Grief Is a Book You Can’t Put Down

In 1994, in cold and damp London, in a Waterstones bookstore, the memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? perched on a paperback display. Three weeks after my father’s death from pancreatic cancer, I had gone to England to start my junior year in college studying abroad.

I kept my grief to myself. I didn’t see anyone else around me who had a parent who had died. I felt so alone.

I bought that book and read it over and over because, even though the author wasn’t like me (he was older, male, and English), he had watched his father get sick and die, like I did.

I had not seen anyone like myself in nonfiction books to help me understand my loss, help me grieve, and help me move on.

I couldn’t mourn there, sharing a tiny one-bedroom flat with two other girls, above a video store in Earl’s Court that played Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover” every night as they closed up at eleven o’clock, loud enough for us to hear it upstairs.

I read that book.

I carried that book with me for twenty-seven years, across an ocean, through eleven moves to five states. From London back to college in Iowa. To my mother’s home in exurban southern New York before I found my first real job and apartment in Boston. To Los Angeles for work, and then to graduate school in Detroit.

I read it again at moments when I needed to be reminded that grief changes, like on the ten-year anniversary of my father’s death; that good memories endure, like when I realized that he had been gone longer than I had known him alive; that difficult times pass, like when I see my own behavior patterns left over from childhood repeating in my adult life.

I gave a copy to a colleague who lost his father to cancer, because I thought it would help him feel less alone.

I shared my copy with my husband when his father died.

Even when you share a book, you still carry it with you.

I need to see that book on my shelf; it signifies a connection, a membership in a club that no one wants to join.

This year I turn forty-eight, the age at which my father died. As I become older than he ever got to be, I have the benefits of age and experience to reflect, to make sense of the past, to write my own story.

Even when you share your grief, you still carry it with you.

Carol Smith, who lost her young son, says grief is “a language deeper than words,” it is “a stone you never put down.”

I think grief is made of words. It is a book you don’t ever stop reading, can’t ever put down.

-Amy Goldmacher

An anthropologist and writer in Michigan, Amy Goldmacher has short nonfiction forthcoming or published in Reservoir Road Literary Review, Essay Daily, Severance Magazine, Please See Me, and a Tiny Love Story in the Modern Love column of the New York Times.