3 Beautiful Books about Grief

Lately I have been thinking about grief and loss. It's not for any particular reason but I've been contemplating what it means to mourn and how that process can shape people's lives. Questions keep coming to me about how people deal with loss, and how dealing with it makes them alternately stronger and weaker.

Here are three fantastic books that all touch on the subject of grief in different ways. Thought-provoking and relatable, I found them to be illuminating on emotions that are rarely talked about but widely experienced.

1. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
The word that always comes to my mind when I think about this book is 'beautiful'. Hannah is reflecting back on her life and the formative events she experienced, many of which came through losing people close to her. There are profound statements about loss and love and how the two are intertwined. This is a book that I cannot wait to read again.

2. The Magical Year of Thinking by Joan Didion
 To me, this is Didion's most poignant book. She describes her husband's sudden death and how it completely upended her life. Her descriptions of grief and how she coped are worded in the most heart-rending way possible, and certain passages have stuck with me ever since I read it.

3. Epilogue by Anne Roiphe
Roiphe's memoir is also about the grief she suffers after the death of her husband, but her writing focuses more on her struggles to forge her own life after being married for 39 years. She covers attempting to date again, the feeling of burdening her children, her desire to change and yet keep everything the same. It's a thoughtful description of a difficult time.