Thrive Book Club: Finding Grace in Loss

This month's pick for Thrive Book Club isn’t a specific book but speaks to the idea of reading about death and loss. Dark, we know.

In mid-April, the New York Times published an opinion from Margaret Renkl where she wrote about the books she fell into as a young reader. They were books about death, including one about Brian Piccolo’s death of cancer at age 26, John Gunther’s story of his teen son’s death from a brain tumor, and others.

She notes that reading books with such dark and sad themes is a way for young readers to "encounter the hardest truth that shadows mortal life: There are no happy endings."

"Books about loss tell us something about our own nature," she adds.

And another wise thought she includes in her article, pondering the power of an end-of-life memoir: "Its beauty reminds us to linger in the grace."

You can read Renkl’s full article here. We think it just might be essential reading before cracking open those other books about cancer and survivorship – or death – to adjust your mindset to accept with grace the emotions that you’ll conjure page by page.