It’s time for another book round up! Who doesn’t love a little summer reading?
Previous book recommendations on this blog have focused on non-fiction books and memoirs by death care professionals. This time we want to tell you about some books that really get inside the grief experience in a more personal way. Most of them are fiction, inspired by real events in the authors’ lives. All of them are insightful looks at grief and grieving that can help us understand how everyone handles grief in their own individual way.
LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott – Little Women is a book you are probably familiar with, even if you haven’t read it. One of the sisters, Beth, contracts scarlet fever and although she initially seems to recover, she is never quite well again and eventually passes away due to long-term complications from the disease. The book, published in 1868, gives a tender and sensitive depiction of what at the time would have been considered a “good death,” dying peacefully at home, surrounded by loving family, and the chapters following Beth’s dying describe her sister Jo’s grief journey with a beautiful truth and depth. Alcott based the events of her novel on her own life, and Beth was modeled after Alcott’s own sister who passed away, so she knew what she was talking about.
THE OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, Eudora Welty – Written nearly a century after Little Women, The Optimist’s Daughter is the story of an independent young woman who has to handle the funeral and get her father’s other affairs in order when he dies unexpectedly after a minor surgery. It is a window into the way small American towns would come together to support one another in difficult times, especially in the South, how those sorts of communities could be uplifting in some ways but stifling in other ways, and how those community bonds were beginning to erode even by the mid- to late 1950s. It’s a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in the ways funeral culture has changed over the past century and a half.
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH, Leo Tolstoy – Tolstoy is known for writing huge novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella, short enough to read in one or two sittings, which tells a simple story: A man with a comfortable upper-middle class life realizes one day that he is unwell, and then he never gets better again. The piece is more lively than that quick description might lead you to believe; we see glimpses of an active life as Ivan reflects on what he considered important in his life and whether that was what really should have mattered to him. As his health continues to diminish he contemplates his own impending death, grieving over the life he will no longer be able to live and feeling anticipatory grief and anxiety over what comes next. This book is simple but elegant, and unique in its insights into the mind of a terminal patient.
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion – This is the only non-fiction book on today’s list, but it fits with the others in that it describes a journey of profound grief in a way that is easy to connect with as a reader. Joan Didion, a masterful writer with decades of journalistic experience, wrote this book about her own experience through grief when her husband and adult daughter both died somewhat suddenly within only a few months of each other. Didion, who is quite honest about the fact that she is not terribly expressive about emotions when it comes to interpersonal interactions, has a mastery of language that captures the grief experience beautifully, putting it into words for those of us who have been through it but unable to describe it, or for those who have not been through it but would like to understand.
Okay, I’ll admit that these books aren’t the usual summer “beach reads.” But each one is beautiful and will hopefully give you a better understanding of the grieving process. Pick one up and post your thoughts about it in the Movement, or share your own recommendations. And don’t forget we have another meeting of the IDLM Book Club coming up on July 13!
