Life After Death: A List of Books to Help you Regain Hope
Three years ago, I lost someone very dear to me; my aunt. She lost a long battle with cancer, and I felt my life shattering after her death. I saw no point in returning to my daily life. I locked myself up in our house in the mountains and worked remotely for 3 months. I couldn’t face going out with friends, seeing them laugh and live their lives normally while I just lost someone; it was unimaginable. It felt as if I’d be betraying her, myself, and the universe, if life went back to normal. Grief was eating me up alive, like time was suspended and now I’m just free flowing. So many emotions ran through me, I was angry, I was sad, but mostly I felt empty. The simple act of putting a smile on was too much work, too hard to consider.
Since March is the month of new beginnings, spring, and flowers blooming - I wanted to share a list of books that have helped me gain perspective and find a way out of my depression and grief. These are not self help books, they are novels. I think the mere fact that they are novels helped. I didn’t want to go through a self help book, I didn’t want some PhD holder to explain to me what grief is, and what to do with it. I wanted to experience grief with other characters- them being real or not did not matter. I wanted to know that I was not alone in this world, that death is inevitable, that in simple cheesy terms: “c’est la vie”. Reading how others digested death, helped me with my own grief.
These books deal with grief, life, loss, friendship, family, and love. Reading them was not easy, but they helped me understand that the joy of life is through its sufferings. We need to deal with our pain and face it head on- to be able to move on. Here is a list of the books I’ve chosen.
This is by far the hardest book I’ve read- to the point where I couldn’t finish it. The reason being is, this is not a fictional novel, this is a memoir. Joan Didion is a known and powerful writer, she is one of the greatest of our generation. In this book, Joan is coming back home with her husband John, after visiting their daughter who was put into an induced coma at the hospital. During dinner, John suffered a massive and fatal coronary, he died instantly. Joan writes about losing her husband, while her daughter is dying in a hospital bed. It is not a structured book, it’s a compilation of memories and feelings and emotions. It’s a very raw form of writing, which makes it so very powerful yet so very heartbreaking. Reading how Joan came back to an empty home, blood scattered all over their dining room, without her husband - having to go through all these feels with her - it really breaks you. Joan navigates through love, life, and death in this powerful, gut wrenching, you can’t stop sobbing book.
When I first started reading this book, I thought it was another romcom to help me forget everything I was feeling at the time, and to get immersed into someone else’s life. That was not the case. The main character, Eve, learns through the first chapters of the book that her best friend, Susie, is dead- after being with her just the night before at trivia night with their group of friends. We experience loss, grief, friendship, and love through this rollercoaster of emotions in a book. McFarlane is a great writer, she gives us laughter and tears on a silver platter. She explains to us that life is not black or white, that you have to live through ups and downs to live life to its fullest potential. The most important aspect of this book is Eve and Susie. It’s not about love, it’s not about second chances, it’s about friendship. Friends that become family. It’s about knowing that no matter what happens to your loved ones, they live forever in your heart and mind.
This book also seems like a romance novel at a first glimpse, but it’s not. Dannie wakes up from a dream that seemed so real, she felt so shaken up about it, without understanding why. This dream involves a man she’s never met before, until she meets him four years later, as her best friend Bella’s boyfriend. It seemed like this book could be about a love triangle, until you read further and realize this is a book about friendship- about Dannie and Bella. It’s about dealing with death, life, and loss. It’s about celebrating the big moments, and about making life affirming decisions knowing things will never be the same afterwards. It’s a beautiful book that gives you hope after so much darkness.
This is not a book about loss and grief, but it helped me through my journey somehow. I won’t lie to you, I felt more depressed after finishing it than I did before. I still haven’t watched the tv adaptation of Normal People, because I don’t want to relive the sadness I felt when reading it. It’s not meant to tell you that life is all rainbows and butterflies, and that everything will be great in the end. It emphasizes how difficult life is without sugar coating it. This book is not for the faint hearted, but it’s a book that will make you re-question existence as a whole.
This a sequel to Saving Francesca. It’s not necessary to read the first book to be able to understand the second, they could both work as standalone books. The Piper’s son is written through the two main character’s perspectives: Tom and Georgie. Georgie is Tom’s aunt, she lost her brother, and Tom lost his uncle. After some unexpected events take place, Tom moves back in with Georgie. They are both broken, angry, and damaged. The Piper’s son is about family, and how to deal with life when everything you do ends up in tragedy. It’s a story about forgiveness — forgiving yourself and forgiving your loved ones. It’s about picking up the pieces after thinking there are no more pieces left.
Elsie and Ben have been married nine days when Ben dies in a car crash. They have only known each other for six months, their families’ haven’t met each other, and their families didn’t know they were married in the first place. Forever, Interrupted goes back and forth in chapters between when Ben was alive, and when Ben is dead. Elsie is trying to find meaning in life after losing her husband, while also having to deal with a mother in law she’s never met. This book will have you in tears from the first page till the last. It’s a reminder to never take things for granted, and to surrender to the idea that death is part of life, and that life wouldn’t exist without death.
