"Books on grieving? Try aisles 8-11."

I know I've mentioned this before, but I've been doing a lot more reading lately. Now, after Deb's passing, I am reading even more. I have a stack of grieving books that is a foot higher than the one pictured above.

This, according to Joan Didion, a brilliant author who lost a husband and a daughter and documented her own grief as well as the mechanics of grief, is completely normal. In her research she tells of the natural inclination to research the topic as if one could find a magic recipe for "just being done with it."

There isn't.

But that doesn't stop the grieving books from flying off the shelves. I even came across a Dr. who had put together a mobile app. for mourners to download. 

"Got a corpse? There's an app for that."

In one stunning coincidence, Ms. Didion found herself visiting her ailing daughter at the ICU at UCLA Hospital. I cried when she described her visits there. Of course I cry when I see a bottle of Formula 409 and remember Deb's admonition not to use that on the butcher block counter. 

Joan takes us through a corner by corner description of her meandering through Westwood, "Left on Veteran Avenue, Right on Kinross, left on Gayley, right on Le Conte, and a left turn onto Westwood blvd, where the shiny new hospital is located." The same route I traveled.

She also tells tale about how the ICU nurses observe the same type of behavior from visitors: questions about stuff they think they know about but don't, questions about when the doctors will be making their rounds, and the near universal habit of all visitors to sit still and stare at the big screen monitor that tracks oxygenation, pulse rate, blood pressure, body temperature and more, hoping beyond hope that the numbers will improve. 

"Tell me about the bilirubin numbers again, nurse."

You don't see TV's on in the ICU, you see sad relatives staring at these monitors hoping for a miracle. 

There's even more commonality in the books. Many of the authors use the same language, 'moving forward', 'love doesn't die', 'your spouse, child or parent will always be part of you', ad infinitum.  

Even the fables are the same. 

There's the tale of the Sad Beduoin, who goes on a hunting trip and finds his dead son in the desert. He wraps the boy in a cloak and tells his wife she must go around the village and find a cooking pan, a special cooking pan that has never been used to cook a meal of sorrow. The wife goes door to door, or tent to tent in this case, only to find that every family has been touched by deep, deep sorrow. She comes back with no pan. The father unveils the cloak and whispers, "now it is our turn."

The same story is told in Buddhism, where a grieving mother visits the Buddha, who says he can bring her child back to life if she can find mustard seeds from a family that has never experienced sorrow. She can't and of course discovers this is a path we all must walk down. 

Deep, inconsolable grief is the price we pay for deep, intertwined love.

BTW, that too is one of those Hallmark insights, that mourners hear over and over again. 

Perhaps it's time for someone to write a new book on grief that doesn't cover the same old territory? A different take that can shed some new light on this, the most unavoidable of human truths.

It won't be me, I went through half a box of Kleenex to knock out these 400 words or so.