These titles speak directly to end-of-life matters including books on grief, bereavement, advance planning, caregiving, dying, and continuing bonds. I will be adding another page soon that will include favorite titles on a broader list of topics such as writing, spirituality, culture, and creativity.
Five Favorite Nonfiction Titles
There are many good books about end-of-life care these days. These are the ones I found most helpful and that I find myself rereading and recommending to others.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande
This book remains the book I recommend most often on the topic and it is the one I used as a text when I taught Psychosocial Aspects of Death and Dying at the community college. In weaving science, memoir, and history together, Gawande offers a useful framework for re-evaluating our relationship with healthcare at the end-of-life as a society as well as individually.
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical perspective on Death and Dying, Sallie Tisdale
I read this one after my mom died and found it very reassuring even though it was too late to apply during that experience. I think the reason it spoke to me is because Tisdale’s direct, practical approach acknowledged the intense reality of what I had gone through without further dramatizing it. It was kind of like having a paramedic show up at an accident scene who can help walk you through what to do next, or, in my case, explain what you just walked through. Tisdale also writes with elegance and voice.
In Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully, Frank Ostaseski gives generous personal context to his end-of-life philosophy and practice. Ostaseski founded Zen Hospice California in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic and worked there for thirty years.
He writes, “I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it.”
Many people ask me for recommendations for a book on Grief. I tend to prefer narratives rather than self-help when it comes to relational/emotional topics. Recently, though, I read The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, which is a little bit of both!
Mary Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist who is also a storyteller, and this book straddles the genre of research, memoir, and self-help. Her introduction describes the visceral experience of grief and why it is disorienting as well as painful. This video (YouTube, 10 min) offers an overview that might help you decide whether the book is for you.
The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, helped me to see the landscape of the whole field of cancer and cancer research in a more three-dimensional way. It also gives insight into why cancer is a particularly difficult riddle to solve. The book is very readable, and while it gives no simple answers to cancer or anything else, I feel more prepared to join the conversation about treatment options because I have more understanding of the research and forces from which they arose.
Five Novels
Story often often helps me make my way through morally complicated and emotionally complex times. There is no shortage of gorgeous novels about loss, and here are current favorites that come to mind.
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki is fiction told through multiple characters and voices. It offers meditations on the meaning of life and death across cultures and generations; on climate change and technology and bullying; on losing a parent or a child; on the wisdom and the blind spots of elders, and the wisdom and blind spots of the young; on suicide and endangered species and trees. On the power of words to transcend time and place.
Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Sentence, is a ghost story that takes place in an independent bookstore! It illuminates many different angles on death and loss with wit and heft and tackles tragic topics such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd with humility and honesty and attention to their cultural complexity and real consequences.
Fresh Water for Flowers, by Valérie Perrin (translated by Hildegarde Serle). My friend, Mary Ellen recommended this one about Violette who is a caretaker at a cemetery who is also living with her own ghosts and lost dreams. It travels through the lives of many characters throughout many years and is a love story and tragedy and family saga and mystery all in one. It was a lot to fit in one book, and I loved being along for the whole journey.
The Last White Man, Moshin Hamid is speculative fiction that reflects on various forms of loss and the different ways humans respond in an unnamed city in an unnamed country through the characters of Ander and Oona.
This interview introduced me to the book in a more thorough way than some of the media coverage which I think narrows the focus and often misses the essence of Hamid’s writing: “How Do We Face Loss with Dignity,” The Ezra Klein Show interview with Hamid.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.
There are many stories, storytellers and themes contained in this book. It is about immigrating and war crimes and family and loss of a parent and loss of a child and brutality and bullying and being between two or three different cultures. It is about ancestors and politics and young love and old love. And, it is about a fig tree with an amazing story to tell.
Five Memoir
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel is a graphic memoir that wooed me completely. It is funny, sad, poignant, witty, silly, deep. There literature major jokes sprinkled throughout, which was an added joy for me. I sent it to three friends before I finished. Bechdel’s father is a funeral director and nicknames their house fun home, short for funeral home.
The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit
Solnit speaks to me. Some people find the fact that she weaves fairy tales and philosophy and memoir together confusing. But I thoroughly enjoy her creativity and insight, and I always learn a lot. This was the first of hers I read and it remains my favorite, maybe because it found me while I was helping care for my mom through her dementia, and while our mothers were different, Solnit’s honest, exquisite writing about her journey was a balm.
What We Wish Were True: Reflections on Nurturing Life and Facing Death, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn is a gorgeous love letter written after Quinn received a terminal cancer diagnosis at age 40. I have to remind myself to breathe while I’m listening; it is exquisite and painful in turns, and it is full of wisdom.
Ann Patchett’s Precious Days is beautiful and honest and includes a number of essays about loss and mortality and love. She reminds me that one of the reasons we need more stories about end-of-life is that people are different in how they experience similar events. I identified with Patchett, often, and then there were times where I saw how different we are and how how a talented, honest writer can help me see and understand a wider emotional range. This makes me feel more compassionate and more connected to others. It is such a generous book.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams
After her mother’s death, Williams opened each of the journals and discovered every page of every book was blank. The fifty-four short chapters that follow are reflections born of those empty pages. It is a beautiful, poignant book, and it especially spoke to me now as I have become aware of the blank spaces that are inevitable after any loss.
Five Poetry Volumes
I love many different kinds of poetry, so this is not an exhaustive list or even necessarily a representation of my favorite styles (though I do LOVE all of these). Instead I’ve tried to include here, the poets who have been able to reach me during some of my big losses in case they can also be helpful to you.
Thirst: Poems, by Mary Oliver. This book was written soon after the death of Molly Malone, the author’s beloved partner of over forty years. I often have an Oliver book in my morning mediation stack and reading a poem day from this slim volume, nourished me during my own hard time.
If you want more, the Oliver book that has carried me through decades that I return to most often is New and Selected Poems from 1992 for for which she won the National Book Award.
What the Living Do: Poems, by Marie Howe. If I’m ever unavailable to give book recommendations, you might track down my friend Mary Ellen McMurtrie and ask her for one. A good percentage of my favorites come from her, including this book of poems about the loss of Howe’s beloved brother which she sent me after I lost a dear friend.
And if you want to hear a beautiful conversation with the poet and some of her poems first, here is an interview on, On Being.
Thank you to my friend, poet Catherine Kyle, for sending me this gorgeous book of poems, The Carrying by Ada Limón. For a sample here is Foaling Season. In July 2022, Limón became our new U.S. Poet Laureate, taking the baton from Joy Harjo.
You can also hear Limón on a regular five-minute poetry podcast called, The Slowdown. Here she is reading a poem, Lament, by Barbara Jane Reyes.
Otherwise, by Jane Kenyon. A classic I keep returning to and find myself quoting often both in my interior thoughts and my writing.
Here is one of my favorites from the volume that is available at Poets.org, Twilight: After Haying
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. If you want a beautiful introduction to this one, listen to this On Being Episode with JoAnna Macy, “A Wild Love for the World”.
Favorite Podcasts
My favorite podcasts on topics relevant to Tending to Endings. I’ve included a couple starter episodes as recommendations if you want to try them out.
70 over 70 Two to start with Sister Helen Prejean (dedicated her life to ending the death penalty) and Diane Meier on Palliative care
Death, Sex & Money Two episodes on Grief to get you started: “When Grief Looks Like…” and Katie Couric on Death and Dishonesty
This one is a memoir in installments, so start from episode one, and I have a feeling you will continue.
In, A slight Change of Plans, Dr. Maya Shankar interviews people who go through some unexpected change that shifts the trajectory of their life. Here are two recent episodes that I found riveting, though there are so many more from earlier seasons to catch up on if you haven’t been listening already. A Test of Faith and The Thai Cave Rescue
Grief Cast: Funny People Talking about Death
Favorite Movies
Departures won an Academy Award best foreign language film in 2009, and it is an exquisite film that takes unexpected turns. One thing it brought into focus, beautifully, is how rituals and traditions around tending to the body of a loved one after death, can help us through all the other more nebulous parts of loss–the grief, the unanswered questions, the denial, the fear. For awhile this was hard to find, but I believe this can now be streamed on Tubi.
Alive Inside: A Documentary on Music and Dementia
This Sundance audience favorite demonstrates not only the power of music on the brain, but also the richness of intergenerational communities. It’s available on Netflix and elsewhere.
Dick Johnson is Dead, by Kirstin Johnson is in turns, creative, heart-hurting, funny, weird, sad, ethically complicated, beautiful, and so very true to the experience of Alzheimer’s. Or at least, for me, the experience of being a daughter watching a parent (in my case my mother) affected by Alzheimer’s.
The Farewell: A Film by Lulu Wang
Wang is troubled by her family’s elaborate plan to keep a cancer diagnosis secret from her grandmother (the person with the cancer). As a result, she makes a film about it (all the while still keeping the diagnosis from her grandmother). Wang also told this story in audio form on This American Life and is well worth a listen. In Defense of Ignorance.
Nomadland, by Chloe Zhao probably needs little introduction, but I found the scenes about end-of-life and grief deeply nuanced and moving.