BOOKS THAT HELPED ME FIND MY WAY THROUGH GRIEF

Reading is Magic. The ability to convey thoughts, ideas, worlds, characters through the medium of black ink on white paper is magic. The ability to transfer empathy for an experience from subject to author, from author to reader, from one reader to another, from one stranger to another, all magic. The ability for the right book to find the right person at the right time – complete, incomprehensible magic.

My grandmother died recently. She had lived a long life. She had been sick for a long time. Her death was not a surprise. But it was not a good death. It was a death hallmarked by long nights spent shivering in cold hospitals listening to discordant beeps from machines attached to wires attached to a woman I barely recognized, a death filled with pain, physical and emotional, a death with a background of loving family members accusing and lashing out at one another, a slow death, a cruel death.

Before, during, and after her death, I read. I read voraciously and widely, reaching for whichever books were closest, grasping them tightly like they were buoys in a storm-tossed sea. I read books that had finally come in after being on my library waitlist for weeks, books I’d waited months to release, books that happened to catch my eyes as I scrolled through hoopla. My TBR at that time was not curated or purposed, but later, after, when the wounds were turning to scars, I looked back and saw that the books I had read, in ways both tangential and direct, had mediated on death. These books had come to me as guides, to tenderly hold my hand and walk with me through my season of grief, promising me a gentler tomorrow someday.

I listened to The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery on audiobook during my time waiting, driving to and from the hospital, sitting in the waiting rooms, those for surgery, those for recovery. The narrator’s soft voice managed to smooth away some of the jagged edges of my world during those long days. Soul studies octopi, yes, but in doing so it asks larger questions about consciousness, about any sentient creature’s ability to walk through life, what makes up a life. Surrounded by sickness and death, the question of what does it mean to be alive, a question that Montgomery approaches with such empathy and gentleness, was a welcome balm.

I began Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman while my grandmother lived, and I finished it after she died. The Norse Myths end with Ragnarok, the ending of the world. There will be fire giants and sea-boiling serpents and revenge-seeking wolves. The gods know how their story will end, and they know that they will not cower but rush out to meet that end in glorious battle. And even knowing their gruesome fate, it does not keep the gods from living, from hunting, and farting, and stealing mead, and playing pranks. There will be death, but first there will be life.

I carried Moloka’i by Alan Brennert in my suitcase to my grandparent’s home, where the family would meet to prepare for the funeral. I snuck moments to myself in rooms that would never hear her footsteps again, and I lost myself in the fictionalized story about the last leper colony in Hawai’i. At seven years old, Rachel Kalama was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease, and is ripped from her family to live in an isolated community populated by those also infected and a handful of others who volunteered to aid the community. Surrounded by disease and death, life persists, kindness continues, sadness and joy, adventure and heartache. This book was full of resilience and quiet perseverance.

Back home, after the funeral I found Smoke Gets in Your Eyes which chronicles the author, Caitlin Doughty’s, experience working at a funeral home. In addition to giving a meditation on current American practices surrounding death, she investigates historical and cultural death practices. She shares how she would change attitudes toward death, to normalize it, to make it less of a mysterious taboo and more of a natural part of life, not something to be feared. While in no way clinical, Doughty’s matter of fact deconstruction and demystification of what happens to bodies after death made the concept loom much smaller in my mind, made it much more manageable.

Finally, I buried myself in the pages of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. Hawk covers a wide variety of subjects, but for me, in that moment, it was an examination of grief, the forms it can take, the unexpected journeys people take to wade through that grief. In the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, MacDonald attempted to train a goshawk. As someone terrified of birds, the idea of confronting a raptor, of isolating myself with a bird of prey shakes me to my very core. The idea of confronting a physical manifestation of fear, of making friends with it, of showing that creature kindness, was an apropos metaphor for handling grief.

I am not great at sitting with my emotions. I like to analyze and compartmentalize and dissect and inspect my feelings. I do not like to feel them. Part of the reason why I so enjoy reading is because it is a safe place for me to explore my feelings. There’s a distance and remove, a safety to be found within the pages of a book that real life doesn’t provide. So it felt comfortable, familiar, to sit with the characters in these books, to hold their hands and empathize with them and their journeys. I often times hear people talk about how healthy it is to sit with our emotions. I always thought I was crap at that, but I now realize that I can do it just fine, so long as I have a book in my hand.

#personal #books #sundry