Books That Changed How I Think About Death and Grief
A death doula's reading list
People often ask me for book recommendations. Sometimes the request comes from a client who is preparing for their own death. Or from a caregiver who is deep in grief after their loved one has died. Reading about death and grief has made me much more comfortable making friends with topics our culture works very hard to avoid. Here are a few books that have brought me solace and insights; may they do the same for you.
Practical
Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love
Mallory McDuff · 2021
How can your choices after you die be more sustainable? After facing the sudden loss of her parents, the author explores how to align her end-of-life choices with her environmental values.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande · 2014
A surgeon's honest look at how modern medicine handles the end of life, and what happens when we take the time to actually ask people what matters most to them.
Hard Choices for Loving People
Hank Dunn · 1999
Written by a hospice chaplain, this chapbook helps you make difficult choices about CPR, artificial feeding, and comfort care for loved ones with life-threatening illnesses.
Memoirs
Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real about the End
Alua Arthur · 2024
A death doula (the one who trained me!) writes about how she came into deathcare work. Her stories help you confront grief and center joy in your own life.
Why Religion? A Personal Story
Elaine Pagels · 2018
A religious scholar takes us on her journey of unimaginable losses, and illuminates the role that religion and spirituality can play in the grief process in a profound memoir.
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 2016
A young neurosurgeon writes about his own terminal diagnosis. It is a book about how to decide what a meaningful life looks like when the timeline is suddenly very short.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory
Caitlin Doughty · 2014
A mortician's account of her first years in the funeral trade. Irreverent and genuinely informative about how Western culture came to outsource death.
Grief
Notes on Grief
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2021
This gut-wrenching short book captures the pain of losing a beloved parent from afar, written after Adichie's father's death during the pandemic.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Francis Weller · 2015
The Five Gates of Grief provide balm for our souls and reflections that help us connect with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2005
An account of sudden loss and the strange, literal-minded bargaining the mind does afterwards as you face unexpected loss and intense grief.
Contemplative and spiritual
How We Live Is How We Die
Pema Chödrön · 2022
Written by an American-born Buddhist nun, this book reminds us that the time to confront our fears and open our hearts is while we are living.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sogyal Rinpoche · 1992
A well-known introduction to Tibetan Buddhist teachings on impermanence and dying, written for Western readers. Many people return to this book again and again.
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Richard Rohr · 2011
This book helped me understand how failures can be framed within a spiritual outlook, and appreciate the authentic wisdom that comes with age, if we are open to it.
Poetry
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver · 2017
My copy of this beloved book lives on my bedside table. Her poems provide solace and inspiration, and keep me connected with the natural world.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy · 2005
The 100th anniversary edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems lives by my bed, its pages worn. When I am facing deep grief or sorrow, these poems restore my faith in the world of the living.
I Shall Not Be Moved
Maya Angelou · 1990
I first read her poems in my poetry writing courses in college. Her words are like songs that sing truths about history, pain, and joy.