Speaking of book recommendations after I just shared a post of them...one of the ladies I volunteered with had a shit year a few years back, losing her son and other family members. With my sympathy card I sent her a typed list of books on grief and grieving that had helped me after losing Theriac (Joanne Cacciatore's Bearing the Unbearable, Louis LaGrande's Healing Grief, Finding Peace: 101 Ways to Cope with the Death of Your Loved One, and Raymond Moody's Life After Loss are all pretty short, accessible, and offer a board first aid kit. Also, you could do worse than to grab some of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's lectures.). Apparently it really helped her, and this past weekend she told me she still had the list and passed it on to a relative of hers who lost her husband this year.
Not all of the advice in every book is going to help; there are some aspects of grief I doubt any book can actually help with. But the recommendations are successful, I'd guess, because a) reading can occupy your mind when you're grieving (and you might as well read about grief because you're not going to be distracted from it), b) learning something new helps people feel more in control of their life & environment and can offer a sense of hope, c) even if the recipient never reads any of the books, being given a book list is a way to say "I care about you and want to help" which is a good message to send. From my own grief experience I also think it's especially powerful to hear "I went through something similar to you and this is what helped me" - it's proof there's life on the other side.
Anyway, 2 more book recs for 2 quite different end-of-life outcomes, which I think you should ideally read before any of your loved ones die so you can actually use the information (also, honestly? Very helpful writing research):
Final Journeys and Final Gifts by Maggie Callanan -- a hospice nurse's guide to the kinds of decisions, conflicts, and sometimes puzzling behavior and experiences encountered when a loved one is in palliative care. Journeys is the more broadly practical book (from the 'writing research' perspective, it also offers some great examples of conflict, memorable scenes, and psychology insights); Gifts looks particularly at spiritual experiences at the end of life, including end of life visions (which happen to all kinds of people and can be a good thing to be prepared for regardless of your own spiritual beliefs). If Gifts proves fascinating, a more recent book on the subject of end of life experiences is Death is But a Dream.
I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One is for the opposite end of experience, where a loss is abrupt and unexpected. It offers advice, myth-busting, and real-life stories from people who are bereaved through suicide, crime, and accidents. I recommend this for everyone because 1) It could happen to you (speaking as someone it's happened to multiple times) and having some knowledge ahead of time will not make it less painful, but could make it less bewildering, 2) It could happen to your loved ones, friends, and co-workers, and you can be more supportive with some knowledge, 3) Back to writing research: this book's information on myth-busting, how grief affects children at different ages, tips for coping when a loved one's' death is part of a tragedy that brings media attention, and vivid examples of the various ways real people have responded to grief can make you a more accurate writer. And I'll be honest, as someone who's Been There, when I read a book that was clearly written by an author who hasn't Been There and hasn't even tried to figure out what it's like, it's ranges from annoying to offensive to actively painful. [Also, if you want to do better at understanding+ depicting grief, read grief memoirs: Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is about miscarriage but resonated so strongly with my very different grief experiences, so I think it's tapping into something, if not universal, at least very broad; Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave, about the loss of multiple generations of her family in the Boxing Day tsunami, manages to depict events and feelings that verge on the indescribable.]
