What’s a helpful thing to say to someone who’s grieving? This question has many wrong answers, and memoirist Emily Rapp Black titled her next book after the worst one she’s ever heard: I Would Die If I Were You (Counterpoint, May).
“It’s so rude,” Black says. “I think it comes from a place of trying to say, wow, you’re really strong—but it doesn’t come across that way. It’s a way of creating distance between people instead of a real connection. It’s meant to be empathetic, but it’s actually just isolating.”
Forthcoming books by Black and other authors discuss constructive, compassionate ways to navigate loss, whether someone else’s or one’s own.
Portals into grief
Black is no stranger to loss: her left leg was amputated when she was a child and she’s lived with a prosthetic ever since; years later, her infant son was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease and died when he was just shy of three years old. She’s found that writing is a potent way to process grief and explain the nuances behind what she refers to as “conversation-killing life stories.” Her first book, 2007’s Poster Child, focuses on life as an amputee, and 2013’s The Still Point of the Turning World is about her late son. I Would Die If I Were You meshes her personal history and her work as a writing teacher helping others find language for their sorrow.
“While the other books have been about surviving really hard things, this one is about thriving,” Black says. “It’s here to say that there’s no story too sad or too depressing to tell. That’s what people have been doing for centuries, and those are the stories that need to be heard.”
Novelist and writing coach Diane Zinna created the long-running Writer to Writer Mentorship Program at AWP during her tenure as its membership director. Her writing craft book Letting Grief Speak (Columbia Univ., May) draws on the free Zoom sessions she runs, called Grief Writing Sundays, where she helps people write about loss via various prompts, or what she terms “portals.”
“I think about it as a way of stepping through the idea together and arriving someplace intensely personal,” Zinna says. “From there we’re writing about our memory, our beloveds, a loss of our sense of self. For each person, that portal’s going to take us someplace different.”
Music and art serve as portals for longtime culture editor Matthew Schnipper in the forthcoming memoir Rise Above (Random House, July), which addresses the 2021 death of his infant son. The book shares a title with a Black Flag song—Schnipper’s son, Renzo Rollins Schnipper, was named after frontman Henry Rollins—and abounds with artistic references, including ones to Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life and the multidisciplinary work of Wolfgang Tillmans.
“The way my brain has always worked is to take the culture I was immersing myself in and talk about how life was existing alongside it,” says Schnipper, who was executive editor at Pitchfork and editor-in-chief at the Fader. “Learning how to talk to people about culture they may not know about, while assuming that they actually might care about it if they did, is what shows up in this book. Even if this is a book about grief, I hope you might decide to look at Wolfgang Tillmans’s photos and listen to his music.”
Given time, loss can serve as a catalyst for positive change, according to philanthropist Kate Doerge. After her 16-year-old daughter Penny died of complications from the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis, Doerge launched Penny’s Flight, a foundation that has raised millions of dollars for medical research. Writing with Sarah Bliss in Reimagining Grief (Hay House, June), Doerge recounts her path to healing and offers a road map for others while acknowledging that grieving looks different for everyone.
“In our culture, we’re so used to certain norms around grief,” Doerge says. “Imagine if, instead of wearing all black and singing ‘Ave Maria’ in a dark church, we decide to honor our lost loved ones by doing the things they loved, wearing the clothes they loved, incorporating all of their favorite music and really celebrating them that way.”
Support systems
Jane K. Callahan, author of A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End (Chicago Review, Apr.), wants to help change conversations around dying and help people better prepare for death. She trained as an end-of-life doula, sometimes called a death doula, and provides emotional and practical support to people near the end of their lives, as well as to their families.
“Being prepared allows you to be more present during the dying process, which will definitely influence how you feel grief after the death,” says Callahan, who has been a practicing end-of-life doula since 2018. In her book, she shares patient stories and her own life experiences, provides advice on navigating tricky situations around death and dying, and details how end-of-life doulas complement hospice care. Through her practice, she offers services on a sliding scale and, in some cases, for free, and her book likewise emphasizes low- and no-cost resources.
“The burden that’s put on people at the end of life, on both the dying person and their family, is a serious crisis in this country,” she says. “The system is setting people up to fail, so I’m trying to get this information out there.”
In contrast to a death doula, a bereavement doula is there for what comes next. Arden Cartrette learned about bereavement doulas after undergoing two miscarriages and, ultimately, carrying a successful pregnancy. Knowing that others were going through similar pain, Cartrette trained as a bereavement doula with a focus on pregnancy loss. The forthcoming Moving Forward, Not Moving On (Jossey-Bass, Apr.) is informed by lessons she’s learned from supporting clients through her website, The Miscarriage Doula.
“I’ve experienced a lot of grief in my life,” Cartrette says. “Pregnancy loss is very different—death is happening within our bodies and to our bodies, but we’re alive. I went through multiple miscarriages, struggling to get pregnant, then being pregnant and welcoming a child after loss. And still I felt so much grief. I was really confused by that, and nothing could help me understand it, which is why I’m so passionate about this education. I want to help people process it in real time.”
Crisis counselor and mental health advocate Lisa Sugarman grew up believing her father had died of a heart attack when she was 10 years old. When she learned, much later, that he had died by suicide, the revelation changed her life. She began sharing her story online and connected with others who had suffered similar losses, which highlighted to her the particular pain of losing a loved one to suicide.
“What makes suicide loss so different,” Sugarman says, “regardless of when it hits you in your life, is the shame, the stigma, the silence, those what-ifs, and the guilt that can be attached to it.”
She joined suicide loss support groups, volunteered for charities including Samaritans and the Trevor Project, and eventually founded the Help Hub, which provides resources for people struggling with mental health crises. Her book Surviving: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss (Familius, Apr.) is the culmination of these efforts; Sugarman describes it as “part memoir, part field guide, and a toolkit.” Each chapter ends with a checklist or worksheet, such as “Starting the Healing Process” or “Ways to Ground Yourself When You’re Grieving.”
Sometimes, grieving people just need to hear that it’s okay to feel conflicting emotions, according to podcaster and grief coach Shelby Forsythia. In Of Course I’m Here Right Now (Broadleaf, Mar.), Forsythia offers guidance for supporting someone coping with loss. She recalls a client who, having experienced miscarriages, was having difficulty celebrating a friend’s pregnancy. The woman was judging herself harshly for this, but the energy of their conversation changed when Forsythia expressed understanding for her feelings.
“It was almost as though she’d constructed this courtroom in her head and was putting herself on trial,” Forsythia says. “I remember saying, ‘Of course you would be upset.’ That totally turned the tables. Words by themselves can change the way that people experience their grief. Suddenly her feelings made sense to her because they made sense to me.”
Naming the feelings
The Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief are oft cited but outdated and misunderstood, according to contemporary research. A more modern framing acknowledges various subgroupings of mourning.
In All My Dead Cats and Other Losses (HarperOne, July), journalist s.e. smith explains these current terms using as examples different cats they’ve lost over the years, bolstering the vignettes with expert interviews. So Mr. Shadow, the gray tabby who slowly faded away from lymphoma, was a case of anticipatory grief, while Ember, the polydactyl tortie who died at the height of the pandemic, embodies disenfranchised grief because smith found it complicated to mourn a cat while so many humans were dying.
“Being able to put a name to something can be really valuable,” smith says. “I was interviewing someone who was an affair partner. Her partner died and she felt like she couldn’t talk about it at all because she was ‘the other woman’ who stole him from someone else. I said, ‘That really sounds like disenfranchised grief,’ and she said, ‘I didn’t know there was a word for that.’ Having these broad framings makes these conversations a little less frightening, because you have a mutual basis of understanding that you can start from. It’s not just this overwhelming sense of loss.”
The pandemic was a particularly acute time of grief, and though it’s not the sole focus of any of the books surveyed here, several authors acknowledge its impact. It engendered many kinds of loss, smith notes: death, but also fractured relationships and political fragmentation. Cartrette had miscarriages prior to the pandemic, and the realization that others were miscarrying in parking lots during lockdowns is what inspired her to become a doula. Schnipper’s son died on Christmas Eve in 2021.
“In our culture, we have this false mindset of, well, when am I going to get over it?” Callahan says. “When am I going to move on? You don’t, and Covid taught us that so perfectly.” Experiences that cause intense grief don’t just go away, she explains. “They become part of our makeup. What we do with that is up to us in terms of our actions and our individual capabilities and resources.”
Books by Callahan and others are aimed at expanding those capabilities, so that readers come away with a better sense of how to work through their own losses and help others who are grieving. If, as Black notes, “I would die if I were you” is the worst thing to say, what’s the best?
“The most helpful thing people have said to me is, ‘Tell me more,’ ” she says, recalling the woman who sat down next to her when she was with her terminally ill son, who was hooked up to various life-sustaining apparatuses. “I had no idea who she was, and I still can’t remember her name. She said, ‘I really would like to know more about your son.’ That’s the best thing anyone’s ever asked me.”
Christian Holub is a freelance writer in New York City who covers books, comics, movies, and TV.
Read more from our feature on books about grief.
