Best Books for Grieving Parents & Caregivers
After experieincing a profound loss, parents and caregivers often put their grief on the backburner while attending to the needs of loved ones. Furthermore, it is often hard to find spaces to feel validated or fully understood in the complex role of grieving while supporting young greivers. This is where the power of books and storytelling comes in – to provide comfort, compassion, and connection.
After combing through several grief support books, the Eluna Resource Center has pulled together this list of literature to support parents who are grieving. We encourage you to visit your local library to take a peek and check out the books that feel like the best fit.
Make sure to also check out our recommended books for kids grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, grandparent, and anticipatory grief.
The AfterGrief: Finding your way along the long arc of loss, by Hope Edelman
“…I can report with assurance that the death of a loved one, especially for someone at a tender age, isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond. That’s a myth of diminishment. Instead, a major loss gets folded into our developing identities, where it informs our thoughts, hopes, expectations, behaviors, and fears. We carry it forward into all that follows..” Hope’s book redifines many of the myths around grief and diffuses the pressure to “get over it”. This is a wonderful and validating book for anyone who experiences a loss. Link to Purchase**
The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life by Donald L. Rosenstein & Justin M. Yopp
The Group offers a singular perspective on grief by weaving together the latest thinking on bereavement, resiliency and post-traumatic growth with the true story of seven men who were raising children on their own after the deaths of their wives. The men connected with each almost immediately, and over the next several years forged a deep bond as their monthly meetings evolved into a forum for healing and personal reinvention that transformed them in unexpected ways. Link to Purchase**
How Do We Tell the Children? A Step-by-Step Guide for Helping Children and Teens Cope When Someone Dies by Dan Schaefer & Christine Lyons
Dr. Daniel Schaefer, working with child psychologists and trauma experts, and drawing on more than three decades of experience with families in crisis, has written a practical guide for anyone who works or lives with children—parents, caregivers, counselors, or teachers—to respond to their inevitable questions about loss and change, life and death. He provides strategies to assist children with grief and trauma and offers time-tested advice and language that children can understand. Link to Purchase**
Parenting while Grieving: A Survival Guide by What’s Your Grief
As a parent, you don’t have the luxury of worrying only about yourself and your emotional well-being. It is your job, in good times and bad, to attend to the needs of your child as well as your own. Putting your child’s needs first is a no-brainer, so when something bad happens, it feels natural to put your own on the back burner. The purpose of this 20-page booklet is to help parents who are dealing with their own grief balance their needs with the needs of the children in their care. Link to Purchase
Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration, and Change by Day Schildkret
This unique book provides ideas and instructions for bringin meaning to big moments in our lives that include loss. Rituals have the power to include mindfulness and elevate these moments into the sacred by acknowleding that, “as life changes, we too must change”. This book allows creativity to enter the grief process and we love if for creating special moments with family and friends.
**Eluna is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and a percentage of your purchase will generate a commission to directly support The Eluna Resource Center.
