Books: The Antidote to Grief
Bangor Library book club discovers the healing power of reading together
By Robin Clifford Wood
After attending two meetings of the Grieving Through Reading Book Club at Bangor Public Library, I remembered a story.
When my 6-year-old niece first became aware of death, she was distraught.
“I don’t want to die!” she cried. My sister Katy, trained as both a therapist and an interfaith minister, felt sure she could console her daughter without lying about death. She’d be honest yet reassuring. Katy tried logical conversation. She tried distraction. She told an elaborate story using her hand as the spirit and a glove as the body.
“See my hand?” she said, waving her bare fingers in the air. “This is you before you were born.” She indicated the glove on the table. “See that glove? That’s your body.”
Katy slipped her hand into the glove and lifted it into the air again, gloved fingers dancing.
“When you die,” she said, slipping the glove back onto the table, “you leave your body. But see?” She raised her dancing, bare fingers back in the air. “Here you are still, the same spirit. You’ve just left your body behind.”
“There,” Katy thought, “I’ve done it.”
After the briefest of pauses, my niece wailed, “But I don’t want to die!” and burst into tears.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Katy said with a sigh. A lie would have to do. “You’re not going to die.” Her daughter sighed with relief.
Grown-ups may not burst into tears at the idea, but many still harbor an aversion to facing the reality of death. Death is an absolute certainty, but we assiduously ignore it, or we pretend death has nothing to do with us… until it does. Unfortunately, after years of denial, many people are undone, torn to pieces, shocked by death’s arrival on their doorstep.
“It came out of nowhere!” people say. But it didn’t. Death was always there; death is always there, all around us. However, there are ways to make the end of life less fearsome, more manageable. We can prepare, we can have conversations ahead of time, we can speak openly about our fears, our grief, our suffering. It helps.
It was the desire to help people come to peace with death and grief that inspired Holly Williams, head of circulation at Bangor Public Library, to facilitate the Grieving Through Reading Book Club. Holly is also a hospice volunteer, a death doula, and no stranger to grief. Her continuing goal is to educate people about death and dying. She soon learned that the conversations participants engage in at each meeting are as important as the material in the books.
“This is not a grief support group,” Williams said. “I’m a librarian, not a therapist.” Still, people do express vulnerabilities and share deep emotions during their meetings.
Holly was surprised by the group’s popularity — from eight to 18 people show up consistently. Some come every month, others only once, but all seem grateful to have been there. Here is what some participants say about the group:
“We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve read really good books.”
“I feel a lot less anxiety now about my future path.”
Referring to one of the books, one participant said, “The book taught you a lot of how to live while you’re dying.”
Some attendees have lost spouses, parents, siblings, or children. Some have terminal illness themselves. Some take an active part in conversation, others sit quietly and listen. If you decide to go, be ready for laughter, nodding heads, and compassionate listening. An undeniable sense of warmth and camaraderie infuses the room. What better antidote to fear and grief?
Faced with the prospect of dying, most of us agree with my 6-year-old niece. One conversation might not resolve our fears, but a series of conversations about well-crafted books might help. As David Kessler says in “The Needs of the Dying,” it is possible to say, “I don’t want to die,” even as we accept death’s inevitability. There’s no way around the gut-punch of grief, but the more we educate ourselves about the losses that are sure to come, the better prepared we’ll be to take the hit.