Bertolt

Jacques Goldstyn

An uncommonly tender illustrated story of love, loss, and savoring solitude without suffering loneliness:

Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children

“A human being is part of the whole world, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

Einstein’s remarkable letter of consolation to a grief-stricken father who had just lost his son:

Only Don’t Know: Selected Teaching Letters of Zen Master Seung Sahn

Seung Sahn

“Name and form are made by thinking. Water does not say, ‘I am water.’ Steam does not say, ‘I am steam.’”

Wisdom on navigating loss and grief from a great Zen teacher:

Turn: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt

“I should have had more courage, dared, risked rejection, even ejection — naked, awkward, crouched as Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise. ‘Should’ is a dreadful auxiliary word, and worst when linked with ‘have’… I mourn what I did not know when I was married: the necessity for honesty between people if mutuality is to bud out of a status quo into air it can then fill with a new form.”

Artist Anne Truitt on love, loss, and what makes marriage work – one of the most beautiful and truthful things ever written:

H Is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

“The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.”

Astonishingly beautiful read on how a hawk clarifies love and loss, beauty and terror, control and surrender:

The Light of the World: A Memoir

Elizabeth Alexander

“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”

Poet Elizabeth Alexander’s exquisite meditation on love, loss, and the boundaries of the the thing we call a soul:

The Heart and the Bottle

Oliver Jeffers

A tender illustrated fable of what happens when we deny our difficult emotions and how to remain fully alive:

Blue Nights

Joan Didion

“Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

For Joan Didion’s 80th birthday today, Vanessa Redgrave reads from Didion’s harrowing memoir of grief:

Love is Forever

Casey Rislov

A wonderful children’s book that helps kids deal with losing a loved one

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

Meghan O’Rourke

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

Meghan O’Rourke on the messiness of mourning and learning to live with loss – remarkable read: