Grief Biography

After author Jess Keefe ended things with her long-term boyfriend, she moved in with her brother in hopes that family could help her not only heal from the break-up but also evolve into a healthy adult. But that fantasy ended when Matt’s heroin addiction came roaring back after lying dormant for years, leading to a fatal overdose one October night. Thirty-Thousand Steps is a powerful and transformative memoir that interweaves the author’s obsessive training to becoming a distance runner, along with her focused research into the science of addiction in the shadow of grief.

Diagnosed with cancer at age twenty-six threw all the life plans Emily had made out the window. In between attempting to fight Hodgkin's lymphoma and working, full-time Emily discovered she was in a deep state of grief. She realized in the middle of it all she had lost herself and would need to not only fight the cancer, but her mind in order to survive.

Losing a child is an experience beyond this world. In her seminal work, The Flight, Cammie Wolf Rice shatters reality — and in the process, reshapes our perspectives on pain, suffering and the meaning of it all. The Flight displays her struggle to make sense of losing her son to opioids. In this journey, you will find your own.

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered.

On July 23, 2007, Dr. William Petit suffered an unimaginable horror: Armed strangers broke into his suburban Connecticut home in the middle of the night, bludgeoned him nearly to death, tortured and killed his wife and two daughters, and set their house on fire. He miraculously survived, and yet living through those horrific hours was only the beginning of his ordeal. Broken and defeated, Bill was forced to confront a question of ultimate consequence: How does a person find the strength to start over and live again after confronting the darkest of nightmares?

"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life", a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly.

A luminous, true story, Name All the Animals is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss.

In what was to become the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma City bombing was one in a long line of violent attacks that have left communities across the nation searching for healing and hope. With the soaring message of the power of love to conquer evil, Grace from the Rubble tells the intertwining stories of four captivating individuals

This is a true story of the death of a child through homicide. It is about a mother's healing journey and the pivotal decisions she had to make in order to survive her son's death. It is about betrayal, and a shocking verdict but it's also about love, courage, and faith. It is hope for survival and inspiration for revival for those that are suffering a similar loss.

She charmed America with her smart, likable, down-to-earth personality as she campaigned for her husband, then vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. She inspired millions as she valiantly fought advanced breast cancer after being diagnosed only days before the 2004 election. She touched hundreds of similarly grieving families when her own son, Wade, died tragically at age 16 in 1996.

Alexandra Chan thinks she has life figured out until, in the Year of the Ram, the death of her father—her last parent—brings her to her knees, an event seemingly foretold in Chinese mythology. A left-brained archaeologist and successful tiger daughter, Chan finds her logical approach to life utterly fails her in the face of this profound grief. Unable to find a way forward, she must either burn to ash or forge herself anew.

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis and the internet developed on parallel timelines.

Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?

In this empowering memoir "Strong and Soulful: Graced by Grief," Denise Olsen shares her transformative journey through the depths of devastating loss to a place of unexpected strength and profound self-discovery. After the heart-shattering loss of her husband, a firefighter in the World Trade Center attacks, Denise was enveloped in a grief so intense, it threatened to consume her. But within this dark chapter of her life, she found a surprising truth: grief, while altering us irrevocably, does not have to be our undoing.

A restless child of the 1960s, Marilyn yearns for love, hippiedom, and escape from her controlling mother. At fourteen, she runs nearly a thousand miles away to Vancouver, British Columbia, eventually landing herself in a Catholic home for troubled girls. At sixteen, she’s emancipated, navigating adulthood without a high school diploma, and craving a soulmate. When she falls in love with Jack, the grad student living next door, life finally seems perfect. The two embark on a cross-continental bicycle trip, headed for South America, but before they reach Mexico, tragedy strikes.

I landed in this place six years ago in a welter of panic, pain and instinct. I'd been in fight-or-flight mode for twelve months, wanting only to keep on flying—or fleeing. I brought almost nothing of my previous life. Grief had made me ruthless; I threw and threw. (And yes, I knew how appalled you'd have been, Pete.) My father implored me to stay with the familiar. Constants, he said, would give me scaffolding. Decades ago, when his second wife, my stepmother, died suddenly, habits were his protection and rituals his comfort—along with a packet or two of cigarettes a day.

In the powerful memoir, Navigating the Stormy Seas: My Journey of Triumph, Dr. Hilary Adams invites listeners on a transformative odyssey that resonates with the power of human resilience, unwavering faith, and the enduring spirit. The storm struck unannounced. With three harrowing words, "You have cancer," Dr. Adams found herself plunged into a tempest of fear, uncertainty, and despair. Yet, instead of succumbing, she anchored herself in her deep-rooted faith, turning her story from one of impending tragedy to a tale of hope and triumph.

Growing up in Melbourne during the sixties as a baby boomer, Yvonne's dreams were to find a life partner, build a home, raise a family, start a career and travel. The trajectory her life was changed forever when her husband took his life. Now she faces the challenges of raising their two children alone. This begins a transformative journey of self-empowerment and rediscovering what defines her identity.

When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips farther and farther underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven.

Kate Braestrup's life was transformed by the loss of her husband; now Kate faces the possibility that she may lose her son. As a young mother, Kate Braestrup discovered the fierce protectiveness that accompanies parenthood. In the intervening years - through mourning her husband and the joy of remarriage and a blended family - Kate has absorbed the rewards and complications of that spirit. But when her eldest son joins the marines, Kate is at a crossroads.