use that as an excuse to retreat into your shell and avoid social contact. If a friend or loved one reaches out to you, it’s because they care.

Draw comfort from your faith. If you follow a religious tradition, embrace the comfort its mourning rituals can provide. Spiritual activities that are meaningful to you—such as praying, meditating, or going to church—can offer solace. If you’re questioning your faith in the wake of the loss, talk to a clergy member or others in your religious community.

Join a support group. Grief can feel very lonely, even when you have loved ones around. Sharing your sorrow with others who have experienced similar losses can help. To find a bereavement support group in your area, contact local hospitals, hospices, funeral homes, and counseling centers, or see the links below.

[Read: Support Groups: Types, Benefits, and What to Expect]

Talk to a therapist or grief counselor. If your grief feels like too much to bear, find a mental health professional with experience in grief counseling. An experienced therapist can help you work through intense emotions and overcome obstacles to your grieving. If in-person therapy is not accessible to you, consider online therapy , which can be just as effective.

Beware how you use social media

Social media can be useful in letting others know about your loss and reaching out for support. However, it can also attract Internet trolls who post inappropriate, insensitive, or even abusive messages. To spare yourself additional pain and heartache at this time, you may want to limit your social media use to closed groups rather than public postings that can be commented on by anyone.

When you’re grieving, it’s more important than ever to take care of yourself. The stress of a major loss can quickly deplete your energy and emotional reserves. Looking after your physical and emotional needs will help you get through this difficult time.

Face your feelings. You can try to suppress your grief, but you can’t avoid it forever. In order to heal, you have to acknowledge the pain. Trying to avoid feelings of sadness and loss only prolongs the grieving process. Unresolved grief can also lead to complications such as depression, anxiety , substance abuse, and health problems.

Express your feelings in a tangible or creative way. Even if you’re not able to talk about your loss with others, it can help to write down your thoughts and feelings in a journal, for example. Or you could release your emotions by making a scrapbook or volunteering for a cause related to your loss.

Try to maintain your hobbies and interests. There’s comfort in routine and getting back to the activities that bring you joy and connect you closer to others can help you come to terms with your loss and aid the grieving process.

Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel, and don’t tell yourself how to feel either. Your grief is your own, and no one else can tell you when it’s time to “move on” or “get over it.” Let yourself feel whatever you feel without embarrassment or judgment. It’s okay to be angry, to yell at the heavens, to cry or not to cry. It’s also okay to laugh, to find moments of joy, and to let go when you’re ready.

Look after your physical health. The mind and body are connected. When you feel healthy physically, you’ll be better able to cope emotionally. Combat stress and fatigue by getting enough sleep, eating right, and exercising . Don’t use alcohol or drugs to numb the pain of grief or lift your mood artificially.

[Read: Self-Medicating Depression, Anxiety, and Stress]

Plan ahead for grief “triggers.” Anniversaries, holidays, and important milestones can reawaken painful memories and feelings. Be prepared for an emotional wallop, and know that it’s completely normal. You can plan ahead by making sure that you’re not alone, for example, or by marking your loss in a creative way.

For more help facing up to and managing distressing emotions like grief…

Use HelpGuide’s free Emotional Intelligence Toolkit .

Grief and loss resources

In the U.S.:  Crisis Call Center  at 775-784-8090

UK:  Cruse Bereavement Care  at 0808 808 1677

Australia:  GriefLine  at (03) 9935 7400

Other support:

Find a GriefShare group meeting near you  – Worldwide directory of support groups for people grieving the death of a family member or friend. (GriefShare)

Find Support  – Directory of programs and support groups in the U.S. for children experiencing grief and loss. (National Alliance for Grieving Children)

Chapter Locator  for finding help for grieving the loss of a child in the U.S. and  International Support  for finding help in other countries. (The Compassionate Friends)

If you're feeling suicidal…

Seek help immediately. Please read  Suicide Help , talk to someone you trust, or call a suicide helpline:

• In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255.
• In the UK, call 08457 90 90 90.
• In Australia, call 13 11 14.
• Or visit  IASP  to find a helpline in your country.

More Information

• Guide to Mourning - A guide to preparing for and mourning the death of a loved one. (Harvard Medical School Special Health Report)
• For Teens: How to Cope - Article for teens on how to cope with grief and loss. (TeensHealth)
• Coping with Reminders - Tips for coping with the grief that can resurface even years after you’ve lost a loved one. (Mayo Clinic)
• The Importance Of Mourning Small Losses - Understanding disenfranchised grief. (NPR)
• 4 Types of Grief Nobody Told You About - Examines less common reasons for grief such as loss of identity, safety, and dreams. (Psychology Today)
• Depressive Disorders. (2013). In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . American Psychiatric Association. Link
• Zisook, S., & Shear, K. (2009). Grief and bereavement: What psychiatrists need to know. World Psychiatry, 8 (2), 67–74. Link
• Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Stroebe, W. (2007). Health outcomes of bereavement. The Lancet, 370 (9603), 1960–1973. Link
• Simon, N. M., Wall, M. M., Keshaviah, A., Dryman, M. T., LeBlanc, N. J., & Shear, M. K. (2011). Informing the symptom profile of complicated grief. Depression and Anxiety, 28 (2), 118–126. Link
• Corr, C. A. (1999). Enhancing the Concept of Disenfranchised Grief. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 38 (1), 1–20. Link
• Johansson, A. K., & Grimby, A. (2012). Anticipatory grief among close relatives of patients in hospice and palliative wards. The American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Care, 29 (2), 134–138. Link

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Dealing With Grief and Loss Essay

Description of grief, stages of grieving, anticipatory grief, psychiatric management of grief caused by death, grief and stress, coping with stress, my reaction to stress.

There are numerous studies in the field of mental health about grief and bereavement following traumatic events. Some of these studies examine certain conditions such as complicated grief (CG), which is characterized by prolonged grieving, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

According to Elhai and Schinider (2007), more than 50% of the world population had experienced a significantly high level of a potentially traumatic situation, such as a fatal accident, natural calamity, or witnessing a trauma. A majority of people, who have been faced with a form of grief or bereavement, can overcome their grief within a period of several months to one year.

People suffering from uncomplicated incidents of stress manage to overcome their grief and resume their regular operations after some time. However, some individuals who face a tragic loss respond by refusing to acknowledge the trauma. This causes the individual to go through a persistent phase of sorrow, commonly known as complicated grief (CG).

Studies show that the risk of CG is increased by a lack of emotional support, especially for individuals who are geographically distanced from conventional support systems such as family, relatives, or a home church. CG can, at times, be accompanied with PTSD, which is characterized by re-experience of the distressing event, isolation and emotional freezing, and hyper arousal in response to the trauma.

Grief is defined as the normal response of emotion, sorrow, and confusion that results in the loss of someone or something that bears deep meaning and importance to an individual. It is a normal reaction when an individual is separated from things and people who form their typical livelihood due to death, illness, job loss, or separation from friends and family.

Grief is often mistaken with depression, though the latter is characterized by a whole body disorder arising from the loss. The first reaction to death or loss involves a feeling of shock, accompanied by a feeling of emptiness and numbness. Grief is also characterized by physical changes such as nausea, difficulty in breathing, trembling, loss of appetite, and insomnia.

People experiencing grief also exhibit anger with things and other people, as well as, a feeling of guilt, thinking that they could have altered the events leading to the loss. This causes grief-stricken people to withdraw socially and be absent-minded for a period following the loss.

The grief period extends until the individual accepts the loss and learns to live with it. Some people may grieve for months and others for years. The symptoms of depression are similar to those of normal grieving though the thoughts of the individuals may cause them to contemplate or attempt suicide.

Studies show a typical four stage grief process in most people who suffer death or loss (Boelen & van den Bout, 2005). The first stage involves accepting the loss, followed by a physical and emotional expression of the pain of grieving. The third stage involves adjustments made by the individual in order to continue living in the absence of the lost person or item, while the fourth stage involves the individual overcoming the grief and moving on with life.

Unless the individual goes through all four stages, he or she is said to be still in the grieving process. The length of time spent in this process is varied and dependent on the type of relationship with the person lost, and other personal factors including personality, culture, and life experiences (Boelen & van den Bout, 2005).

Grief is one of the many reactions encountered by individuals due to separation. As mentioned above, there are multiple causes of grief besides actual death. Separation by death may be caused by a variety of factors, though the separation is characterized by its irreversibility and finality.

Studies show that grief may be caused by numerous factors besides bereavement, such as the experience of a separation followed by the departure of a close person into the armed forces (Schnider & Elhai, 2007). Grief in this case is not caused by death, but the threat of death, which is referred to as anticipatory grief.

In such situations, the grieving individual is worried about her adjustment after the potential death if the family member or friend, causing them to go through the usual phases of grief.

These phases include depression, increased occupation with the departed, a review of the possible dangers that the person is exposed to, and an anticipation of the kinds of adjustments that might follow in the event of death. Studies claim that this kind of reaction safeguards the individuals against the implications of an abrupt death notice (Schnider & Elhai, 2007). However, the reaction may bear negative repercussions in the event of a re-union.

There have been a few complaints that soldiers who returned to their homes experienced reduced affection from their spouses, and in some instances, they demanded instant divorce. In such cases, the patient had gone through the grieving period and decided to move on by interacting with new people. Studies show that such instances of anticipatory grief can be avoided through prophylactic measure (Schnider & Elhai, 2007)s.

Studies show that grieving individuals who undergo a certain level of psychiatric management do not experience prolonged and serious variations in their social adjustment. In addition, such individuals are able to evade potential medical diseases that grieving people are prone to.

The role of the psychiatrist involves sharing the individual’s grief work, which involves the efforts made by the bereaved to disentangle himself from the bondage of the deceased or the lost item, and finding new ways of positive living in the absence.

The psychiatrist is required to observe the reaction of the bereaved, who may either over-react or under-react. Such delayed reactions may happen at erratic times and the harmful misrepresentations of the grief reaction that are initially hidden, may prove to be destructive at a later time, while they can be prevented at the moment.

Religious agencies are one of the leading bodies in handling the bereaved. Some religions provide comfort to grieving individuals by providing a backing of dogma to the patient’s wish for continued interaction with the deceased. This involves the use of well-developed rituals that preserve the patient’s interaction with the bereaved.

In doing this, the religions can assist the bereaved in overcoming the morbid feelings of guilt of the patient by ‘Divine Grace’ and by the promise of an opportunity to interact with the deceased at the time of a ‘later re-union.’ Studies show that these religious procedures have helped numerous numbers of mourners who have suffered grief from death (Chochinov & Holland, 1990).

Despite the positive results obtained from such forms of comfort, studies reveal that the process does not provide adequate assistance in the patient’s grief work. This is because the bereaved individual is required to review his relationship with the deceased to become fully aware of the alterations and cope with them in his own mode of emotional reaction.

The individual needs to overcome some emotions on his own, including the fear of insanity, and the fear of accepting the hostile feelings arising from the sorrow and sense of loss. This process allows the bereaved person to come up with an acceptable means of relating to the deceased individual in the future.

The individual is required to verbalize his feelings of guilt by finding a person that he is comfortable with in sharing his emotional state, and one who can influence new patterns of conduct. This individual acts as a primer, and psychologists who assume this role provide their patients with about ten sessions of personal interaction (Chochinov & Holland, 1990).

Some bereaved individuals react by becoming hostile, in which case, special techniques are adopted to manage the grief reaction. This hostility may be directed at the primer, causing the patient to be filled with guilt for their aggression towards the psychiatrist; hence, avoiding the sessions.

In such cases, the psychiatrist seeks the assistance of other persons who comprehend the reaction, such as social workers, ministers, or members of the family, who can persuade the patient to continue seeing the psychiatrist.

While the services if an expert psychiatrist is necessary for bereaved persons, especially those who suffer because of war casualties, they may not be available to all of them. In such cases, knowledge of how to handle and assist bereaved individuals is passed on to auxiliary workers such as social workers and ministers (Chochinov & Holland, 1990).

Walter Cannon, a physiologist, defined the term ‘flight’ as the physiological reaction of the human body to one or more external stressors (Laureate, 2012). The body’s responses cause the sympathetic nervous system to instantly become aroused, as it prepares to either fight or flee the stressor (Laureate, 2012). The human sympathetic nervous system operates as an intricate and unconscious response that is protective in a variety of ways.

It prompts the cardiovascular system to increase the heart beat rate, which in turn, increases oxygen to the human brain and limbs so the individual can act and think more hastily (Laureate Education, 2012). Dhabhar (2011) claims that the “fight or flight” response enhances the immune system as physiological changes prepare the human body for potential wound healing and infection resistance.

The rapid changes are accompanied by a series of chemical signals including a surge of hormones and neurotransmitters as the brain processes the stressor’s potential impact and prepares the body to respond to it (Laureate Education, 2012).

The system response mentioned above forms the basis of the trigger mechanism for flight or fight stress response. The process begins with the activation of the anterior-pituitary adrenal cortex system within the hippocampus region of the brain.

As a result, the adrenocorticotropic hormones are released, causing the biochemical reaction to trigger. The latter reaction activates a relevant stress response depending on a variety of factors including: the nature of the stress; the type of stress event; the environment; timing of stress occurrences; duration and; the individual natural cognitive style, or psychosocial development of the individual to become vulnerable or resilient to stress. (Pinel, 2009)

High levels of stress can be caused by a variety of situations including relationship issues, financial concerns, health issues, or situations involving natural and manmade disasters. Li Wang (2011) claims that individuals who experience high stressful situations are prone to high anxiety or depression. Psychiatrists implement various stress reduction techniques to assess an individual’s stress.

One of the techniques used is mindfulness-based intervention. This technique involves procedures such as in-person vs. online, pre and post evaluation, and group repeated-measures. Health psychologists can use stress reduction techniques to evaluate pain levels, sleep quality, blood pressure, heart rate, mood, and breathing rate that measure the autonomic equilibrium of stress.

In a randomized clinical trial (RCT) therapeutic yoga workplace using the mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques to alleviate stress from the immune systems, with forty percent of depressed and sixty percent non-depressed individuals participated in, it was noted that 40 % of sad individuals are more stress than non-depressed individuals (Li, Wang, Lin, & Lee, 2011).

A majority of the coping responses involve a problem or emotion-focused coping. “The former refers to the adaptive mode of coping that requires active planning or engagement in a specific behavior to overcome the challenge causing the distress” (Schnider & Elhai, 2007).

Emotion-focused coping, on the other hand, refers to the efforts made to manage the emotions of an individual, and are often considered as either active or avoidant. Active emotional coping refers to a strategy that involves adaptive emotion-regulation.

It may involve the individual venting their emotional distress or consciously reframing the stressor’s effect. “Avoidant emotional coping, on the other hand, is a maladaptive strategy that involves defiance or self-distraction to evade the source of the distress” (Schnider & Elhai, 2007). The latter involves evasion with the view to avoiding engagement win problem-focused mannerisms (Schnider & Elhai, 2007).

Some of the steps involved when coping with grief and loss include letting yourself feel the pain and other emotions instead of guiding the emotions, being patient with the grieving period, acknowledging the mixture of emotions experienced, sharing the loss, memories, and experiences with others, and taking care of oneself by eating well and exercising.

While most people take some time off from regular activities to grieve, studies show that it is necessary to occupy oneself and break from grief through constructive destructions like games and music, as opposed to picking up destructive habits like alcohol and drug abuse. Where possible, people are advised to join a support group where they can be provided with comfort, guidance, and encouragement (Boelen & van den Bout, 2005).

There are two mechanisms that I often use to reduce stress: cognitive restructuring and relaxation breathing. Like other grieving parties, my stressful moments are marked with both physiological stress symptoms, such as agitation and psychological stress symptoms like ruminating about what I could have done and what could have been.

Additionally, I go through numerous episodes of cognitive restructuring or reframing, as a problem-focused strategy that involves the identification of alternative ways of looking at or experiencing the challenge at hand. This strategy is ideal for me since it helps me to identify ways of changing my relationship to the stressor when I cannot change the state of the stressor itself. At times I exercise for forty-five minutes before getting ready for work.

Sometimes, I do this following a late night of studying. At other times, I adopt an all-or-nothing attitude whereby I sleep in until I am ready to get up, and then blame everything on my environment.

Alternatively, I get up and exercise for thirty minutes because I know that those few minutes of exercising are more useful to me than sulking about my altered exercising routine. My grieving reactions are acknowledged by Carver (2010), who claims that an individual’s ability to use reframing as a coping mechanism has been linked to the personality trait of optimism.

I use my second grieving mechanism, relaxation breathing, daily. This strategy was developed and proposed as one of the best methods for dealing with grief (Herbert, 2010). Although I have never developed a full-fledged meditation practice, I practice relaxation breathing every day and use it often for “minis” (a version of relaxation breathing that requires less than two minutes).

Relaxation breathing works by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (Laureate, 2012) and is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” response. It calms and re-centers me no matter where I am and what I am doing.

I also engage in physical exercises including work-out at the gym, hiking, walking with friends at a local park, playing on the slide with clients, and yoga, which has taught me how to breathe and relax my mind from the everyday hustles of life. I also like to picture myself in what I believe are serene environments, such as Bermuda, to help me relax and calm my nerves.

Problem-focused and biology focused coping mechanisms have worked for me because I have changed my mind set to make sure that I can utilize these mechanisms to reference them for clients. I have learned that being spiritual and employing stress coping mechanisms has changed my life. Sometimes I am faced with stressful moments, but I remind myself that if I cannot change the cause of the grief, then it is not something to stress out about.

Emotion-focused coping can be a good mechanism to utilize. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) define the mechanism as involving cognitive processes focused at lessening the emotional distress of an event which includes escape, avoidance, distancing, and self-controlling. Sometimes when people are in a relationship, and one of the partners causes undue stress, the other partner distances himself or herself by not talking as often or hanging out with them.

When the individual has not accepted responsibility for the action that has been caused, the person sometimes avoids facing the consequences or problems which will indeed cause stress.

Positive, meaning-focused, and spiritual coping mechanism works for people who have a spiritual background. This mechanism is good for an outreach program from church members. When people devote their energy in something positive, it normally produces happy endorphins.

Boelen, P. A., & van den Bout, J. (2005). Complicated Grief, Depression, and Anxiety as Distinct Postloss Syndromes: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis Study. Am J Psychiatry , 162, 2175-2177.

Chochinov, H., & Holland, J. (1990). Bereavement: A Special Issue in Oncology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dhabhar, F. S. (2011). A Hassle a Day May Keep the Doctor Away: Stress and the Augmentation of Immune Function. Integrative and Comparative Biology , 42(3), 556-564.

Schnider, K. R., & Elhai, J. D. (2007). Coping Style Use Predicts Posttraumatic Stress and Complicated Grief Symptom Severity Among College Students Reporting a Traumatic Loss. Journal of Counseling Psychology , 54(3), 344–350.

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IvyPanda. (2020, March 12). Dealing With Grief and Loss. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dealing-with-grief-and-loss/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Dealing With Grief and Loss." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dealing-with-grief-and-loss/.

1. IvyPanda . "Dealing With Grief and Loss." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dealing-with-grief-and-loss/.

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IvyPanda . "Dealing With Grief and Loss." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dealing-with-grief-and-loss/.

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Sometimes dealing with grief on our own can feel like we’re alone. Writing about loss, death, sadness, and grief can feel intimidating because we’re excavating our deepest vulnerabilities, and this means confronting buried emotions. It might be difficult to process the wide range of emotions that accompany loss—everything from sadness to anger to relief. However, finding a place to allow these feelings to land can be liberating—not only for one’s writing, but also cathartic personally.

In this personal essay course, we will learn how to tell the stories that impact us the most through creative writing about grief, pain, and loss. The objective of this course is to mine our feelings of loss and try to capture them onto the page. This course will give participants the permission and tools to become more comfortable about writing death and loss. Through the course of eight weeks, we will read other writers and their essays on the subject of loss, death, and grief, and delve into the stories that individual participants would like to explore.

Students will receive feedback on short writing exercises based on prompts, as well as the chance to workshop an essay with the instructor during the class. Participants will leave this class learning how to tackle death, loss, grief in the space of a personal essay. Students will learn how to make the personal universal. There will be also class discussion on the materials. Students will receive extensive feedback on two essays during the 8-week period.

I highly suggest this class, so much so, I’m gifting it to a friend. Don’t hesitate. Take this class! —Linda Ragsdale

Weekly Zoom Meeting Schedule

The course’s weekly Zoom meetings will take place  on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM Eastern time.  Meetings will be one hour to 90 minutes in length.

Creative Writing About Grief: Course Syllabus

Week 1: welcome and introductions/why write nonfiction essays stemming from loss or tragedy.

How do past journal or diary entries help you excavate the grief you’d like to write about in your essay? Work on in-class writing prompt on three pivotal moments that seem compelling for you to excavate in an essay.

Week 2: Different ways to brainstorm our grief to write our best essays.

Writing about grief is often difficult and sometimes it takes work to pen our most difficult feelings. In this session, students will learn techniques re: brainstorming on their essay topic. It will include information on mind mapping, traditional outline structure, and using photographs to generate story ideas.

Week 3: How to begin the grief essay?

Knowing where to start the grief essay is important. We will look at various essays and how they begin. How do we engage the reader with the very first sentence of our grief essay?

Week 4: Navigating the middle of our grief essay and the narrative arc.

For an essay to feel genuine to the reader and the writer, the narrative arc has to hit the right points. We will work through the middle of our essays to excavate the tension sometimes the middle poses when writing about grief.

Week 5: Giving ourselves room to breathe when writing grief essays.

Sometimes creative writing about grief raises difficult emotions/feelings. What to do when we feel stuck? How to forge forward as we navigate our emotions and confront sadness and truth in our writing. We will cover strategies on how to handle this grief in a way that will channel our best essay writing and focus on healing too.    

Week 6: Looking at endings in our essays.

Grief is something that doesn’t end and how do we capture that sentiment in our essays? This is tricky terrain, especially as we are trying to navigate our feelings in our endings even though the grief lingers outside the page.  

Week 7: Putting it all together.

How does they essay come across in terms of prose and lyricism? We will look at how the essay is elevated through metaphors and the use of craft.

Week 8: Looking at markets and the feeling after publication of our grief essays.

We will talk publication and markets and whether you’re in the right mental place to publish your essays. How do we navigate the questions that come after readers read our vulnerable pieces on grief?

Why Take a Creative Writing Course with Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
• Award-winning instructor Rudri Patel will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

Student Feedback for Rudri Patel:

I cannot recommend working with Rudri enough, she is one of the best writing teachers that I have ever had. Leena Trivedi-Grenier

Rudri is genuine and compassionate, sharing her stories and helping students find a way to hold their grief, and release some of its anchors. I highly suggest Writing Our Grief , so much so, I’m gifting it to a friend. Don’t hesitate. Take this class!  Linda Ragsdale

The course exceeded my expectations. Rudri's practical, supportive, and encouraging style is just what I needed to build confidence and practice in my writing. Rudri is exceptionally perceptive, warm, and generous as a teacher. Rudri helps you believe in yourself as a writer and to build long-term habits after the course.  Tom O'Shea

Rudri's teaching style is warm, personal, informed, generous, and comprehensive. She wants her students to have a safe place to dig into their grief and to give written voice to it, to learn the craft of writing about grief with an eye for publication. She challenged us to experiment with new forms, and set the tone for a supportive class partnership. I highly recommend this class.  Dianne King

Rudri created a wonderful workshop atmosphere. I received specific feedback on each of my writing assignments and felt supported and encouraged throughout the six-week course. I'm amazed at how much I learned in this short time period.  Theresa Connors

Rudri is a real gem. Her management of the class given the difficulty of the material was exceptional. She was always encouraging to all the students.  Larry Ricci

Rudri's combination of compassion and solid tangible technique furthered my continuing development as a writer. If you want to take an MFA level class with an instructor who cares enough to guide you kindly but sure-footedly to the edges of your comfort zones---then this class is for you. You will come out on the other side a much improved writer. Christina Cavallaro

Rudri is kind so she reads with her heart as well as her head. As well as providing editorial expertise, she reads with empathy. I found this mattered more than I thought it would. I am so thankful for this course and everything I learned in class and from the community of other writers within the class.  Sarah Harley

Rudri is intelligent and perceptive. Her lectures are well organized but not rigid. She is present to the individual students' needs, and her offering of a one-on-one meeting is the cherry on the cake. She is a very generous teacher, and I would and will certainly recommend her courses and take them again myself.  Barbara Moroncini

A must take course! Our instructor, Rudri Patel, led the course with such brilliance, commitment and sensitivity. Each lesson was well organized. Ms. Patel went above and beyond with weekly zoom classes, and she added her personal experiences as a writer so freely. Cynthia Slack

Rudri has a way of fostering discussion and motivating her students to produce more and better work. By the end of the first week alone, I’d completely revised my daily writing strategy, reduced procrastination, and felt better equipped to achieve some pretty ambitious writing goals. I’m confident that 2021 will be my best writing year to-date.  Jessica Fiorillo

This workshop was everything I wanted and more!  Not only is Rudri an excellent instructor and writer, but she is a wonderful human being. Rudri provided a safe place for everyone to freely express themselves, giving 200% of herself and modeling for students her courage and vulnerability.  Cynthia Bassett

Awesome! Rudri is a great teacher.  Natalie Ellis

This class, and Rudri’s compassion and ability to create a safe space, helped me work through levels of grief that I didn’t realize I still had. I made connections between past and present losses that I hadn’t made before, which has helped me to grieve at a deeper level. My writing has benefited from the exercises and Rudri’s encouragement to write my truth. This was an excellent class, and I hope to work with Rudri again in the future.  Andi Reed

I learned so much in Rudri's class, not just about bullet journaling but about setting goals and establishing habits that nurture and sustain the writing life. Rudri created a welcoming space to discuss not just the ins and outs of bullet journaling, but also how to build habits that nurture creativity and self-care. I highly recommend it for writers and everyone!  Daisy Florin

Rudri Bhatt Patel has been a mentor, coach, and editor for my writing projects for almost ten years. Under the skillful guidance of her expertise, candor, and gentle spirit, I have made great gains in refining and expanding my short stories to publication as well as completing a novel. In addition, as co-members of a critique group for several years, Rudri consistently offered in depth and valuable feedback to me and others on a biweekly basis. Her comprehensive written feedback was always delivered with a sensitivity and respect for each person’s creative expression, while authentically providing insight into strengths and areas that needed development. Trish Dolansinski

Rudri is the editor and teacher everyone wishes they would discover. Her warm engaging style meets spot-on feedback has done more for me in 6 weeks than I can begin to describe. Rudri's approach to giving feedback is supportive in a way that both inspires and lifts while being grounded in solid practical suggestions to help elevate your work.  Christina Cavallaro

I recommend Rudri Bhatt Patel without reservation. She is knowledgeable, articulate and experienced in all things writing and publishing. Her kindness as well as her professionalism and expertise make working with her a delight. Susan Pohlman

Rudri's knowledge and skills related to professional writing have also helped me with my own writing career many times in the past. Julie Vick

Over the past ten years I have had numerous opportunities to interact with Rudri Batt Patel during writing classes, book critiques, and writer networking sessions. She has a profound ability to engage as a learner, presenter, and facilitator. Her own writing skills are exceptional and her variety of published works enable her to assist developing writers in multiple ways. Phyllis Schwartz

Rudri Patel is an organized and seasoned presenter with years of writing and publishing experience. I’ve been lucky enough to have Rudri in my critique circle for over a decade and I’m a stronger writer because of it. Windy Lynn Harris

Rudri has a wonderful way of bringing out the best in her colleagues without criticism - a skill I appreciate as a veteran of the classroom myself. Jenn Morson

“I loved Rudri Patel. She helped me take my writing to another level. She was full of knowledge, encouragement, constructive criticism and quickly identified my strengths. I highly recommend her.” —Nancy Wynn

About Rudri Patel

Rudri Patel is a lawyer turned freelance writer, essayist, and editor. On staff at  Literary Mama  and the co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal,  The Sunlight Press , her essays and reported work have appeared in  The Washington Post, Business Insider, The Lily, Saveur, Civil Eats, ESPN, Parents  and elsewhere. Rudri is currently at work on a memoir on grief and culture and how it provides perspective on life’s ordinary graces.

Rudri's Courses

Six Flash Essays in Six Weeks Writing About Family *Private Class | Writing Our Grief: How to Channel Loss into Creative Expression *Private Class | Using Bullet Journaling to Achieve Writing Goals *Private Class | From Pitch to Publication: Writing Narrative Journalism *Private Class | Write Your World: Express Your Creativity through Article Writing, Blogging, and Essays Writing Our Grief: How to Channel Loss into Creative Expression Using Bullet Journaling to Achieve Writing Goals From Pitch to Publication: Writing Narrative Journalism Write Your World: Express Your Creativity through Article Writing, Blogging, and Essays (Live Workshop) Move Your Writing Forward: The Art of the Bullet Journal

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The Importance of Being “Seen” In Grief

Sharing with strangers has an unusual power to help heal loss..

Posted May 8, 2024 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

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• People are most willing to be vulnerable when they are in a happy and accepting setting.
• What we share with the people close to us may have nothing to do with what really troubles us.
• Sharing grief isn’t always as easy with family and friends as it is among strangers.

Throughout the past 14 years as a grief educator, I've witnessed, listened to, and identified common themes among individuals who have experienced loss. A prominent theme that emerged early on is the profound need for people to feel acknowledged in their suffering and their healing journey.

In group settings, I found, people were more consistent in responding to recommended exercises compared to those I worked with individually. Having a group of compassionate witnesses seemed to motivate them to engage more with the very same work. The noticeable influx of compassion from the group greatly amplifies the healing journey for each individual.

Feeling a sense of acknowledgement is crucial in the grief healing process. Centering community compassion in the classes gradually transformed the interactions. Initially, participants were hesitant to share their deepest wounds. However, when part of their homework was to share their most inner thoughts in writing in front of the whole group, most everyone did so.

As class members began to feel seen and validated by others, even complete strangers, they started sharing their most hidden wounds and fostering a sense of connection and camaraderie. The most used response was, "I can’t believe I am sharing this with a group of strangers, I have never told anyone before."

It might seem paradoxical but sharing inner struggles doesn’t come as easily in our own organic group settings within our family and friends as it does among strangers. But deep down, we care more about what our family and friends might think of us than we do strangers.

The importance of connection is not a novel revelation. Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults say that having close friends is extremely or very important for living a fulfilling life, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey —far more than the number of people who say the same about being married (23%), having children (26%) and having a lot of money (24%) .

Knowing how important personal connection and interaction are is one thing. However, what we share with the close people in our life may have nothing to do with what really troubles us. It is as if we leave out the most important parts of our lives, the moments that have impacted us in profound and personal ways.

A 2023 survey of 5,073 U.S. adults indicated that the most common conversation topics are work and family life. Among those with at least one close friend, 58% say work comes up in conversation extremely often or often, while 57% say family comes up so often. About half say the same about current events (48%).

We share our daily issues within our family setting and we talk about our external environment. But do we share our feelings and show up vulnerably in these conversations, or do we keep things superficial and merely factual even with our closest friends and family members? This is why having an expansive group to offer acknowledgements of grief is so imperative.

Here are five lessons I’ve observed about the importance of community.

• People are most willing to be vulnerable when they are in a happy and accepting setting. Therefore, intentionally creating a blameless and positive environment is essential in reinforcing relationships based on trust and truth. Never underestimate the power of reliance and authenticity within a community.
• Just because an individual has a large group of friends doesn’t mean they feel seen in a time of suffering.
• Most of us find it difficult to be self-compassionate and kind to ourselves. This is why its vital to be surrounded by people who can contribute such support externally, who can also reflect back at us our pain with compassion and deep understanding.
• People who have endured many hardships but have received compassion and grace from others become more capable of great acts of kindness themselves. Their belief that they can really help others is increased and they become passionate about helping those who need help the most.
• Our own self-awareness is lacking when we don’t have an external awareness reflecting back to us. Research has shown that our own self-correction and guidance can be mistaken if it doesn’t have a full understanding and view of the issue at hand. We need both inner and outer guidance to co-exist so that we find clarity for our lives after loss. Not sharing feelings can prove to be catastrophic long term, especially in regards to making the right choices for ourselves, our partners, and careers.

For those inclined to repress a feeling due to doubts about its legitimacy, better instead reframe it as, It is crucial for my emotional well-being to communicate this to someone in my life . If a friend appears to be distressed, provide a positive and accepting environment for them to share their concerns by attentively listening without interjecting.

“The Evolution of Friendship.” American Scientist , 28 Apr. 2018, www.americanscientist.org/article/the-evolution-of-friendship .

Beshay. “What Does Friendship Look Like in America?” Pew Research Center , 14 Apr. 2024, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/12/what-does-friendship-look-li…

“Friendship Statistics: Market Report and Data • Gitnux.” GITNUX , 20 Dec. 2023, gitnux.org/friendship-statistics/

Christina Rasmussen, MA, is the author of many books on grief, including Invisible Loss.

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Modern Loss website submissions

Modern Loss accepts pitches for original 700- to 800-word personal essays, listicles, Q&As, and opinion and reported pieces about death loss and grief. We also welcome multimedia projects such as audio and cartoons/illustrations. We look to publish candid pieces about all aspects of loss, no matter where you are in the process, and seek out a wide range of voices. Please note, we do not publish poetry or fiction.

Humor? Great. Strong opinions? Yes. Provocative? Please. But please note the personal essays we run tend to be tightly focused around one element of loss (examples are here , here , here , here , here and here ), rather than an overview of one’s grief journey.

As our tiny team handles a large volume of submissions, we will be in touch if we'd like to proceed with your pitch. Also due to our size, spec pieces with a word count much longer than target cannot be reviewed.

More From Forbes

12 books for dealing with grief, bereavement or loss.

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Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking," speaks at the College of Marin in Kentfield, ... [+] California in February, 1977.

Grief is a profound and complicated experience. The process of grief entails far more than just sadness—it often takes control, and fills us with countless confusing and exasperating emotions. Yet through it all, many people find the most solace in the written word.

Books about loss can be a comforting companion. They offer us unexpected insights and stories—and sometimes even laughter—through the most unimaginably challenging times. Whether it’s a novel that transports you to another world, a memoir that shares the rawness of loss or a self-help guide with practical advice, books on grief can be a powerful means to rediscover life after loss.

Top Books On Grief And Grieving

In this list, I’ve gathered 12 books for bereavement that approach grief from different angles. Each provides a unique perspective on navigating the path toward acceptance and peace. Based on user reviews and therapist recommendations, these books can be a thoughtful gift for a grieving friend or a meaningful addition to your personal post-loss journey.

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is a poignant memoir from the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the age of 36. The 2016 biography offers a candid look at Kalanithi’s journey—from a dedicated surgeon to a patient facing his own mortality—as he grapples with the transition from saving lives to understanding the value of his own.

This book is an ideal read for anyone trying to come to terms with terminal illness—their own or of a loved one. Its raw and introspective narrative can resonate deeply with anyone who has faced loss or is searching for meaning while anticipating grief. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House .

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Wwe smackdown results winners and grades on may 10 2024, the 8 best trampolines with insights from an industry expert, 2. on grief and grieving by elizabeth kübler-ross & david kessler.

On Grief and Grieving is a seminal work by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, published in 2005. The book explores the well-known five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—providing a framework for understanding the complex emotions that accompany loss.

Through real-life examples and compassionate insights, the authors delve into how these stages manifest and how to navigate them. This book is particularly beneficial for those seeking structure in their grieving process, those who appreciate a more clinical approach to understanding grief or those seeking a guided path through mourning. It can be purchased at Simon & Schuster .

3. Notes On Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a bittersweet reflection on loss. The 2021 memoir follows Adichie’s experience with the sudden death of her father, exploring the waves of emotion, memory and deep sense of absence that follow such a significant loss. Through a series of intimate essays, Adichie shares her grief with raw honesty and vulnerability.

This book is an ideal purchase for those who appreciate heartfelt narratives and are seeking comfort from someone who knows and understands the reality of unexpected grief. It can be especially helpful for those looking for a sense of shared experience, and the solace that can come from knowing they’re not alone in their feelings of loss. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House Canada .

4. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is a touching memoir, published in 2011, that explores the deep and complex emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one. O’Rourke reflects on her experience of losing her mother to cancer, the slow unraveling of her life and the process of rebuilding in the aftermath.

The book provides an unrefined account of the pain, confusion and disorientation that often follows the death of a close family member. The Long Goodbye is especially valuable for those coping with long-term illness—either themselves or vicariously—offering a voice that speaks to the drawn-out nature of grief. O’Rourke’s memoir can be found at Penguin Random House .

5. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science Of How We Learn From Love And Loss by Mary Frances O’Connor

The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor is an enlightening exploration of the neuroscience behind grief, published in 2022. O’Connor, a renowned neuroscientist and grief expert, delves into the brain’s response to loss and provides a scientific perspective on the grieving process.

She explains how different areas of the brain contribute to the experience of grief, covering topics like why grief can be so overwhelming and how it evolves over time. This novel is ideal for readers seeking insight on why we grieve, and how we can learn to cope with loss from a logical, research-based, neurological standpoint. You can find the book at HarperCollins .

6. The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a profound memoir published in 2005, is a deeply personal account of grief and loss. Didion explores the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the subsequent confusion and shock that followed.

Through her candid and introspective retelling, Didion delves into the surreal experience of grief, and the struggle to accept reality while yearning for the impossible. This book is ideal for those who have lost a partner or spouse, as it offers a compassionate exploration of the chaotic emotions that often accompany this profound loss. You can find Didion’s memoir at Penguin Random House .

7. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a compelling and emotionally charged novel. Published in 2011, the story follows a young boy coping with his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited by a monster. Through a series of intense and often unsettling tales, the monster helps him confront his deepest fears and the harsh realities surrounding him.

This book masterfully weaves together elements of fantasy and psychological depth. It’s particularly suited for younger readers and teens dealing with grief, as it helps readers make sense of the complex and unimaginable nature of grief. However, its universal themes and gripping storytelling make it resonant for anyone seeking an empathetic portrayal of the grieving process. You can find the novel on the Walker website.

8. PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern is a heartwarming novel that was published in 2004. The story follows a young widow struggling to cope with the sudden loss of her husband. Before his death, he writes a series of letters containing instructions and messages intended to help her navigate her grief. As she reads, she slowly heals, finds hope and learns to live without him by her side.

This book is ideal for those seeking an uplifting approach to grief, with moments of humor and warmth amid sorrow. It is an ideal novel for those who have lost a partner or spouse, or anyone looking for a comforting read that celebrates love even in the face of loss. The novel is available from Hachette .

9. It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine—a grief advocate and psychotherapist—is a compassionate guide to navigating grief, published in 2017. It offers a refreshing perspective on loss, challenging conventional wisdom about how people “should” grieve. She emphasizes that grief is not something to be fixed or rushed, but instead embraced as a natural part of the healing process.

This book is ideal for those who feel external pressure to “move on” quickly, as it validates the diverse emotions that often accompany grief. It creates a safe space to explore the realities of living with loss—without judgment or pressure to conform. You can find the book on the Sounds True website.

10. Bearing The Unbearable: Love, Loss, And The Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore is a powerful exploration of bereavement, published in 2017. Cacciatore, a leading grief counselor and researcher, delves into the profound pain that comes with losing a loved one, shares personal stories from her own experience and those of her clients, and emphasizes that grief is a natural response to love and should be honored rather than suppressed.

This guide is best suited for those dealing with deep and intense grief, particularly after the loss of a child or a tragic event. It is an ideal read for people seeking empathy and practicality following profound loss. You can find the book at Explore .

11. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is an innovative and poetic novel published in 2015. It tells the story of a family reeling from the sudden death of their mother, with the central figure being a shape-shifting character who enters their lives to help them navigate the aftermath. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of the grieving father and his two young sons, exploring the confusing and sometimes surreal emotions that accompany grief.

This book is an ideal purchase or gift for those who appreciate experimental narratives and poetic storytelling. It’s especially suited for readers seeking a more abstract and metaphorical exploration of grief, offering an imaginative approach to understanding the process of healing. The novel is available from Faber .

12. It’s Okay To Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort

It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny is a heartfelt and humorous memoir published in 2016. McInerny describes her journey through a series of major life events, including the loss of her husband to brain cancer, the miscarriage of her child and the death of her father—all within a short span of time. Despite the heaviness of these experiences, she brings a lighthearted and irreverent approach to her storytelling, balancing grief with moments of humor and warmth.

This book is ideal for those who believe that laughter can be a healing balm, even during loss and grief. McInerny’s honest and relatable voice offers a refreshing perspective on navigating grief with a touch of humor. You can find the memoir at HarperCollins .

Bottom Line

Books can be an unexpected source of comfort and enlightenment during times of grief. These 12 carefully selected books span memoirs, guides and novels, each offering a unique perspective on bereavement. Whether you’re seeking empathy, guidance or a touch of humor, these books can empower you through your journey of healing and remembrance.

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Personal Essay | Struggling with Grief During the Holidays

Happy holidays!  I hope that you have much to look forward to in the next few weeks, whether you’re spending time with biological family or chosen family (or having some quiet time). It’s a joyous season for everyone—at least, so we  think  on the surface.

I know that there are many of you out there who are struggling with emotions that don’t seem to fit the holiday cheer that surrounds and bombards you on all sides. Some of you are grieving the loss of a loved one, a now empty chair at your table. Some of you are dreading returning home to a dysfunctional family environment where you feel you cannot be your fullest, most authentic self. Some of you are dealing with physical and mental health problems that can limit your participation in holiday activities. Some of you are worried about the heated, hateful political climate and how it’s affecting your life. Some of you are wondering what comes next in your life because you are feeling stuck. Some of you aren’t even sure  what  you’re feeling because you’ve numbed yourself in an attempt to protect yourself.

I just want to say that  I hear you. I see you. I value you. I’m with you.  I’m also dealing with a mixed bag of emotions in a time when the expected emotions include peace and joy.  It’s okay. It’s enough. You’re enough. I’m enough.  You don’t have to fake holiday cheer— here are some grief resources  and  here are some self-care resources .

I want you to know something, and I want you to carry this with you this season:

On certain days, you may feel that the world is hurrying along your recovery process, that people are pushing you to be healed in ways you’re not sure if you  ever  will be, let alone right now on this specific day. You may feel that you are fighting a battle that no one acknowledges anymore. You may feel that the socially “acceptable” period of grieving is over and now you must fight this battle alone, in silence, with the weight of fifty warriors’ gear on your back.

You may feel alone today, but know that there will be other days when people will offer you a tissue box before you even start crying, a hug before you even ask, or a knowing and concerned look that shows you that yes, they have time to talk with you because you are important and they care about you more than words could describe, before you even have to muster the courage to seek their help. There will be other days, and people to share the highs and lows of healing with. Worse days where others will attempt to hold your pieces together as they scatter in the rising wind, but also better days where your joy and milestones will be celebrated, glasses chiming and tears of happiness streaming down your faces, saying, “Today, we conquered the beast. Tomorrow looks good, too, but whatever comes, we will fight it—or enjoy it—together.”

So, if today is a day you have faced by yourself, have faith that there will be days in your future that you split your warrior gear up amongst your companions, and they will help you bear your burden.  You , however, are not a burden. The weight of recovery and relapse is heavy, far too much for one person to carry alone, but that does not mean you are a burden. It means you are human and that you are fighting for hope.

You will find your way and you will find your team because that’s what you deserve. You deserve everything that is good in this world, and then some. You deserve so much more than “good,” too. You deserve extraordinary because you  are  extraordinary. Fight on at your own pace. No one worth listening to is going to rush you along, and that includes your own mind. Be patient with yourself. Enlist others. Persevere.

You may be bleeding, but  you are unshakable.

You are beloved. 

Emmie Arnold (she/her/hers) is a hospital chaplain in New York; a Reverend in the PC(USA); avid cook; traveler (on hiatus); friend and family member to many; writer; and musician.

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I've hated Mother's Day since I was 7. I choose to celebrate my mom in my own way.

These days i’m just coping at the keyboard, telling stories of the everyday people in our community who matter. people like my mom who deserve to have their stories told..

My mom died when I was 7 years old and I’ve hated Mother’s Day ever since. I met my stepmother when I was 8 years old. I love her and she deserves all the tribute I can muster – but not on this one day. 

If you look up my mother in the newspaper archives, you’ll find the photo of the car crash that killed her. Feb. 25, 1983, in the Kentucky Post. I saw it at a neighbor’s house I visited shortly after she died. The newspaper had been saved, carelessly tossed on a stack of papers near an end table. I was young, but I could still read. I knew what I was seeing. 

A few years ago I asked a friend to go to the library for me and get the article that I thought ran with the photo, but there was no article. Just a photo with a headline and a caption. My friend omitted the photo per my request. The image is etched in my brain; I don’t need to see it again.

The headline read, “Ice snarls I-275 in Wilder.” The caption read, “Westbound I-275 became a sheet of ice about 8:15 this morning when snow froze on the roadway. A Toyota skidded on the ice and struck an electrical pole, and four or five other cars went out of control. Two women in the Toyota – Bonnie Feldkamp, 32, of Walnut Street and Susan White, 33, of Wilson Ave, Cincinnati – were admitted to St. Luke Hospital.” 

That’s not a typo. Bonnie Feldkamp was my mother. We have the same name. Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is my full name – our full name. I am her junior.

She died in that hospital two days later. Brain dead. My father and my grandmother signed the papers that permitted surgeons to harvest her organs and we all let her go.

I often wonder who benefited from my mother’s organs. 

Happy Mother's Day?: Why I wrote a book on my kids' great-grandmothers

I celebrate my mom by telling the stories of people like you

I was a writer at a young age. It didn’t seem like a choice, really. If I wasn’t writing in my diary, I was writing sentences and essays assigned as punishment. As a teen, I kept a journal and wrote poetry.

Diaries were for amateurs. Journals were for serious writing, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. 

When I was arrested in middle school for destroying property, even the judge sentenced me to write an essay about positive ways to deal with my anger, along with a letter of apology to the property owner.

It would seem that everyone agreed I was better off with a pen in my hand. 

Parents need help regulating their children's social media. A government ban would help.

At 48 years old I’m still learning to use my words. These days I’m just coping at the keyboard, telling stories of the everyday people in our community who matter. People like my mom who deserve to have their stories told, deserve to have their voices lifted.  

I used to think that writing was my immortality, but really it’s my mother’s. Her name deserves better than a mention in a caption under a smashed up Toyota on Page 1. 

I don’t need to celebrate her on Mother’s Day. I celebrate her every time our name appears on a byline. 

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is the community engagement and opinion editor for The Louisville Courier Journal, where this column originally published . She can be reached via email at [email protected] or on social media:  @WriterBonnie

My son died on Mother's Day weekend. Sometimes I wonder how I've survived all these years.

• My 25-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose.
• I have a feeling he died on Mother's Day, even though I found out about his death two days later. 
• My husband and I were numb at first, and the tears came later. 

Mother's Day is always the second Sunday in May. This year it's May 12th. On that day in 2015, two Newark, NJ, police officers appeared at our door. We did not live in Newark, so I figured the news was bad.

They were there to tell us that our 25-year-old son Alex had died from a heroin overdose . They'd found him the previous morning in an empty lot frequented by heroin users.

I always thought he probably died the evening of May 10 — Mother's Day in 2015. Since then, Mother's Day has not been my day .

It hasn't been easy to move forward

Sometimes, I wonder how I've survived these last nine years. My husband tells me I'm an expert in compartmentalization, and he's right. I know how to be laser-focused on what I'm doing, and I've had lots to do. I have forced myself not to disappear into the grief that all moms who lose their child feel. I didn't want to move on or erase memories of Alex. As I struggled with Alex's death, I wanted to move forward, somehow integrating his death into my significantly altered life.

Life has gone on for me, for us. Both my husband and I retired from our jobs in the Rutgers University Department of Sociology. We loved teaching and research, but we were ready for change. We moved to Washington, DC., and I, for one, am ready for activism.

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It hasn't been easy to move forward from the dark days. Often it has been horrifyingly hard. But when people ask, I always say I just put one foot in front of the other. There really isn't any other way to do it.

We were numb at first

The shock of your child's death is disorienting. Life changes in an instant. We were numb, in shock, I suppose. The tears came later.

On the first day, we needed to tell our relatives, close friends, and colleagues to let them know the horror that had befallen our family. Our "first responders" arrived almost immediately to take care of us. When day turned to evening, I took enough Ambien to ensure I could sleep through the night, more than I had ever taken in the past. I needed to be alert the next day. There was no time for insomnia.

The first week occupied us with the chores and rituals that follow a death in the family. We met with the funeral director, who had been Alex's Little League coach. We decided on a non-church service and chose to cremate our beautiful boy. We also decided not to view Alex's body, a choice I sometimes regret. But the thought of seeing Alex dead was unbearable. This meant that I was never fully convinced that Alex died. But our friend, the funeral director, confirmed it was.

I also wrote Alex's obituary and eulogy for the Celebration of Life. I needed to honor my child's memory, to try to give meaning to a life cut short, to acknowledge all of who he was. I also felt strongly that I needed to take a public stand against stigma, to step out of the shadows. I wanted to shine a light on addiction.

That week was the longest week of my life, but it wasn't the hardest. That came after. We had to pick up the pieces and learn to live again. We escaped as soon as possible, fleeing to Montauk, one of our special places. I knew we needed to get away from New Jersey for Christmas. For the next four years, we spent Christmas away from home, mostly in the Caribbean. It worked. By 2019, we were ready to be home for the holidays. We even found some joy.

I wanted to know more about addiction

I began my quest to understand why addiction happened to my family by intellectualizing my experiences and asking the "why" and "how" questions of my life.

I read historical and sociological studies; I studied policy research on addiction and the strategies to combat it. I learned about harm reduction, which I now think is the most promising strategy for combatting the scourge of addiction. I broadened my readings from scholarship and journalism to memoirs. These personal narratives describe mental health, substance use, and pain and suffering in raw and unfiltered ways, showing how they destroy the lives of children, families, neighbors, and friends.

While intellectualizing my experiences was helpful, I realized I needed more than reading to find understanding. I searched for social communities, first online and then in person through 12-step and grief groups. The people I met in my Naranon and grief groups provided invaluable fellowship, and several remain my grief buddies. But I was still searching. I tried other forms of self-care, including yoga, walking, and meditation. A friend even brought me to a psychic. When I mentioned it to my fellow travelers in grief, three of the moms, but none of the dads, had done the same thing.

But it was writing and my turn toward activism that really helped to pull me out of the shadows. As I shift to this new stage of my life, my expanded social communities and my family have given me the support, encouragement, and purpose I need. I have a wound that will never completely heal, but telling my story has made things better.

Patricia A. Roos wrote " Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction ," published May 17, 2024 by Rutgers University Press.

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Mother’s Day is hard when you’re struggling to become a mom. Here’s my story.

Finally, after a long wait, I am pregnant. But I will spend the holiday thinking of those like me, for whom this day often brings nothing but pain.

Each Mother’s Day for the last four years, I’ve thought, “I really hope I’ll be a mom by next year.” And for years, it hasn’t happened.

Finally, after a long wait, I am pregnant. But I will spend the holiday thinking of those yearning to be a mom, wishing they could give their child a sibling, mourning a lost baby, or those who are childless not by choice.

And the grief, pain, and medical procedures it took to become a mother will stay with me — as will the heartbreak I felt at seeing Mother’s Day card displays, the times that walking by an aisle of baby items at Target made me cry, and the many days I was too sad to leave the house.

» READ MORE: Can we cancel Mother’s Day, please? | Opinion

Since Mother’s Day 2020, my husband and I have endured one early pregnancy loss, countless medical tests and doctors visits, and four rounds of in vitro fertilization — each of which involved giving myself shots for two weeks to stimulate my ovaries, then having surgery to remove my eggs and fertilize them with my husband’s sperm.

Five different times, doctors inserted an embryo created via IVF into my uterus. Each time, the pregnancy test was negative. The sense of loss was overwhelming. I’d cry for days, and I lost trust in my own body.

Infertility affects one in six people , and one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. So even if you haven’t dealt with infertility, chances are you know someone who has. And for an experience that is so common, our society doesn’t talk about it nearly enough.

So I’ve decided to start talking about it.

Infertility affects one in six people.

Our diagnosis was “unexplained infertility,” which means testing found no reason why we could not conceive. We were both in our early 30s, healthy, and seemingly fertile. IVF and other treatments don’t guarantee success, which isn’t something I understood when I started. After repeated failures, doctors concluded I suffered from poor egg quality.

I felt defective.

I watched the lives of people around me move forward while I remained stuck in grief. Friends had two or three babies while I racked up medical bills and bad news.

But I didn’t talk much about it, so to most people, I lived a double life — rushing to doctors’ appointments before work, taking 20 minutes to cry when I received bad news before hopping on my next Zoom call, and smiling politely when someone complained about sleepless nights with their toddler or asked if I wanted kids.

When others announced pregnancies, I tried to express joy, but each time, I was devastated. My husband and I withdrew from friends, unable to bear discussing day cares or attending baby showers.

My inability to feel happy for my friends brought guilt and shame on top of my immense sadness. With the help of therapy and support groups, I learned these feelings are perfectly normal for anyone experiencing infertility. One study often cited by experts found that women with infertility have the same rates of depression and anxiety as those with cancer, HIV, and other life-threatening conditions.

But not all friends and family whom we told about our struggle understood. Some shared stories of acquaintances who got pregnant once they stopped trying, suggested my stress was contributing to the problem (it wasn’t), or proposed adoption, which we weren’t ready to consider, or surrogacy, which I didn’t need. Others said nothing at all.

The best support came from those who remembered important dates for procedures or test results and checked in, sent me cards or flowers when I got bad news, and stopped sharing happy updates about their own babies when it was too hard for me to hear. They didn’t offer unsolicited advice or shy away from my sadness; they just listened. I grew closer to friends who were also undergoing IVF and befriended strangers in support groups .

But the years dragged on, and eventually, even my infertile friends got pregnant and transitioned into motherhood. My husband and I discussed a potential life without kids. Could we be happy? I didn’t know.

Last year, we turned to egg donation. Thanks to that option, I am now pregnant with a child who gets half his DNA from my husband and the other half from a donor who went through IVF herself to help us.

While I don’t share genes with my baby, I am his mother. I can nurture him in my womb, bring him into the world, and offer him all of my love. I will tell him the story of how he came to be, and explain he’s the child we were waiting for all along. I can’t wait to get to know him and teach him the biggest lesson I’ll take from this journey: Be kind, because you never know what someone is going through.

Dear Abby: Grief of miscarriages makes family events seem trivial

• Published: May. 11, 2024, 12:00 p.m.

Abigail Van Buren writes the Dear Abby advice column. (AMUniversal) AMUniversal

• Abigail Van Buren

My partner and I have miscarried five times over the past four years. We are heartbroken, defeated, overwhelmed and exhausted. We are struggling emotionally, physically and financially because of this journey.

We do not feel any real emotional support from our families. They have been sympathetic, but after the initial “I’m sorry. I’m here if you need me. We’re thinking about you,” that’s it. They expect us to attend all holidays, family gatherings, trips, etc., and we aren’t always feeling up to it.

I am angry with them for not understanding what we’re going through. I have started distancing myself and skipping these family functions. Is this wrong of me? — BOWING OUT IN NORTH DAKOTA

DEAR BOWING OUT:

No. Under the circumstances, skipping a family gathering in which you would be forced to socialize isn’t a bad idea. If this causes hurt feelings, remind the host that grief has no set timetable, and you will celebrate with them again when you are up to it. Period.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

To receive a collection of Abby’s most memorable — and most frequently requested — poems and essays, send your name and mailing address, plus check or money order for $8 (U.S. funds) to: Dear Abby — Keepers Booklet, P.O. Box 447, Mount Morris, IL 61054-0447. (Shipping and handling are included in the price.)

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