Grief Biography

When Lu Spinney's 29-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, "he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp," writes his mother, "skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead.... " He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss - Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness - that unravels over the next five years.

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.

After colliding with a semi-truck, Don Piper died and went to heaven. Ninety minutes later he returned to life on earth. After years of silence, he is now sharing his life-changing story.

In his exceptionally thought-provoking and moving memoir, neurosurgeon Joseph D. Stern explores how personal loss influences the way physicians relate to patients and their families.

Leslie Gray Streeter is not cut out for widowhood. She's not ready for hushed rooms and pitying looks. She is not ready to stand graveside, dabbing her eyes in a classy black hat. If she had her way she'd wear her favorite curve-hugging leopard print dress to Scott's funeral; he loved her in that dress! Looking at widowhood through the prism of race, mixed marriage, and aging, Black Widow redefines the stages of grief, from coffin shopping to day-drinking, to being a grown-ass woman crying for your mommy, to breaking up and making up with God....

A restless child of the 1960s, Marilyn yearns for love, hippiedom, and escape from her controlling mother. At fourteen, she runs nearly a thousand miles away to Vancouver, British Columbia, eventually landing herself in a Catholic home for troubled girls. At sixteen, she’s emancipated, navigating adulthood without a high school diploma, and craving a soulmate. When she falls in love with Jack, the grad student living next door, life finally seems perfect. The two embark on a cross-continental bicycle trip, headed for South America, but before they reach Mexico, tragedy strikes.

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

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.

When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was 10 years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian minister. She eventually began working with the Maine Game Warden Service, which conducts the state's search-and-rescue operations when people go missing in the wilderness.

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.

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz–just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy–collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

"Okay, Lord, you can have him. But if he must die, I want it to be for something big. I want someone’s life to be changed forever." This is what Laura Sobeich prayed when she found out her 17-year-old son had only one year to live. With this desperate prayer, she released her son to God’s will. At that point, Zach Sobiech was just another teenager battling cancer. When his mother told him to think about writing good-bye letters to family and friends, he decided instead to write songs. One of them, "Clouds", captured hearts and changed not one life but millions, making him an international sensation.

Because Ella Risbridger has learnt to focus on the little things that bring her joy, feeding as many people as she can squeeze round her tiny table and sharing recipes that are good for the soul. Miracle Pie is her journal and storybook of cooking, where the food is so good you want to lick the bowl, with recipes like fancy fish pie, cardamom-cinnamon chicken rice, chimichurri courgettes, triple carb soup, blackberry miso birthday cake, fried jam sandwiches and sticky toffee Guinness brownies.

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis and the internet developed on parallel timelines.

Shannon Dingle has experienced more than her fair share of tragedy and trauma in her life, including surviving sexual abuse and trafficking as a child that left her with lasting disabilities and experiencing faith shifts that put her at odds with the evangelical church that had been her home. Then, in July 2019, Shannon’s husband was tragically killed by a rogue wave while the family was on vacation. The grief of the aftermath of losing her love and life partner sits at the heart of Living Brave.

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.

A biography; a life story that is more than that. Her life has been an inspiration to intellectuals, doubters, wayfarers; an Oak of Weeping to sit under; a mix of strength and weakness. She describes her life as a remarkable and difficult one, yet one in which she dares to see its beauty. It has warmth, a verbal straightness, humor, self-irony, and authenticity. It is a fiery and hopeful book from a living heart. It feels like a long and very personal letter.

This is a true story of the death of a child through homicide. It is about a mother's healing journey and the pivotal decisions she had to make in order to survive her son's death. It is about betrayal, and a shocking verdict but it's also about love, courage, and faith. It is hope for survival and inspiration for revival for those that are suffering a similar loss.

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered.

In the summer of 2002, Shannon Leone Fowler, a 28-year-old marine biologist, was backpacking with her fiancé and love of her life, Sean. Sean was a tall, blue-eyed, warmhearted Australian, and he and Shannon planned to return to Australia after their excursion to Koh Pha Ngan, Thailand. Their plans, however, were devastatingly derailed when a box jellyfish wrapped around Sean's leg, stinging and killing him in a matter of minutes as Shannon helplessly watched.