Grief Biography

I wrote this book during one of the most difficult years of my life. This is my journey through the grieving process of losing my 27 year relationship and trauma work before and after. It is a glimpse into how I used the therapeutic processes of Compassionate Inquiry and Internal Family Systems to navigate through the year, as well as chronicle how my childhood shaped my life and how I show up in relationship, my worldview, coping mechanisms, and more.

David Menasche lived for his work as a high school English teacher. His passion inspired his students, and between lessons on Shakespeare and sentence structure, he forged a unique bond with his kids, buoying them through personal struggles while sharing valuable life lessons.

Diagnosed with cancer at age twenty-six threw all the life plans Emily had made out the window. In between attempting to fight Hodgkin's lymphoma and working, full-time Emily discovered she was in a deep state of grief. She realized in the middle of it all she had lost herself and would need to not only fight the cancer, but her mind in order to survive.

On July 23, 2007, Dr. William Petit suffered an unimaginable horror: Armed strangers broke into his suburban Connecticut home in the middle of the night, bludgeoned him nearly to death, tortured and killed his wife and two daughters, and set their house on fire. He miraculously survived, and yet living through those horrific hours was only the beginning of his ordeal. Broken and defeated, Bill was forced to confront a question of ultimate consequence: How does a person find the strength to start over and live again after confronting the darkest of nightmares?

Liz Jensen's son, a zoologist, conservationist and ecological activist, was twenty-five when he collapsed and died unexpectedly. She fell apart. As she grieved, forest fires raged, coral reefs deteriorated, CO2 emissions rose and fossil fuels burned. Your Wild and Precious Life is the story of how a mother rebuilt herself, reoriented her life and rediscovered the enchantment of the living world. Set against the backdrop of climate and ecological catastrophe, it's an argument for agency, legacy and the wild possibility of hope after devastation.

Chiara Luce, a girl full of vitality, suddenly fell gravely ill. And, strangely, moment by moment, a new life full of light began to unfold for her. She was 18 when she died, yet she had lived to the full. On September 25, 2010, Chiara Luce was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI and is now known as "Blessed Chiara Badano".

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.

A collection of the journals, fiction, and letters of the late Esther Grace Earl, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 16. Essays by family and friends will help to tell Esther’s story along with an introduction by award-winning author John Green who dedicated his #1 bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars to her.

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.

Reality, as Eileen Robertson Hamra perceived it, was instantly altered the moment authorities confirmed that the plane her husband was piloting had crashed and he had not survived. With her three young children, Eileen entered the desolate world of grief and loss, but where she arrived was nothing short of miraculous. Between the valleys of grief and the peaks of hope, she discovered that keeping promises to the dead is a lifelong act, and honoring one love does not mean forgoing the freedom and joy that is found in reopening your heart.

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.

We all have hidden prisons—grief, anger, shame, trauma, self-doubt. But these prisons have doors. Drawing from his extraordinary journey from incarceration to New York Times bestselling author, resilience expert, and entrepreneur, Shaka Senghor reveals the mindset and proven practices that transformed his life—and can help anyone achieve their wildest dreams.

Brian O'Mahony was diagnosed with leukaemia at eighteen and died just a few months later. In Goodbye, My Son Brian's mother, Marian, shares her experience of her son's journey through terminal illness, providing an invaluable insight into how to try to come to terms with even the most devastating of tragedies. Suddenly plunged into the role of carer, and without any experience to draw on, Marian was confused and scared by a future that seemed to hold no hope. But she desperately sought to 'get it right', even when she wasn't sure what that might mean.

"I'm sorry, it's cancer." Four words with the power to upend your entire existence and thrust you into an emotional whirlwind. As these words unravel, they unleash trauma, chaos, and threats to every facet of life—from health and body image to relationships, job, career, and future dreams. Thoughts swirl: What did I do so wrong to deserve this? How am I going to survive? Is my body going to be mutilated?

Two years after Marilyn loses her fiancé to cancer, she becomes a Christian and marries Henry, joining him in a worldwide ministry that leaves little time for family or personal reflection. When her old grief resurfaces, she’s shocked by the tsunami that rips through their lives. Intensive counselling fails to bring healing, and when Henry writes a public letter that decimates their churches and spins them out of fellowship—and lifelong employment—she faces an emotional and spiritual reckoning that challenges her to the core.

The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power.

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.

The powerful testimonies of 11 widows of the Bible are brought to narrative life in lyrical, visceral prose that brings listeners deep inside the women's grief, strength, and faith. Full of both haunting and hope, Not Alone connects Biblical widows' voices in a chorus of commiseration that reminds us what it means to love - and what it means to live with God.

From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. A kind of memoir that is also a peon to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare. It is a life that navigates and transcends abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. It is the life of a misfit, one that forges a fierce and untrodden path to creativity and comes together in the shape of love.

In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life, Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge "into the darkness of an expiring existence". Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom's intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer's, and then on becoming a widow.