Grief Science

When a loved one passes unexpectedly, the person left behind can lose their bearings. After the sudden loss of her mother, Chelsea Hanson, a nationally recognized grief educator and founder of With Sympathy Gifts and Keepsakes, didn't know where to turn for help, what to do next, or how to put the pieces of her life back together. Hanson's The Sudden Loss Survival Guide gathers everything that she learned during her own recovery process and provides an indispensable road map to aid those who've experienced a life-changing loss.

There are plenty of self-help books for mourners, but nothing in the way of a modern, approachable and above all useful field guide for the living. And all of us - young, old, sick and well - could use the help. After all, pregnant couples have ample resources available to them as they prepare to bring a new life into the world: Lamaze courses, elaborate birth plans, tons of manuals. Why don't we have a What to Expect When You're Expecting to Die book?

'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In Lifescapes, the acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.

A grief-stricken man travels back in time to seek revenge on the woman who murdered his girlfriend but inadvertently falls in love with her. Kane is about to marry the woman he loves. His life is perfect. A few weeks before the wedding, a vindictive woman from his girlfriend’s past mysteriously arrives and kills her. He learns of a traumatic accident that happened five years earlier, which triggers Riley’s hatred for his girlfriend. Distraught over his girlfriend’s death, Kane uses an antique time machine to travel into the past in order to find and destroy the woman responsible. When...

Have you ever felt as if you couldn't go on? That you were nearly lost under the weight of your own burdens? Were you told - or did you decide - that the only way out was to soldier on, to blindly grind out the days until you felt like you could breathe again, if not as well as before? What if there was another way?That's the option that Jerry is presented with by his best friend, Robert, along with an incredible tale of the man who came to Robert in his own time of need; the man who calls himself Mister Grief; the man who has a tale of his own to tell.

The Change and Odens stand on the verge of executing the most ambitious heist ever attempted within the human sector of the galaxy. Their formidable fusion of technology holds the power to shift the trajectories of hundreds of thousands of worlds, bending them to their will. As 3rd Level Marcus struggles to unravel the intricacies of this grand scheme, he must either decide to remain loyal to the Spire, the faction he once called home, or forge an uneasy alliance with the formidable adversaries known as the Sky Warriors. Complications mount when an enigmatic Oden Oiem ring plummets from the...

When he became an undertaker, Rupert Callender undertook to deal with the dead for the sake of the living. This book is his brilliant, unforgettable story—the life and work of the world’s first punk undertaker—but it's also about ordinary, everyday humanity and our capacity to face death with courage and compassion, to say goodbye to the people we love in our own way.

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.

What if everything you loved was just a simulation—and you chose to believe in it anyway? In the near future, after the Singularity has blurred the line between human and machine, Josiah Kim lives the perfect life: a loving wife, a brilliant daughter, a home in paradise. Until one morning, everything shatters—and he’s left with nothing but grief and a mysterious device that lets him see them again. Crafted from memory, code, and haunting precision, Prompt Theory is a mind-bending journey through loss, love, and the ethics of artificial resurrection. As Josiah grapples with reality, ...

Life is hard—as the past few years have made painfully clear. From personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world, sometimes simply going on can feel too much. But could there be solace—and even hope—in acknowledging the hardships of the human condition? Might doing so free us from the tyranny of striving for our "best lives" and help us find warmth, humanity and humour in the lives we actually have? Could it inspire in us the desire for a better world? In this profound and personal book, Kieran Setiya shows how philosophy can help us find our way.

A practical guide to navigating grief and everything that comes with loss. Jeff Brazier has experienced bereavement in many forms: in his childhood; helping his two boys through the devastating death of their mother, Jade Goody; witnessing the anguish of his own mum when she lost both of her parents; and hearing the stories of his coaching clients who are coming to terms with loss. No one can be an expert on grief, but within this book Jeff provides support and guidance from someone who has been there.

What if we didn’t consider death the worst possible outcome? What if we discussed it honestly, embraced end-of-life care and prepared for the end of our lives with hope and acceptance? In this empathetic and knowledgeable guide, TikTok star Julie McFadden – known online as ‘Hospice Nurse Julie’ – shares the valuable lessons she’s learned in her fifteen years as a palliative care nurse.

Three enhanced audiobooks performed by the stars of the classic BBC television series. These stories are set during series one. 'Promises' by Nigel Fairs. Starring Jan Chappell as Cally and Stephen Greif as Travis. Cally is alone with Travis, Blake's mortal enemy. As they delve into the past, a long-hidden secret that links them both is revealed.

Evelyn Amdur, a hospice social worker, began to write these stories midway through her career, collaborating with her daughter, Shelley. Many traditional cultures have a custom of "death songs", which rest on the idea that at one's last moment, one somehow sums up the essence of one's life in a phrase or a song. Woven into these stories are instructions on how to die well, not only in what spirit we face death itself, but also through instructions on what is necessary to prepare our families, to ready our estates, and to manage all the players who may be involved in our deaths.

Leo LOVES Christmas. And this Christmas needs to be absolutely perfect, because it’s the first one without Mum. Only it all keeps going wrong! The fairylights are in a tangle, the tree’s wonky and the Christmas biscuits taste AWFUL. Soon Leo decides he’s had enough – he makes a heartfelt wish that it would all GO AWAY. Then Leo wakes up on Christmas morning – and it’s gone!! All of Christmas! But Leo isn’t going to let it get away that easily. With the help of his best friends, Prisha and Ivan, he sets out on a mission to undo his wish and get Christmas back.

Death and the treatment of the dead body loom large in our collective cultural consciousness. The authors explore the materiality and meaning of the dead body and the living's relationship to it. All the biggest questions facing the planetary human community relate in one way or another to the corpse. Surprisingly, Christian communities are largely missing in the discussion of the dead, having abdicated the historic role in care for the dead to the funeral industry.

Mesmerized, at times unnerved, by his 97-year-old father's nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book - both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion. It's an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami’s hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn’t anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history. They found themselves battling pounding rain, waves the size of skyscrapers, and 140 knot winds.

Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer reflections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes. Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor ‘whose brain had been broken by violence’. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were ‘disappeared’ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994.

When Robert Ryder loses his best friends all in one cruel twist of fate, including the love of his life, it seems almost too good to be true when he finds a book of shadows with a spell to resurrect the dead. When the spell works, the returned want more than just a second chance at life. Their emotions and needs are intensified, the strongest being their desire for revenge. And why are there shadows moving within their eyes? Are they still his friends? Or did something come back in their place? And there are other things seeking to cross over, entities becoming stronger with every use of ...