What to read about grief and bereavement

FEW EXPERIENCES are more solitary than grief. Each mourner knows the loved one in a different way. No one feels the same pain or can predict when they will feel it. Yet grief is also universal. As time goes by, more and more absences populate everyone’s lives. Though inevitable, death—and the emotions it elicits—typically comes as a shock to family and friends. In different ways the writers of these six books, which include memoir, fiction and reportage, evoke the experience of loss, from the earthquake of death to the longer process of learning to live amid the rubble of memories.

Life in the 21st century is so far removed from the reality of death that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie finds herself full of rage at those who try to sidestep its force. Writing in the days after her father’s unexpected collapse in 2020, the novelist lashes out at the euphemisms people use, at those who talk of his “demise” or refer to her father as “resting”. Mourners who comment on his age—he was 88—provoke further ire: “At issue is not how old he was but how loved.” Ms Adichie describes grief as a weight that the living carry around; it causes her “to sink and sink”. She fears that, with her father gone, knowledge of her family’s past, and her ancestry, will fade. Only the longing will remain. “For the rest of my life,” she says, “I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

A giant earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, killing more than 18,000 people and leaving tens of thousands bereaved. Yet displays of emotion are often frowned upon there. Some people in the hardest-hit region, north-eastern Honshu, Japan’s main island, found an unusual outlet: speaking to a loved one from a telephone box in a garden, the cable leading nowhere. Laura Imai Messina’s novel is based on the real phenomenon of the “wind telephone”. When so many people die at the same time, writes Ms Messina, “everybody’s grief looked the same at first but was, ultimately, unique.” At the centre of her large cast are a child who has been mute since the waves swept her mother away, the child’s father and a bereaved woman he meets at the telephone box. Separately, then together, they confront their sorrow. Finally, the young girl picks up the receiver: “Mummy, it’s Hana. Do you still remember me?” When she starts talking again she says “normal things. Childish things, things that were just right for a girl her age”. The message is clear: to live on is still to honour the dead.

Few contemporary authors chronicle love so beautifully as does Julian Barnes, so it is little surprise that he writes masterfully about grief, love’s dark companion. The novelist says that he used to imagine, and even welcome, the idea of growing old with his wife, Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent. The discovery that she had a brain tumour destroyed the anticipated slowing and calming of their life. From “a summer to an autumn, there was anxiety, alarm, fear, terror”. After nearly 30 years of marriage, diagnosis to death took 37 days. No one can prepare for such a blow, writes Mr Barnes, nor for the world’s indifference to it. Yet suffering is also a comfort. “Pain is a proof of love,” he says. Several times he quotes a letter from a friend: “It hurts exactly as much as it is worth.” Even after considerable time has passed, everything he does or might achieve is thinner, weaker and matters less. “The fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.”

Not everyone has the blessing of feeling untainted sadness after a death. “Our parents cast long shadows over our lives,” reads the opening line of Richard Eyre’s memoir. Many people would pick up this book to read about his long career as a theatre director, yet the heart of this story is an almost universal reckoning. “We try all our lives to separate ourselves from [our parents],” Mr Eyre writes, “and only when they are dead do we find we are indivisible.” Unlike fiction, which has shape and coherence, “life is all loose ends.” His mother’s dementia brought that home to him. His grief began even as she lived: “Little by little she was slipping away, and we never knew when to say goodbye.” Mr Eyre is honest about the layers of guilt, anger and regret that overlay his relationship with his parents. What he did not expect was for those feelings to outlive them. “I had my freedom now,” he writes after his father’s death. “All I wanted was his love.”

“Where Reasons End” is a series of conversations between a mother and her dead son. Behind the fictional dialogue is real-world horror: Yiyun Li wrote the book soon after her teenager committed suicide in 2017. “How have I lived so blindly and deafly?” the fictional mother asks at one point. She is referring to how she apprehended the clamour of a busy New York, but her implication is clear. The arguments she has with her imagined son—about adverbs, about friends, about baking—are a quest to understand why he ended his life. As is true for any bereaved person, the only thing worse than hearing the voice of her deceased loved one is when he falls silent: “Is that how any person loses any person,” she asks. The two often talk about writing, both his and hers. “I will be sad forever,” she says. He replies, “I thought you said you took forever out of your dictionary.” Her response is a dagger: “You put it back for me.” Yet, even though she is an author, language can let her down. “What do you call a parent who’s lost a child, a sibling who’s lost a sibling, a friend who’s lost a friend?” Ms Li asks. Sometimes there are no words.

Even though they know that the body fails, most people find it “literally inconceivable” that they or their loved ones will one day cease to live, writes Stephen Cave in “Immortality”. Every society conjures stories and belief systems to distance itself from that reality. Part history, part philosophical text, this book uses four broad themes to show how the quest for immortality has succoured civilisation: resurrection of the body, the immortal soul, living forever and establishing a legacy. As religion has receded from the forefront of many people’s lives, that final coping mechanism—the search for lasting fame through celebrity, feats of discovery or heroic deeds—now dominates the drive for immortality, Mr Cave argues. (He also notes the persistence of niche, but powerful, projects to prolong life indefinitely.) Even the wish to have children comes in part from a desire to cheat death. The book concludes with a plea to consider how endless, exhausting and dull eternity might really be. Mr Cave calls on readers to revel instead in the fragility and finitude of life and love. Everyone, he says, needs a deadline.

What does a person leave behind when they die? Some bequeath a lot of junk, as one Economist correspondent discovers in this podcast. Some grievers find solace not in material goods but in syncopated pop music. Though it is always hard to say goodbye, the way people do it around the world says as much about those left behind as about those who have died. In Britain funerals have changed in line with social mores, particularly when it comes to burying a public figure like the queen. Yet it can be hard to grieve when many others are doing so, as one reporter found after the tsunami in Japan. Even ten years on, the pain persists. Small wonder that some people want to live forever.■