22 Best Books on Grief

Grief, the scariest of all the feelings in this world, unfortunately, is experienced by every living thing on this planet. The time that we pass is so surprising that one day, we are laughing out so loud and the other day, grief overtakes us. But one must know how to deal with grief as it is a part of life.

We know that nothing looks strong enough to take away all your grief but to reduce your grief, we are here to introduce you to some very helpful books.

List of 22 Best Books on Grief

After fully researching, we can say that these books will make you able to cherish the best moments that you spent with your loved ones and will teach you to live in the present. Let’s dive into it!

This book focuses on how to beat the grief and turn to the happiest life waiting for you. This book severely discourages the idea of living with grief throughout your life. This writer tells the people that grief is just another form of love but it’s the most painful form of all the emotions a human being encounters.

This book is full of not only bits of advice but a lot of exercises to follow and practice daily. It shares a lot of personal experiences to make them realize that life is still beautiful, though they have lost their loved one but it’s not the end.

If we talk about the most painful grief that hurts a person to the core of the heart, then everyone agrees that it’s a parent’s loss. Losing one or both parents is something that we can’t forget or move on easily. It is not only the loss of the parents, it is more like losing an inner part of us.

Levy, in this book, discusses this grief and ways to deal with it with time.

This book discusses the five stages of grief, shares many experiences, and of course how to move on towards a better life. The author doesn’t believe in forgetting the loss throughout and starting living a new life.

Grief and loss are something that always stay with us and we always keep on grieving over the same loss, so this book helps in living with the grief, staying strong, and being productive.

Are you ready to start magical thinking about loss and grief? Then this book is for you! It deals with how people went through grief and then how they dealt with it and became stronger people than they were before.

Parents are someone whom we love the most and even it feels scary to think about someday losing them. This book is also for the teens to tell them that life is still beautiful and waiting for them to bloom.

The loss of a loved one that you have the most memories with is the most painful. This book is all about losing a husband and how painful it is.

This book is written in simple English, in an easy to understand tone, and discusses the writer’s personal experiences about losing a husband and then dealing with the grief. This book explains the grief in detail and makes its readers start magical thinking about healing themselves and so comes out with better bits of advice.

6. Surviving the Death of a Sibling by T.J. Wray

Sibling is most probably the person with whom you share everything. Friends come and go but siblings remain constant. From the childhood fights to the partners in everything, losing a sibling is just like losing a part of us.

This book is based on the writer’s personal experience when she lost her sibling and when she recognized the real importance of his sibling in her life. It is all about dealing with grief and hateful comments.

7. Surviving the Death of a Sibling by T.J. Wray

This book is all about dealing with the death and loss of something very special to us. The writer turns grief into poetry that directly triggers our emotions. This book will relieve the pain and will take you out of the darkness that you feel in the grieving process.

This book is all about the ways to handle grief with food and humor.

8. Please Be Patient, I’m Grieving by Gary Roe

Dealing with the loss of someone very close to our heart, leaves us devastated. This book shares a lot of tips and surprisingly these tips are not only for those who deal with grief but also for others who need to support people in their grieving process.

This book has a lot of experiences, tips, and exercises to make a grieving person feel hopeful about the future.

9. A Parent’s Guide to Raising Grieving Children by Phyllis R. Silverman and Madelyn Kelly

This book is the best book when it comes to telling the children about grief, and how to deal with it. Not only that, but this book also shares a lot of tips to treat a grief-stricken child, and different mood swings.

It’s all about telling a child to behave when someone leaves us and how to give a natural and sane response to a loss.

10. The Empty Room by Cohen and Horseley

This book, as the name suggests, talks about the never-ending grief of losing a sibling. The writer discusses his own experience of dealing with his sibling’s illness and then his death. Long-term grief pushes you towards potentially isolated life.

This book shares the stories of the people who went through a sibling’s death and dealt with it so strongly that they are living a happy life. Undoubtedly, a sibling’s loss hurts throughout the life but living our own life is as necessary.

11. Surviving the Holidays Without You by Gary Roe

Holidays are always spent with our loved ones and the family, and missing a member of a family that you share your holidays with is a very big loss. Spending the night, going to the same place but not with the loved one, memories, etc. reminds us a lot about our loved one.

This book is all about the emotions that have been strongly associated with our loved ones and we feel not able to deal with the grief. This book is all about controlling emotions.

12. Bearing The Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore

This book has so much more than just discussing the types of griefs that we encounter. Grief has undoubtedly a severe impact on our brain, the body, and our daily lives as well. This book describes the psychological effects of grief and how it breaks us from the inside. Trauma has a strong effect on our brain and can make us a patient if we don’t learn to deal with it.

It highlights the importance of dealing with grief and shares many tips and advice to live after a traumatic incident.

13. When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S.Kushner

The writer penned down this book when he encountered a fatal disease in his toddler and he started thinking about how God can do this to anyone or make someone suffer from a damaging loss. The writer talks about fear and faith and how his doubts made him realize a very important lesson of this world.

This book also shares the stories of people who went through the loss and never let the grief take over them.

14. I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye by Brooke Noel and Pamela D. Blair

This book shares the myths about grief and gives comfort to the readers. This book is all about learning emotional stability from a very young age and then practicing it throughout life.

The writer addresses young adults and also the people who can be a very beneficial support to people living with grief. This book shows the pictures, sketches to help a person dealing with grief to explore himself and enjoy a normal life.

15. The Other Side of Sadness by George Bonanno

The writer associates the concept of trauma with resilience and explains grief scientifically. He explains the feeling and the emotions after losing a loved one. He took more than 100 interviews with the people who suffered from a loss and beat the grief and then came up with lots of tips.

The writer faced the death of his beloved father and so he shares the pain and feelings of a person facing it. If you want to learn about grief scientifically and  how grief is related to our culture, then this book is a must for you.

16. How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies by Therese A. Rando

Grief is the most painful emotion to live with. Losing someone can be expected as well as a very sudden incident too. But what to do, when a loved one dies, how to manage the funeral things, and then how to live the life without the loved one, is everything that you will learn by reading this book.

The advice and the tips are really strong enough to make you feel stronger than before and welcome the life ahead.

 17. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

This book is written by an author who himself lost his love of life, his wife. This book revolves around the personal feelings of the author, how he lost his wife and how he learned to cope with the grief.

This book explains that life never stops even when you lose the best person in your life and makes its readers find a new way out of grief and start looking at the brighter side of life.

18. When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

This book focuses on understanding that the loved one who has left can never come back. Though grief feels permanent, defeating the grief is the most necessary thing that a grieving person must do.

It talks about the two kinds of people, one who wants to beat the grief and the others who want to find a way while living in grief, and stresses the importance of why understanding the reality is necessary to beat the grief.

19. The Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Russell Friedman

It doesn’t matter what kind of grief you are suffering from; this book is surely going to help you out. Whether you are struggling with the grief of losing a friend, parent, spouse, or siblings, this book has the ultimate solutions.

This book has many exercises, action plans that help people to start coming out of grief and be productive. These action plans guarantee a healthier life and are very easy to practice as well

20. Heartbroken by Gary Roe

A spouse is undoubtedly a partner of life with whom you share your whole life. It’s never easy to bear the loss of a spouse who is so near and dear to us. The grief specialist Gar Roe discusses this trauma and gives widows a sense of support and comfort that is everything to pass the remaining life.

This book is very easy to read and a reader can easily feel connected to it. This book focuses on giving support and making grieving people feel like they are not alone.

21. Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone 

Grief is something that makes you devastated from the inside. This book says that It’s the pain that doesn’t only affect your body, and your daily life but it can also lead to some serious disorders such as insomnia or depression. 

This book describes how she came out to a meaningful life when she faced her daughter’s loss. 

22. Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grand

There is always an Option B to deal with any grieving situation. You feel grief can never go and you’ll start learning to live with it someday then it’s your illusion. Grief will never leave you unless you take action to beat it.

This writer talks about the ways to deal with grief spiritually. Things come and go, it’s us who have to decide whether to keep on grieving and destroy the coming happiness as well or learn to deal with grief and enjoy the happiness to its fullest.

FAQ’s

Final Thoughts

Everyone encounters the worst situations and something they can never imagine but still, we have to deal with it for a happy life. Struggling with grief and losses might be hard. It sometimes feels almost impossible to get out of the hell of pain and stress, but everyone has to get out of it by himself. In such circumstances, all a person needs is a little help to withstand the harshness of life. 

Support and guidance are among the foremost things that are necessary to feel the life around you. These books are among the best ones that not only motivate you but also give you comfort and confidence enough to deal with the grief and grow happily. If you are also a sufferer of grief then you should take some guidance from these inspiring books to overcome the situation