“Born alone, die alone,” is the nihilist adage you might have heard most recently from your angsty nephew (or repeated when you were full of angst yourself). Whatever nugget of truth that sentiment may hold, what humans definitely don’t do — try as some might — is grieve alone. The death of a loved one is a loss that reverberates throughout your life in a way that makes it nearly impossible to keep the grief sequestered. The people who can support you through this process make the experience a little less lonely. And if you’re struggling to find those people, some of the books on this list may help.
There’s a memoir-guide hybrid counting the ways the author has experienced different kinds of grief, and different kinds of support, after the deaths of his cats; a young adult novel about two sisters who aren’t able to process their mother’s death until they do it together; and a graphic novel that allows the author to channel his pain through art. The throughline is this: Grief isn’t something that you have to figure out on your own. There are people who have been there before who are willing to help you — in your life and within these pages.
Children’s Picture Books
Goodbye: A First Conversation About Grief (2023)
By Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and Isabel Roxas
Explaining not only death, but what comes after, to kids can be incredibly daunting. Goodbye makes the process seem a little less scary — not just for its young audience but for the adults who are guiding them. The book is very intentionally interactive, peppered throughout with prompts like, “What questions do you have so far?” to make sure kids are absorbing and processing the information in a way that makes sense for them. It also introduces the ways others might grieve and think about their loss so kids have the space to come to their own conclusions, and gives them tools to deal with their own grief, from telling stories about dead loved ones to acknowledging sometimes grief can look like anger. Maybe most importantly, Goodbye prepares young readers to support others who are grieving, really underlining that this is an experience that can’t be tackled alone.
This picture book centers the Jewish tradition of burning a yahrzeit candle all day on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. It’s wonderfully lyrical, with one line in particular that I keep coming back to: “Because sadness and joy can be together, like a candle in the dark.” Many picture books about death and grief support young readers as they deal with feelings of sadness and loss, and rightfully so. This book reminds kids that part of going through the grieving process, especially with others who have suffered the same loss, is figuring out how to access happy memories about the dead loved one, how to move past sadness — if only for a moment — to remember the joy they brought to your life when they were alive, and that they can still bring to your life when you remember them.
Young Adult
Row and Arianna are two teenage sisters still reeling from their mother’s death six years before the book begins. A novel in verse, Turtle Under Ice is incredibly intimate, getting to the heart of how grief has shaped the girls as individuals, and as sisters. Though the book’s narrative core is exploring how the two must learn to lean on each other while understanding their shared grief does not take identical forms, some of the most interesting moments showcase how they feel isolated in their grief (Row disappearing into hours of intense soccer practice; Arianna trying to express herself through her art), and how they can feel abandoned when those around them shut down or avoid them when they seek connection to express or process it. The novel clearly shows how the grief a death leaves behind is too heavy to carry alone.
Gayle Foreman has been writing YA fiction about teenagers in the strange space between life and death for over 15 years, since the protagonist of If I Stay (2009) had to decide whether waking from her coma would be worth the pain of living with grief. In Afterlife, Amber is back from the dead, with no memory of her demise seven years earlier. Though she’s the protagonist, the novel really focuses on how grief over her death has shaped the lives of those around her, from her parents and sister to her high school boyfriend. Having Amber come back so suddenly doesn’t heal everyone’s sense of loss as neatly as one might think, but it does push some into communicating and processing their grief with others rather than shouldering it alone. This is the kind of book you’ll read in one sitting, as you witness Amber come to terms with her death, and her family cling to the girl they believe has come back home for good.
Adult
The title story of short-story collection The Grief Shop imagines a future where a world — broken and often numb after a massive tragedy — patrons of a café sip shots of grief in an effort to feel. The shots are doled out by our barista narrator, who is proud of their cultivated numbness in the face of grief. It’s a compelling conceit that posits that, although so many try to escape grief, without it, people would still seek it out. It’s even more compelling that the grief distribution plan happens in a communal place — that part of the process is being with people and having your pain seen.
S.e. smith begins this memoir/how-to-grieve hybrid by remembering the charnel he visited as a child in Greece, how he’d watch the bones of the dead be exhumed after a year in the ground to be stored in the house, and how different this treatment of death and dying is than what he’s witnessed in America. This opening really sets the reader up to reconsider their own relationship to mortality as Smith uses the deaths of his cats to lay out the different kinds of support a grieving person may need, depending on whether the death is sudden (being patient as they adjust to this new, often disorienting reality) or expected (reminding them there’s no wrong way to grieve); an isolated loss or something tied up in a greater tragedy.
I haven’t stopped thinking about this book since I read it four years ago. A memoir about the loss of a child — in this case, comedian Rob Delaney’s two-year-old son Henry from cancer — will always be a devastating read. But where it could have been full of cliches or only heartbreak, A Heart That Works manages to be incredibly hopeful. That’s in large part from Delaney’s focus on all the people who made Henry’s very short life — and its aftermath — better. These include the medical professionals and support staff (all of whom were more accessible because of the UK’s National Health Service system) and his other two children, who each showed him new ways to love and grieve.
Just a few days after her 70th birthday, Magda Eklund is embarking on a road trip with her best friend Sara. Her bags are packed, the itinerary is set, and Sara’s ashes are buckled in. Recent pop culture has mined plenty of funny and poignant moments from cremains riding shotgun (my mind automatically goes to Orlando Bloom next to his dad’s urn wearing sunglasses in Elizabethtown), but this thoughtful novel has its own unique cremation comedic beats. (One involves the ashes accidentally becoming a part of an art museum.) This is the story of a woman grappling with not only her grief over the person she was closest to, but the truth about what kind of relationship she wanted to have with her late friend. Its most compelling moments explore what it means to grieve with a support system versus in isolation. Though Magda has close friends and a sister, she keeps them at arm’s length for much of the book, not allowing them to see her vulnerability or aid in her grieving. She goes so far as to lie to her sister, saying Sara is still alive a year after her death. It’s only once Magda opens up and leans on the people she cares about that she’s able to start moving forward.
Graphic Novels
So many of the books on this list explore how to manage grief with others — how to lean on friends and family, or how to hold them up. There are some beautiful moments of this collective grief in Waves, AJ Dungo’s graphic memoir focusing on his girlfriend Kristen’s battle with cancer and her death. But it’s really the book itself that will remind readers we don’t have to grieve alone. It was created as a tribute to a person the author loved, and to connect with all the others grieving her death. The story is told nonlinearly, interspersed with a history of surfing (a pastime Dungo took up because Kristen loved it) that makes the story — the pain and the love it captures — more immersive.
Most of what you need to know about this memoir can be found on the cover, from the description “a dead mom graphic memoir” to the illustration of the author and her dance partner, the ghost of her mother Rhonda. Oh, and the dance party appears to be happening on Rhonda’s grave. Dancing at the Pity Party is about the death of Feder’s mother from cancer when Feder herself is only 19. It’s genuinely funny and created with a clear purpose, which Feder explains in the intro: to make death and grief seem a little more normal in a society that is incredibly touchy around it so that, when someone goes through a loss like hers, they’ll be met not just with the kindness she received but also the space to express a wide range of emotions.