Grief Biography

In Just Show Up, Kara and her close friend, Jill Lynn Buteyn, write about what friendship looks like in the midst of changing life seasons, loads of laundry, and even cancer. Whether you are eager to be present to someone going through a difficult time or simply want inspiration for pursuing friends in a new way, this eloquent and practical audiobook explores the gift of silence, the art of receiving, and what it means to just show up.

Balena è la storia di un corpo che cambia e diventa gigantesco, ma è anche la storia di una donna che si riappropria di sé grazie a quel corpo. Dopo la perdita del padre, a soli undici anni, Giulia inizia a cercare di colmare quel vuoto enorme col cibo, finendo per passare da 40 a 96 chili in pochi mesi. Poi, insieme al corpo, cominciano a crescere il rifiuto di sé e la vergogna, mentre compagni e insegnanti iniziano a trattarla in modo diverso. Un memoir toccante e acuto che racconta la stigmatizzazione del corpo, il superamento del lutto e la ricerca di un nuovo inizio.

The remarkable story of how a mother moved from rage to hope after learning her youngest child was dying and harnessed her grief to transform the lives of others. Harnessing Grief will hearten listeners through Maria Kefalas' journey of understanding how to find hope and purpose amongst the most tragic of circumstances.

Before May 31, 2008, September Vaudrey's life was beautiful. But on that day, with one phone call from the ER, her whole world - everything she knew and believed - was shaken to the core. Katie, her 19-year-old artist daughter, had been in a car accident and would not survive. How does a family live in the wake of devastating tragedy? When darkness colors every moment, is it possible to find light? Can God still be good, even after goodbye?

Mia St. John has always been on top of her game. A five-time world champion boxer known as The Knockout because of her ability to level any opponent charging toward her, Mia spent two decades in the spotlight transforming her body into the ultimate fighting machine. But what most people don't know is that outside the ring, she was battling a lifetime of demons while struggling to keep her family together.

For us, it was a literal knock, with two men standing in crisply pressed uniforms. They had news. News that gutted us to the core - the death of our loved ones, a brother and two husbands - in combat zones. The thing about those moments is that it's almost inconceivable that they can happen to you. That is, until they do.

In my mind, I felt the better I played the part of normal, the better off my kids would be emotionally. Even if that meant, in my world, I would continue to deny that Evan was gone.

It happened out of nowhere. Diana and her high school sweetheart Chad were living an ideal life. They were raising kids, working in public service, travelling, and watching their daughter compete in gymnastics. When everything just changed. Soon, they found themselves embarking on an 18-month battle to save Chad's life after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer at only 44. Full of hope, they travelled the country searching for treatments and begging some of the best doctors in the world for help. They never gave up, but the monstrous cancer beat them anyway.

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.

Modern families come together in all sorts of ways—one parent, two parents; same sex, opposite sex; planned, unplanned; biological, adopted. There are examples of different sorts of families all around us. Finding Mac tells the story of how one family came together, as Richard and his wife Swee welcome eight-year-old Mac into their lives. It recounts the highs and lows as they get to know and love each other becoming a successful family unit. Along the way it shares their experience of adoption, and particularly the experience of adopting an older child.

On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife’s killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his 17-month-old son’s life be defined by Hélène’s murder. He refused to let the killers have their way: “For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom.”

Kareem Rosser and Lee Lee Jones were young, beautiful, and deeply in love. Their love was a real-world romance that felt like a fairy tale: Kareem was raised in the Bottom—one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Philadelphia—while Lee Lee was raised in the wealth of the Pennsylvania suburbs. They met and fell in love in the world of horses: Kareem, a nationally ranked polo player and Lee Lee, a legacy equestrian. The world was at their feet, a lifetime of joy and adventure ahead of them. But their love story is interrupted by a devastating accident.

As a child in the 1950s, Kevin O’Connor knew his house was different than his friends. A stately, three-story 19th-century Victorian. His bed tucked next to a stage in a former ballroom. His uncle and aunt lived with their three daughters on the floor below. A large electric organ in a bay window of the first-floor mortuary business. Stacked caskets and an embalming room in the basement.

An inspirational and heartrending memoir about Ben Breedlove, whose videos about his near-death experiences and visions of heaven went viral in 2012, written by his sister Ally Breedlove. On Christmas Day 2011, Ben Breedlove's soul went to heaven. But it wasn't his first time there. Ben suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart condition that posed a constant risk of sudden death. His condition, a thickening of the heart muscle, worsened over time, leaving him weak and fatigued.

In the powerful memoir, Navigating the Stormy Seas: My Journey of Triumph, Dr. Hilary Adams invites listeners on a transformative odyssey that resonates with the power of human resilience, unwavering faith, and the enduring spirit. The storm struck unannounced. With three harrowing words, "You have cancer," Dr. Adams found herself plunged into a tempest of fear, uncertainty, and despair. Yet, instead of succumbing, she anchored herself in her deep-rooted faith, turning her story from one of impending tragedy to a tale of hope and triumph.

There was a time before his wife got sick when Gonzalo could think about other things. Where humor was more than a coping mechanism. Life wasn't all about treatments and recovery, or the emptiness he felt when she died. They had kids together. Young kids. Less than a year after their youngest was born and suddenly he was strapping them both into their car seats to drive to their mother's funeral. He used to think he was the glue holding the household together. It didn't take long for him to realize how wrong he'd been.

After author Jess Keefe ended things with her long-term boyfriend, she moved in with her brother in hopes that family could help her not only heal from the break-up but also evolve into a healthy adult. But that fantasy ended when Matt’s heroin addiction came roaring back after lying dormant for years, leading to a fatal overdose one October night. Thirty-Thousand Steps is a powerful and transformative memoir that interweaves the author’s obsessive training to becoming a distance runner, along with her focused research into the science of addiction in the shadow of grief.

Part memoir, part fiction, A Grief Sublime begins at the moment the author learns of the sudden death in a car accident of her husband of 30 years, Steve "Sproutman" Meyerowitz. Ricocheting between the splintered past and the present, in her grief, Robbins enters into conversation with Keats and Whitman, Melville and Dickinson. Beautifully read by award-winning narrator Karen Allen with James Warwick as the voice of the poets, Beth Robbins' lyrical, powerful story takes us with her as her despair transcends into a hopeful new experience of life.

She was only nine when her world fell apart. The struggle to understand took a lifetime.In 1960s Bristol, Susan's family was like any other with its joys and frustrations, and fierce loyalties. Then tragedy struck and left a legacy that was to last a lifetime.Susan was only nine when her mother died. A year later she was sent away to school. She didn't want to go, and didn't understand why she had to. In her struggle to cope with an uncertain world - a world where nothing seemed to make sense any more....

I landed in this place six years ago in a welter of panic, pain and instinct. I'd been in fight-or-flight mode for twelve months, wanting only to keep on flying—or fleeing. I brought almost nothing of my previous life. Grief had made me ruthless; I threw and threw. (And yes, I knew how appalled you'd have been, Pete.) My father implored me to stay with the familiar. Constants, he said, would give me scaffolding. Decades ago, when his second wife, my stepmother, died suddenly, habits were his protection and rituals his comfort—along with a packet or two of cigarettes a day.