Grief Dying

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird. Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents.

Whether you are a family member searching for answers, a caregiver looking for recommendations, or a friend just trying to understand, you will receive invaluable tools and guidance to support your loved one through the last days of their life.

For most of us, there is no harder life experience than caring for a loved one who is dying. Suzanne O'Brien realized this earlier than most during her her time working as a nurse in hospice care, often offered as a comforting alternative to a sterile hospital environment. But Suzanne saw the real financial and staffing limitation that came with hospice, and, realizing this option didn't provide all the answers, wanted to take it a step further, providing her patients and their families with the tools to approach the death of a loved one with grace, dignity, knowledge, and compassion.

"When our pets aren't with us anymore, an Invisible Leash connects our hearts to each other. Forever." That's what Zack's friend Emily tells him after his dog dies. Zack doesn't believe it. He only believes in what he can see. But on an enlightening journey through their neighborhood—and through his grief—he comes to feel the comforting tug of the Invisible Leash. And it feels like love. Bestselling author Patrice Karst's gentle story uses the same bonding technique from her classic book The Invisible String to help listeners through the experience of the loss of a beloved animal

Eden had her best friend Katie—she didn’t need anyone else. But then there was Truman. Katie’s older brother, the artist. The recluse. The boy with the innocent smile and the dangerous eyes. Eden had never really known Truman—not until the night of Katie’s accident. That was the night they’d finally let each other into their orbits—only to have the sky come crashing down on them.

What Really Matters chronicles the life transformations experienced by Dr. Karen Wyatt, her patients, and their family members during hospice care. This book of beautiful and uplifting stories about the lessons learned from the dying is also a guidebook for those who are feeling lost or hopeless about their lives in this contemporary world.

Nine-year-old David has recently lost his mother to a freak accident, his salesman father is constantly on the road, and he is letting his anger out on his grandmother. Sarcastic and bossy 13-year-old Primrose lives with her childlike, fortuneteller mother, and a framed picture is the only evidence of the father she never knew. Despite their differences, David and Primrose forge a tight yet tumultuous friendship.

Shedding light on one of the great mysteries of existence, An Energy Healer’s Book of Dying offers a compact yet comforting guide to support you through this emotional, grief-filled, and exhausting time and help you bring solace to your loved one during the transition back to spirit.

Some girls call their mother their best friend. Marisol Martin? She could never relate. She and her mom were forever locked in an argument with no beginning and no end. Clothes, church, boys, no matter the topic, Marisol always felt like there was an unbridgeable gap between them that they were perpetually shouting across, one that she longed to close. But when her mother dies suddenly, Marisol is left with no one to fight against, haunted by all the things that she both said and didn’t say.

John Wyatt focuses on the ars moriendi—quite simply the art of dying well and dying faithfully. He offers clear direction, warm reassurance and rock-solid confidence in the One who has conquered death. We cannot choreograph our own death, but we can die well. This is a book for those who are facing death. It is also for their relatives, friends, and caretakers.

Vanessa's husband, Paul, dies suddenly and tragically on their regular Sunday morning swim. How will she cope with her dilapidated house, her teenage children, the patients who depend on her? Will therapy help? Why do mysterious white feathers start appearing in unexpected places? Beautifully written and honestly relayed, Vanessa uses her professional skills to explore the many questions posed by unanticipated death and to try to find a way forwards.

Eighteen-year-old Amelia Griffin is obsessed with the famous Orman Chronicles, written by the young and reclusive prodigy N. E. Endsley. They're the books that brought her and her best friend Jenna together after Amelia's father left and her family imploded. So when Amelia and Jenna get the opportunity to attend a book festival with Endsley in attendance, Amelia is ecstatic. It's the perfect way to start off their last summer before college. In a heartbeat, everything goes horribly wrong.

This book is a guide to death and the mysterious world beyond. The rituals, meditations, and exercises are designed to bring you on a journey of discovery through the most profound of all human transitions. Filled with insight and practical guidance, it shows you how to honor family and friends in spirit and discover the life-affirming aspects of every state of existence.

What do you say to someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease? How can you help someone who knows they are dying or people who have just said good-bye for the last time to someone they love? You want to help, but how can you be sure you aren't doing more harm than good? What should you say about God, heaven, or prayer? Author Patrick Shawn Riecke answers these questions after 20 years of helping the sick, dying, and grieving. You will encounter the best ways to talk with people in what he calls Phase Three - life's most difficult moments.

Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer reflections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes. Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor ‘whose brain had been broken by violence’. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were ‘disappeared’ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994.

Seventeen-year-old Katie Price has a rare disease that makes exposure to even the smallest amount of sunlight deadly. Confined to her house during the day, her company is limited to her widowed father and her best friend. It isn't until after nightfall that Katie's world opens up, when she takes her guitar to the local train station and plays for the people coming and going. Charlie Reed is a former all-star athlete at a crossroads in his life - and the boy Katie has secretly admired from afar for years. When he happens upon her playing guitar one night, fate intervenes and the two embark on a star-crossed romance.

Of the many critical conversations we will all have throughout our lifetime, few are as important as the ones discussing death—yet few of these conversations are actually happening. Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner) offers keen, practical advice on how to have these conversations—not just at the dinner table, but anywhere. There's no one right way to talk about death, but Hebb shares time- and dinner-tested prompts to use as conversation starters, ranging from the spiritual to the practical, from analytical to downright funny and surprising.

We're all going to die. Yet in our medically advanced, technological age, many of us see death as a distant reality - something that happens only at the end of a long life or to other people. In The End of the Christian Life, J. Todd Billings urges Christians to resist that view. Instead, he calls us to embrace our mortality in our daily life and faith. This is the journey of genuine discipleship, Billings says, following the crucified and resurrected Lord in a world of distraction and false hopes.

End-of-life doula Anna Lyons and funeral director Louise Winter have joined forces to share a collection of the heartbreaking, surprising and uplifting stories of the ordinary and extraordinary lives they encounter every single day. From working with the living, the dying, the dead and the grieving, Anna and Louise reveal the lessons they’ve learned about life, death, love and loss. Together they’ve created a profound but practical guide to rethinking the one thing that’s guaranteed to happen to us all.

While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor specializes in the study of grief, and in The Grieving Body she shares vital scientific research, revealing imperative new insights on its profound physiological impact. As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being.