There is a proliferation of books on grief and none are written for pleasure, but rather for the encouragement of those recovering from the death of a loved one. Some do this better than others.
Travelling Through Grief is authored by a married couple whose first partners died. They look on bereavement as a detour from the journey of life — a detour that will be frightening and bewildering and lonely but will lead you back not onto the main road on which you travelled with the deceased, but onto a new road where you will travel alone with self-confidence.
The first step or task is “the need to accept the reality that your loved one has died and is unable to return.” That is not to say we should try to forget our loved ones because in actuality, the authors say, it is in keeping their memories alive that we are better able to work through our grief. They give the assurance that heaven is a definite place where Jesus has prepared a space for each of us and that, in all probability, we will recognize each other, but in a much different way. On earth our identities come from our families; in heaven our identity will be as children of God.
Perhaps the ultimate how-to book on grief is Grieving, A Beginner's Guide. It's a misnomer to call it a beginner's guide since those newly acquainted with grief will tell you it takes months before they can concentrate on more than a few words. The author, a widow, does speak from personal experience, but one can also tell she has gathered material from other sources. I read this book about a year after my own husband died and at the time didn't feel it was very helpful. However, several months later, when I looked the book over again I saw the many places I had scored and underlined.
The Year of Miracle Thinking is a horribly true story of the year after Didion's husband's sudden death at the dinner table, when at the same time their only daughter was lying at death's door in a nearby hospital. It is the story of her bewilderment, of memories good and bad, of her all-consuming anxiety about her daughter, her deep grief and insane fantasy that her husband wasn't really dead.
By the end of the book, she has found no resolution to what happened but realizes we can't keep the dead alive. We have to let them go. She says, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
The author of The Unwanted Gift of Grief, A Ministry Approach is a chaplain in a large city hospital where he encounters death and grief almost every day. On a personal level he draws on the death of his mother and the birth of his first-born child, a Down's Syndrome baby.
“Grief”, he says, “is an unwanted gift, but a gift we must use. If we don't do our grief work, our grief may grieve us into some form of physical illness.” He assures the reader that everyone grieves differently; some will be emotional while others withdraw. Some will try to stay busy, thinking this will keep them from entering the wilderness of grief, while others will be immobile, unable to tackle anything.
He says the only experts are those who have experienced grief. I will go one step further and say we are only experts on our own grief.
