Some years of your life are great. Lots of big things happen – you get a new job, you go on a great vacation, and a new baby is born into the family (not your baby, but still its cool).
Other years, a sad thing happens. That was the year your grandmother died. Or that was the year your job announced layoffs and you had to change jobs when you hadn’t expected to.
You survive these difficult situations and then it seems life goes back to a kind of normal again. You process the change, possibly read a few books about whatever you’re going through, talk more than usual with friends, but you’re mostly the same person.
And then some years, everything completely falls apart. So much happens, so many things change, that you change. You become a thoroughly different person. Divorce, or the death of a spouse or a sibling, or a tragedy occurs. Or maybe just multiple life losses all pile up at once.
I had one of those multiple loss type years recently. I’m still transforming, still processing. These are 8 books I read when this happened to me.
- Spiritual Divorce: Divorce as a Catalyst for an Extraordinary Life
- Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence
- How to Survive the Loss of a Parent: A Guide for Adults
- The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping With Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents
- Good Bye Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost a Pet
- Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief
- AdaptAbility: How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For
- Harry Potter series. Because life. Because they are full of uplifting themes and such wonderful stories about love and loss and grief and support in times of great difficulty. Because the characters are so deep and true and welcome you like old friends. Because stories are metaphors for reality. Because they help you cope and give you hope. And joy.
These books were for the losses I experienced in a single year. Unasked for changes. Not all were completely unexpected. We know that our parents will not live forever. That our sweet dear dogs we’ve cared for and loved for 15 or more years cannot live forever no matter how deeply we love them. Other people will have different heartbreaks. I hope they don’t hit you all at once as mine did.
There are books for every single difficulty. Sometimes they are hard to find, but they are out there. It’s an amazing time when so many resources and stories are available to us if we just look.
I don’t know how long it will take me to process this particular year. Sometimes I wish and even think I’ve made it “through,” whatever that means.
And then I experience a new facet of one of the losses or of the combined losses. A memory is triggered. I hear a song, any song. Remember something I’d planned to do with my dogs. Want to share something someone said with a person no longer in my life. End up in a restaurant those gone once enjoyed. Smell Confederate Jasmine or English Boxwood.
And I will again feel the swampy molasses mud of the heartbreak and change I am trying to navigate overflow my path.
And I go to the shelf and open to the words of a supportive teacher or counselor or adventurous friend and with their help, face the pain and turmoil that arises again.
I don’t know if someone said this or not but it’s been ringing in my thoughts: “Books are an everlasting friend.”
I will never be the person I was before this year began. We can learn from every experience, the happy ones and the sad ones. I tell myself this all the time.
Book pages by Pexels from Pixabay / filtered from original
Rose books by Myriam Zilles from Pixabay / filtered from original
Woman with book by Andrew Sarov from Pixabay / filtered from original
Bev says
The poetry of sorrow. “Because life.” How utterly lovely.
carynwrites says
<3