Grief Day By Day: Simple Practices and Daily Guidance for Living with Loss


Jan Warner - 2018
    It is ever changing and may come to us differently on any given day. Grief Day by Day offers reflections and practices that address the day-to-day feelings that accompany the ever changing process of grief.In Grief Day by Day, Jan Warner draws on her own extensive experience and the experiences of the 2 million followers on her Grief Speaks Out Facebook page to offer hope in its most practical form. This book does not look to offer a solution to grief. Rather, it provides supportive, useful guidance to help you create a life in which peace, and even gratitude, can coexist with your grief.Inside the pages of Grief Day by Day you’ll find: 365 Daily Reflections that include quotes, meditations, and other musings on grief Weekly Themes that capture common feelings and experiences such as: Loneliness, Things Left Unsaid, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Guilt, and Intimacy 52 Healing Exercises that help you process your feelings at the end of each week and develop skills for coping with grief as it arises There is no “right way” to grieve, and there is no right way to use this book. Whether you follow it page by page, or select that which seems most relevant to you at the moment, how you use this book is less important than why you are using it. You’re using this book because you have chosen to honor your experience, to make a home for your grief, and to find a new way of living on the bridge between loss and life.

Me Time


Jessica Sanders - 2019
    Me Time reframes self care, from acts of indulgence to a holistic practice of self love that nurtures both mind and body. Filled with timed self care ideas that range from one minute activities to day long adventures, this book shows you how to make time for self care. Remind yourself that you are worthy of your own care with Me Time.

Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life


Ira Byock - 1997
    Nobody should have to die alone. This is Ira Byock's dream, and he is dedicating his life to making it come true. Dying Well brings us to the homes and bedsides of families with whom Dr. Byock has worked, telling stories of love and reconciliation in the face of tragedy, pain, medical drama, and conflict. Through the true stories of patients, he shows us that a lot of important emotional work can be accomplished in the final months, weeks, and even days of life. It is a companion for families, showing them how to deal with doctors, how to talk to loved ones—and how to make the end of life as meaningful and enriching as the beginning.Ira Byock is also the author of The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life.

Life is Trichy: Memoir of a mental health therapist with a mental health disorder


Lindsey M. Muller - 2014
    Starting from a young age, this resulted in years spent hiding her body focused repetitive behaviors from everyone she knew, while simultaneously pursuing a professional career in psychology to treat others with the same exact challenges. She tactfully weaves the actions, feelings, and thoughts from years of sitting in the patient’s seat, with her professional, psychological knowledge in the clinician’s seat. Lindsey’s personal struggle mixes with factual information to elucidate the tricky and unspoken truth about a classification of disorders affecting approximately five percent of the population. Life is Trichy is appropriate for clinicians, patients, family and friends of hair pullers, and curious minds.

Dream New Dreams: Reimagining My Life After Loss


Jai Pausch - 2012
    As she faced life without the husband she called her “magic man,” Jai learned to make herself a priority to create a new life of hope and happiness—as she puts it, to “feel a spark of my own magic beginning to flicker.”     Dream New Dreams is a powerful story of grief, healing, and newfound independence. With advice artfully woven into an intimate, beautifully written narrative, Jai’s story will inspire not only the legions of readers who made The Last Lecture a bestseller, but also those who are embarking on a journey of loss and renewal themselves.

Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner)


Michael Hebb - 2018
    Yet few of these conversations are actually happening. Inspired by his experience with his own father and countless other stories from others who regret not having these conversations, Michael Hebb cofounded Death Over Dinner--an organization that encourages people to pull up a chair, break bread, and really talk about the one thing we all have in common. Death Over Dinner has been one of the most effective end-of-life awareness campaigns to date; in just three years, it has provided the framework and inspiration for more than a hundred thousand dinners focused on having these end-of-life conversations. As Arianna Huffington said, "We are such a fast-food culture, I love the idea of making the dinner last for hours. These are the conversations that will help us to evolve."Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner) offers keen practical advice on how to have these same conversations--not just at the dinner table, but anywhere. There's no one right way to talk about death, but Hebb shares time- and dinner- tested prompts to use as conversation starters, ranging from the spiritual to the practical, from analytical to downright funny and surprising. By transforming the most difficult conversations into an opportunity, they become celebratory and meaningful--ways that not only can change the way we die, but the way we live.

How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies


Therese A. Rando - 1989
    But whether the death is sudden or anticipated, few of us are prepared for it or for the grief it brings. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. Each person's response to loss will be different. Now, in this compassionate, comprehensive guide, Therese A. Rando, Ph.D., bereavement specialist and author of Loss And Anticipatory Grief, leads you gently through the painful but necessary process of grieving. Whether the death was sudden or expected, from an accident, illness, suicide, homicide, or natural cause, Dr. Rando will help you learn to:Understand and resolve your grief.Talk to children about death.Resolve unfinished business.Take care of yourself.Accept the help and support of others.Get through holidays and other difficult times of the year.Plan funerals and personal bereavement rituals.How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies also includes a comprehensive resource listing and a chapter on finding professional help and support groups.There is no way around the pain of loss, but there is a way through it. Dr. Rando offers the solace, comfort, and guidance to help you accept your loss and move into your new life without forgetting your treasured past.

The Myths of Happiness


Sonja Lyubomirsky - 2012
    This restricted view of happiness works to discourage us from recognizing the upside of any negative life turn and blocks us from recognizing our own growth potential. Our outsized expectations transform natural rites of passage into emotional land mines and steer us to make toxic decisions, as The Myths of Happiness reveals.Because we expect the best (or the worst) from life’s turning points, we shortsightedly place too much weight on our initial emotional responses. The Myths of Happiness empowers readers to look beyond their first response, sharing scientific evidence that often it is our mindset—not our circumstances—that matters. Central to these findings is the notion of hedonic adaptation, the fact that people are far more adaptable than they think. Even after a major life change—good or bad—we tend to return to our initial happiness level, forgetting what once made us elated or why we felt that life was so unbearable. The Myths of Happiness offers the perspective we need to make wiser choices, sharing how to slow the effects of this adaptation after a positive turn and find the way forward in a time of darkness.In The Myths of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky turns an empirical eye to the biggest, messiest moments, providing readers with the clear-eyed vision they need to build the healthiest, most satisfying life. A corrective course on happiness and a call to regard life’s twists and turns with a more open mind, The Myths of Happiness shares practical lessons with life-changing potential.

Tracks of a Fellow Struggler: Living and Growing Toward Grief


John R. Claypool - 1995
    The first was delivered just eleven days after his daughter's diagnosis of leukemia, the second after her first major relapse nine months later, and the third weeks after her death. The final sermon--a reflection on the process of grieving--was preached three years later.With more than a million copies sold, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler is once again available in a hardcover edition, perfect for gift-giving, or for anyone seeking God's comfort in difficult times to read and cherish.

Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies about Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be


Rachel Hollis - 2018
    Now comes her highly anticipated first book featuring her signature combination of honesty, humor, and direct, no-nonsense advice.Each chapter of Girl, Wash Your Face begins with a specific lie Hollis once believed that left her feeling overwhelmed, unworthy, or ready to give up. As a working mother, a former foster parent, and a woman who has dealt with insecurities about her body and relationships, she speaks with the insight and kindness of a BFF, helping women unpack the limiting mind-sets that destroy their self-confidence and keep them from moving forward.From her temporary obsession with marrying Matt Damon to a daydream involving hypnotic iguanas to her son's request that she buy a necklace to "be like the other moms," Hollis holds nothing back. With unflinching faith and tenacity, Hollis spurs other women to live with passion and hustle and to awaken their slumbering goals.

Gratitude


Oliver Sacks - 2015
    I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver SacksNo writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts


Jennie Allen - 2020
    The visionary behind the million-strong IF:Gathering challenges you to exercise your God-given power to shift negative thinking patterns and take back control of your thoughts and emotions.Are your thoughts holding you captive? I’ll never be good enough. Other people have better lives than I do. God couldn’t really love me. Jennie Allen knows what it’s like to swirl in a spiral of destructive thoughts, but she also knows we don’t have to stay stuck in toxic thinking patterns. As she discovered in her own life, God built a way for us to escape that downward spiral. Freedom comes when we refuse to be victims to our thoughts and realize we have already been equipped with power from God to fight and win the war for our minds. In Get Out of Your Head, Jennie inspires and equips us to transform our emotions, our outlook, and even our circumstances by taking control of our thoughts. Our enemy is determined to get in our heads to make us feel helpless, overwhelmed, and incapable of making a difference for the kingdom of God. But when we submit our minds to Christ, the promises and goodness of God flood our lives in remarkable ways. It starts in your head. And from there, the possibilities are endless.

A Grief Observed


C.S. Lewis - 1961
    S. Lewis's wife, the American-born poet Joy Davidman. In her introduction to this new edition, Madeleine L'Engle writes: "I am grateful to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God in angry violence. This is a part of a healthy grief which is not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul's growth."Written in longhand in notebooks that Lewis found in his home, A Grief Observed probes the "mad midnight moments" of Lewis's mourning and loss, moments in which he questioned what he had previously believed about life and death, marriage, and even God. Indecision and self-pity assailed Lewis. "We are under the harrow and can't escape," he writes. "I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace." Writing A Grief Observed as "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve," he came to recognize that "bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."Lewis writes his statement of faith with precision, humor, and grace. Yet neither is Lewis reluctant to confess his continuing doubts and his awareness of his own human frailty. This is precisely the quality which suggests that A Grief Observed may become "among the great devotional books of our age."

The Still Point of the Turning World


Emily Rapp - 2013
    But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder.  Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months.  Rapp and her husband were forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about parenting.  They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment; to find happiness in the midst of sorrow; to parent without a future.The Still Point of the Turning World is the story of a mother’s journey through grief and beyond it.  Rapp’s response to her son’s diagnosis was a belief that she needed to “make my world big”—to make sense of her family’s situation through art, literature, philosophy, theology and myth.  Drawing on a broad range of thinkers and writers, from C.S. Lewis to Sylvia Plath, Hegel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rapp learns what wisdom there is to be gained from parenting a terminally ill child.  In luminous, exquisitely moving prose she re-examines our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a good parent, to be a success, and to live a meaningful life.

Get Your Sh*t Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide)


Sarah Knight - 2016
    But what about all the sh*t you do give a f*ck about-like your career, health, relationships, and bank account?Now, Sarah's back with more hilarious advice to make life easier and better. Whether your dream is to quit your day job and buy a food truck, pay off your debt, or just spend more time with your cat, Sarah cuts through the bullsh*t cycle of self-sabotage to show you how to be happy.You'll learn:Three simple tools for getting (and keeping) your sh*t togetherThe Power of Negative ThinkingHow to balance work and fun-and save money while you're at itWays to manage anxietyAnd tons of other awesome sh*t!Soon you'll be setting real goals, crushing them, and getting out the door for happy hour-every damn day.Praise for Sarah Knight"Genius." - Cosmopolitan"Self-help to swear by." - The Boston Globe"Hilarious [and] truly practical." - Booklist