Relationship Loss

Every person who lives long enough will eventually encounter circumstances that are difficult to explain theologically. From years of counselling experience, Dr. James Dobson offers assurance of God's constant care, even when human suffering is beyond our comprehension.

In grief, it is normal to wonder if you will ever feel okay again. Loneliness, fear, confusion, and anger make hope hard to come by. And yet, grieving in hope is vital to the healing process. Written at a much-appreciated length, this brief book gently guides listeners through the healing process of grief. Showing how grief doesn't happen in neat orderly stages, it explains how to work through painful emotions and questions and find God's peace and healing.

Speaker and author Kayla Stoecklein delivers an inspiring message of how she came face-to-face with crushing personal loss and discovered how to rebuild a beautiful life. Since losing her pastor-husband to suicide in August 2018, Kayla Stoecklein has been passionate about bringing hope to those who wonder if life will ever hold beauty again.

When Alissa Parker lost her daughter Emilie in the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting, she started a life-changing journey to answer soul-searching questions about faith, hope, and healing. As she sought for the peace and comfort that could help mend her broken heart, she learned, step by step, how to open her heart to God's grace and will. The story of Alissa and Emilie reminds us that the bonds of love continue beyond this life and that despite tragedy and heartache, we can find strength in our family and our faith.

Coping with loss is difficult, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer alone. Based on the proven-effective acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) treatment, Moving Through Grief provides simple and effective techniques to help you get unstuck and start living a rich and fulfilling life again, loss and all. ACT is all about embracing what hurts and committing to actions that will improve and enrich your life.

Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment, a secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most in life. So begins Frank Ostaseski's stirring book, The Five Invitations, an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present awareness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves.

Feeling like grief’s got you in a chokehold, and not in a cool, action-hero kind of way? Wonder if screaming into your pillow at 3 AM is a hobby you should list on your dating profile? Grief Sucks; But Your Life Doesn't Have To is here to throw you a lifeline and maybe even a few laughs along the way. Brooke Carlock gets it. She's been through the grief grinder, having lost her dad, mom, stepmom, and ten-year-old daughter in a span of a year and a half. This book isn’t your typical “let’s hold hands and cry it out” guide.

Tender, heartbreaking, and eye-opening, the true stories in Glimpses of Heaven offer a window into the world beyond and life after death.

In this narrative of grief, Pastor Mel Lawrenz chronicles how his family struggled to survive the sudden death of their beloved daughter. In raw, vivid episodes, he describes the immediacy of the pain and the uncertainty of what comes next. In the agony of traumatic loss, Lawrenz apprehends the realities of love and life and offers insights on how to navigate our life priorities before or after tragedy hits. You are not alone. You too can find a way forward.

In this mini-audiobook collection of essays, prominent atheist author Greta Christina offers secular ways to handle your own mortality and the death of those you love. Blending intensely personal experience with compassionate, down-to-earth wisdom, Christina (Coming out Atheist and Why Are You Atheists So Angry?) explores a variety of natural philosophies of death.

Death is not for the faint of heart, and sometimes the best way to cope is through humor. No one knows this better than comedian Laurie Kilmartin. She made headlines by live-tweeting her father's time in hospice and her grieving process after he passed and channeled her experience into a comedy special, 45 Jokes About My Dead Dad. Dead People Suck is her hilarious guide to surviving (sometimes) death, dying, and grief without losing your mind.

Our favorite four-legged grief counselor, Jack McAfghan, guides you gently and honestly through all aspects of pet loss and grief. Jack will prepare you, teach you to make peace with the decisions you may ultimately have to make and help you to understand that the end of this life is not the end of life at all. Learn the secret language that will help you communicate with your pets no matter where they are.

When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was 10 years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian minister. She eventually began working with the Maine Game Warden Service, which conducts the state's search-and-rescue operations when people go missing in the wilderness.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. 'I was in "the void,"' she writes, 'a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.' Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

A beloved spouse dies. Your husband, wife, and life partner is gone. Your world is upended. The emotional pain can be intense. Your heart begins asking questions. "Am I going crazy? Am I going to make it? Where is God in all this?" Many of the people around you don't know what to say or do. They utter clichés and platitudes. "It's okay. You're strong. You'll get through this."

When people hear the word acceptance, they might assume that it means being OK with what happened in the past or with how things currently are. In fact, there is a difference between acceptance and 'feeling good' about what happened—acceptance means allowing yourself to feel whatever emotions naturally come up in response to what you are going through. It means acknowledging the reality of the pain, even though in an ideal world, it shouldn't be that way.

In Dream New Dreams, Jai Pausch shares her own story for the first time: her emotional journey from wife and mother to full-time caregiver, shuttling between her three young children and Randy's bedside as he sought treatment far from home; and then to widow and single parent, fighting to preserve a sense of stability for her family, while coping with her own grief and the challenges of running a household without a partner.

Lamentations of the Heart soulfully combines contemporary free verse poetry and nonfictional prose to tell the story of one mother’s grief following the death of her only child. The author interweaves scriptural passages with the inevitable struggles to accept and make sense of her new reality. All of it reveals the unending love for family that remains. Written to reach out to others who have experienced similar pain, it moves upon the uneven, wavering pattern of great emotion, along a tumultuous path blessed with signs and wonders — an unwanted journey a tapestry of life healing ...

You're not alone in mourning—it's possible to move past the denial, start the healing, and memorialize your beloved pet, even if the pain of loss feels overwhelming. Losing a pet can feel like losing a member of your family. Their absence leaves an ache in your heart that may seem impossible to heal. Do you continually find yourself asking, "Why is this so hard?" Are you desperate to explain your pet's loss to your child, but you just can't find the right words? Do you yearn to hold onto their memory, yet unsure how to keep their spirit alive?