Books We Love
Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor
“Follow Barbara Brown Taylor on her journey to understand darkness, which takes her spelunking in unlit caves, learning to eat and cross the street as a blind person, discover-ing how "dark emotions" are prevented from seeing light from a psychiatrist, and reread-ing scripture to see all the times God shows up at night. With her characteristic charm and wisdom, Taylor is our guide through a spirituality of the nighttime, teaching us how to find God even in darkness, and giving us a way to let darkness teach us what we need to know.”
You Are Not Alone: Love Letters From Loss Mom to Loss Mom, Emily R Long
“This book is a simple book of love written for you, a grieving loss mom, from other loss moms who have also heard those life-altering, soul-shattering words, “I’m sorry there is no heartbeat” or “I’m sorry, your baby is gone.” In the pages of this book, we share letters of love from our hearts to yours with the hope that, maybe, in the darkest, loneliest hours of grief, you will find a little bit of comfort in the words of another mother who has been where you are now. Our deepest desire is for you to know that you are not alone. We are with you. Although we desperately wish we didn’t have a reason to, we lovingly welcome you to our community of sister-mothers of loss. Let us wrap you in love and be a light in the darkness of grief.”
Unimaginable: Life After Baby Loss, Brooke D Taylor
"There is no way to begin without telling you the saddest part of the story. It’s a love story, and it begins with a positive pregnancy test. But, it doesn’t end with a baby." After 34 weeks of a textbook, uneventful pregnancy, Brooke and her husband David were shocked when she went into labor weeks before her due date—and then absolutely blindsided when they arrived at the hospital only to be told that their beloved “Baby Duck” no longer had a heartbeat. This book tells the story of what came next: learning to live with a broken heart that keeps on beating, picking up the pieces amidst the devastation of earth-shattering grief, and finding a way to love life again—even when it looks nothing like they had imagined. This is the story of surviving the death of a child, navigating the complexities of life after pregnancy loss, and discovering that grief can somehow become a part of our life without overtaking it completely. Unimaginable: Life after baby loss examines what it means to be a parent bereaved through stillbirth, and traces one mother's path back to a hopeful life.”
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, Kate Bowler
“Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live.”
No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), Kate Bowler
“Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age thirty-five, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.”
The Baby Loss Guide: Practical and compassionate support with a day-by-day resource to navigate the path of grief, Zoe Clark-Coates
“Written by one of the world's leading baby loss support experts, The Baby Loss Guide is designed to help you navigate this complex issue. Whether you have personally encountered loss, or are supporting people through this harrowing time, this book provides practical and compassionate advice.”
It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, Megan Devine
“In It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we try to help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides―as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner―Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing. She debunks the culturally prescribed goal of returning to a normal, "happy" life, replacing it with a far healthier middle path, one that invites us to build a life alongside grief rather than seeking to overcome it.”
Grief Is Love: Living with Loss, Marisa Renee Lee
“In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one—healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires. In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like. In this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more. The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core, Grief is Love explores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we’ve lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.”