Grief Biography

On a February day in 2008, Forrest Church sent a letter to the members of his congregation, informing them that he had terminal cancer; his life would now be measured in months, not years. In that remarkable letter, he wrote: "In more than one respect, I feel very lucky." He went on to promise that he would sum up his thoughts on the topics that had been so pervasive in his work-love and death-in a final book.

Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter.

Death is not for the faint of heart, and sometimes the best way to cope is through humor. No one knows this better than comedian Laurie Kilmartin. She made headlines by live-tweeting her father's time in hospice and her grieving process after he passed and channeled her experience into a comedy special, 45 Jokes About My Dead Dad. Dead People Suck is her hilarious guide to surviving (sometimes) death, dying, and grief without losing your mind.

Alle wollen alt werden, niemand will alt sein. Der Widerspruch ist absurd, das Leiden daran real. Wie lernen wir, so gut wie möglich damit zurechtzukommen? Geht das, alt werden und ein erfülltes Leben führen? Mit ihren über 80 Jahren hat sich Elke Heidenreich mit dem Altwerden beschäftigt. Herausgekommen ist dabei ein Buch, wie nur sie es schreiben kann. Persönlich, ehrlich, doch nie gnadenlos, mit einem Wort: lebensklug. Sie denkt über ihr eigenes Leben nach, und das heißt vor allem, über ihre Beziehungen zu anderen Menschen. Im Alter trägt man die Konsequenzen für alles, was man getan hat.

Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother, brilliant newcomer Sarah McColl has penned an indelible tribute to the joy and pain of loving well. Even as her own marriage splinters, McColl drops everything when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, returning to the family farmhouse and laboring over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. In a series of vibrant vignettes - lipstick applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked - McColl reveals a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of children.

Kelsey Parker's world was turned upside down in the summer of 2020 when her husband Tom, singer in boyband The Wanted, was cruelly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Heavily pregnant with their second child and coping with her own heartache at losing her partner of 13 years, Kelsey remained a tower of strength and positivity for Tom during his darkest days. When traditional treatments stopped working, she spent hours researching alternative therapies to give her husband extra time with his young children Aurelia and Bodhi.

In early 2020, as the world sunk into the pandemic, James Runcie and his wife Marilyn Imrie were going through a different, far more personal tragedy. After 35 years of miraculously happy marriage, they learned that the painful, frustrating symptoms Marilyn had been experiencing for two years were a sign of Lou Gehrig's Disease. With this diagnosis, during the isolation and strangeness of the pandemic, James and Marilyn's lives were transformed.

Life After Losses is a memoir with a message. Author James LaVeck offers help for grieving while taking listeners on an intimate journey of love, loss, healing, recovery, and discovery.

A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss.

After losing her long-term partner, Mary Deal shares the turmoil and oftentimes bewildering depths of her grief. This memoir exposes the spectrum of emotions which those suffering loss experience. The author holds back nothing of her odyssey of despair. Her experiences and much she has learned to help herself provide other survivors a chance to see that they are not alone. Though everyone’s grief is different, all grief is surprisingly similar in its basis. Hope is found in familiarity with another’s grief and no one should endure the bereavement process alone.

February 29th is a date that comes into existence just once every four years. It is also the birthday of Thais - author Anne-Dauphine Julliand's darling daughter - who died of a genetic disease. Thais lived just shy of her fourth birthday. She had a short life but good one. As this special day is about to reappear on her calendar for the first time since her daughter passed away, Anne-Dauphine struggles with how to mark this momentous occasion. She wants to live fully on this special day: Thais would have been eight years old.

Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?

October 2021. Whitney Lyn Allen’s happiness came screeching to a standstill. Stunned by her husband Ryan's rare allergic reaction to a bee sting, the 35-year-old felt hopeless after Ryan succumbed to irreversible brain damage. With his unexpected death leaving a massive gap in their close-knit family, she feared she would never be enough to raise their two young boys.

When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips farther and farther underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis lived a charmed childhood with her large Irish-Catholic family: loving parents, a house full of siblings, a top-tier education, and summers on Cape Cod. And yet, loss was part of her story from the beginning. In therapy in her 20s after a break-up, Meghan discovered how the silence surrounding a childhood tragedy had laid the groundwork for a life spent trying to keep other people happy and avoiding any type of risk, including love. End of the Hour is for anyone who has experienced the unpredictable, lasting power of grief—and wondered how they’d ever get through it.

Zibby Owens has become a well-known personality in the publishing world. Her infectious energy, tasteful authenticity, and smart, steadfast support of authors started in childhood, a precedent set by the profound effect books and libraries had on her own family. But after losing her closest friend on 9/11 and later becoming utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood, Zibby was forgetting what made her her. She turned to books and writing for help.

Dan Robson's father is a builder, a fixer. When he dies, nothing in his son's world feels steady anymore. Dan knows he is not the man his father was. Dan never learned the blue-collar skills he admired, because his father wanted him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Now that his father is gone, the acknowledgment of his sacrifices and the sheer longing to be close to him again in some way draw Dan to the tools that lie unused in the garage. So begins Dan’s year of learning the skills his father’s hands had long mastered, and trying to fill the steel-toe boots left behind.

Infertility is a battle that women have been fighting for centuries, but the seemingly taboo subject is rarely discussed openly. Here, Bailey Henry describes her journey with infertility, including four miscarriages, marriage, grief, love, and the chance she was never properly potty-trained. With raw honesty, heartbreak, and a bit of humor, Bailey discusses the trials of being pregnant but never having a baby. If you've known the devastating loss of a child, or if your life simply hasn't turned out the way you thought it would, this one is for you.

Within six months Barbara Schoichet lost everything: her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother to pancreatic cancer. Her life stripped bare, and armed with nothing but a death wish and a ton of attitude, Barbara pursues an unlikely method of coping. At the age of 50, she earns her motorcycle license, buys a Harley on eBay from two guys named Dave, and drives it alone from New York to Los Angeles on a circuitous trek loosely guided by her H.O.G. tour book and a whole lot of road whimsy.

In What We Wish Were True, Quinn achingly grapples with the possibility of leaving behind the husband and children she adores, and what it means to live with a terminal diagnosis and still find meaning. “I think about how my purpose may be the same in death as it continues to be in life—surrendering to the hope that our weaknesses can be made strong, that what is broken can be made whole,” she writes.