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Grief and Loss
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The process of grief can be overwhelming, confusing, and rewarding. These resources are useful for working with and understanding grieving, whether you're working with your own or helping another work with their grief.
Global Resources
| Title | Type | Description | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alison's Gift by Pat Hogan |  |
"Alison's Gift is the true story of Alison Sanders' life and death-a story that has touched all of America. This is Alison's story and how her life found its way into millions of homes. Alison's Gift is the triumph of love over life-ending experience. Along with Alison, meet real-life heroes who live through their greatest fears in a journey of loss, grief, and the rekindling of hope. This story chronicles Alison's life and death, her family's experience and her many legacies. Alison, a vibrant child, had a mission in life to help others. In unique ways, both seen and unseen, her purpose lives on. Her fearlessness, compassion, and leadership qualities transformed her community in life and have reverberated throughout the country in her death. Alison's life was cut short by an air bag in a low-speed automobile collision. Meet Alison's father: although emotionally scarred by his loss, he starts a one-man crusade, forcing the auto industry to adopt safer air bag systems for our children. | |
| Blue Nights - by Joan Didion | |
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound. Click here to visit the resource page. | |
| Dying Beautifully by Dave Karpowicz | |
Starting with the diagnosis and ending after the cemetery service, "Dying Beautifully" acts as a guide, providing tools to help transform the dying process from sorrow to celebration. In a "workbook" format to facilitate working the book. | |
| Getting the Last Laugh on Grim Reaper - article by Leonard Pitts | |
This article explores how humor can assist us in being human during the process of a loved one's death. Click here to visit the resource page. | |
| Griefwalker | |
Griefwalker is an extraordinary portrait of Harvard-trained theologian Stephen Jenkinson, who teaches that death empowers us to live and that we must know grief well in order to appreciate our own lives. Many may find Jenkinson’s belief challenging - that our deaths are not something to be denied or avoided but rather “befriended”. He points out that not every culture fears death as we do. The film carries viewers into the lives of those confronting death, as well as those learning how to help people die well. Combining beautiful imagery of the impermanence of nature and the actuality of dying, Griefwalker weaves an illuminating picture of a remarkable man and leaves us with a deeper understanding of how our deaths could be held as “a prized possession”. | |
| Learning to Say Goodby by Eda LeShan | |
Written for the whole family, this book opens the way to genuine communication between youngsters and adults so they can deal with the grief and bewilderment that follows the death of a parent. In simple direct language, the author discusses the questions, fears, fantasies, and stages of mourning that human beings need to go through - and offers a practical strategy, based on life experiences, to provide comfort and hope. | |
| Life Before Death - Collection of Films about living well and dying better | |
HOW WILL YOU DIE? LIFE Before Death is a multi-award winning documentary series that asks the fundamental question underpinning our mortality. This beautifully filmed journey takes us to 11 countries as we follow the remarkable health professionals battling the sweeping epidemic of pain that threatens to condemn one in every ten of us to an agonizing and shameful death. Through the eyes of patients and their families we discover the inherent humanity that empowers the best of us to care for those beyond cure. This is an intimate, hopeful and life-affirming story of living well and dying better, advocating for making the most of every moment in our life before death. Click here to visit the resource page. | |
| Light In The Shadows by Hank Dunn | |
This little booklet is full of helpful meditations for the dying. As the author says in the intro, "In these few pages i have gathered the most helpful insights these patients have taught me. This book is about finding hope in hopeless situations; being grateful in the midst of great losses; experiencing a connection to things eternal; living a meaningful life while considering the possibility of death; and getting to the root issues in medical treatment decisions. | |
| Necessary Losses - by Judith Viorst | |
In this book, Judith Viorst turns her considerable talents to a serious and far-reaching subject: how we grow and change through the losses that are an inevitable and necessary part of life. She argues persuasively that through the loss of our mothers' protection, the loss of the impossible expectations we bring to relationships, the loss of our younger selves, and the loss of our loved ones through separation and death, we gain deeper perspective, true maturity, and fuller wisdom about life. She has written a book that is both life affirming and life changing. | |
| The Courage to Grieve - by Judy Tatelbaum | |
This unusual self-help book about surviving grief offers the reader comfort and inspiration. Each of us will face some loss, sorrow and disappointment in our lives, and The Courage to Grieve provides the specific help we need to enable us to face our grief fully and to recover and grow from the experience. | |
| The Final Crossing by Scott Eberle | |
Joan Halifax: "This is an extraordinarily wise and compassionate book written by a physician of the body and the heart. In this beautifully written account of the death of his beloved teacher and friend, we can discover the great mystery of meeting death as a teacher and friend..." | |
| The Gifts of Grief - A film by Nancee Sabonya | |
Through compelling personal stories, we gain valuable insights from people facing, growing and transforming through grief. What can we learn from our losses? What inner and outer resources do we have to help us cope with our grief? How do we go on? What are the “gifts of grief?” These are the core questions that are explored by ordinary and extraordinary people, including writer, Isabel Allende; Reverend Cecil Williams; writer, Alana Laraine; Zen Monk /Vietnam Veteran, Claude AnShin Thomas; youth motivator, Vinny Ferrero; filmmaker, Lee Mun Wah who celebrate and inspire healing and transformation. The film invites us to open to pain, learn from loss, and teaches us about the preciousness of life. Click here to visit the resource page. | |
| The Grief Process - Meditations for Healing by Stephen and Ondrea Levine | |
This is a combination study guide and 2 cassette tapes. It is an in-depth workshop with the authors that explores how anyone can resolve grief through meditation. Working with a group of people caught in the wake of physical and emotional loss, the Levines explain how grief can lead to an "armoring of the heart," and demonstrate a series of deeply felt exercises they have developed and refined over many years of work with meditation groups, hospice residents, and others. | |
| The Grief Recovery Handbook by J James & R Friedman | |
Incomplete recovery from grief can have a lifelong negative effect on your capacity for happiness. Drawing from their own histories, as well as from others, the authors illustrate what grief is and how it is possible to recover and regain energy and spontaneity. Based on a proven program, now extensively revised, this book offers grievers the specific tools needed to complete the grieving process and acceptance of loss. | |
| The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's Final Chapter- by David Kessler | |
In gentle, compassionate language, this book helps us through the last chapter of our lives. The author has identified key areas of concern: the need to be treated as a living human being, the need for hope, the need to express emotions, the need to participate in care, the need for honesty, the need for spirituality, and the need to be free of physical pain. Examining the physical and emotional experiences of life-challenging illnesses, Kessler provides a vocabulary for family members and for the dying that allows them to communicate with doctors, with hospital staff, and with one another, and—at a time when the right words are exceedingly difficult to find—he helps readers find a way to say good-bye. Using comforting and touching stories, he provides information to help us meet the needs of a loved one at this important time in our lives. | |
| The Year of Magical Thinking - by Joan Didion | |
The book recounts Didion's experiences of grief after her husband's death of a cardiac arrest in their New York apartment. Days before his death, their daughter was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died. The narrative structure of the book follows Didion's re-living and re-analysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for her daughter. With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book. | |
| Tuesdays With Morrie - Starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria | |
Mitch became caught up with his career as a sport commentator and journalist. He ignored his girlfriend and did not make time to do things in life that are of the most value to a human being. Morrie was one of Mitch's professors in college and a famous scholar. Mitch rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live. | |
| When Parents Die: A Guide for Adults - by Edward Myers | |
The topics range from the psychological responses to a parent's death such as shock, depression, and guilt, to the practical consequences such as dealing with estates and funerals. | |
| Wit - Starring Emma Thompson - directed by Mike Nichols | |
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature known for her intense knowledge of metaphysical poetry, especially the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Her life takes a turn when she is diagnosed with metastatic Stage IV ovarian cancer. Oncologist Harvey Kelekian prescribes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease, and as she suffers through the various side-effects (such as fever, chills, vomiting, and abdominal pain), she attempts to put everything in perspective. The story periodically flashes back to previous moments in her life, including her childhood, her graduate school studies, and her career prior to her diagnosis. During the course of the film, she continually breaks the fourth wall by looking into the camera and expressing her feelings. |
US Resources
| Title | Type | Description | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| What Suffering Does - NY Times Article by David Brooks | |
Good article on the effects of suffering contrasted with the effects of happiness. Click here to visit the resource page. |