Loss is extraordinarily painful and real. There is no pain quite like that of losing someone you love. It’s a pain you cannot know until you do, and then you can’t un-know it, no matter how badly you might want to. In western culture, the depth of pain one feels in loss is also uncomfortable and unwelcome—people just don’t want to think about it. It’s unyielding weight is very quickly considered impolite, and our cultural push toward collective denial can be so painful for those in the midst of a loss who can no longer deny its existence.

More than 30 years ago, in the last volume of his trilogy on attachment, Loss: Sadness & Depression, (that title, I know) the psychologist John Bowlby wrote about loss:

“Loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer…there is a tendency to underestimate how intensely distressing and disabling loss usually is and for how long the distress, and often disablement, commonly lasts. Conversely, there is a tendency to suppose that a normal healthy person can and should get over a bereavement not only fairly rapidly but also completely.”

I wish that this misconception about grief and loss had been corrected in the intervening decades, but in my estimation, it has only mildly shifted if at all. Loss is still an uncomfortable reality that most people would like to ignore for as long as possible (which in some ways is completely understandable—why feel outrageous pain if you could avoid it?) But one of the things that this means is that it becomes the burden of those who are grieving to find spaces to do so out of sight. These spaces can be with others—in grief groups, in therapy—but sometimes those spaces are unavailable, inaccessible, or just not big enough to encapsulate the entirety of the feeling of grief.

grief & loss in art

I actually think that whether or not we like it, we’ve known about this immensity for a long time, and that this accounts for the amount of human effort that has gone toward conceptualizing, imagining, preparing for, theorizing about, “preventing,” and making meaning of death in art. I think art, and the imagination, is maybe the only space truly big enough to encapsulate the enormity of grief.

I could write entire other blogs about grief in visual art and music and movies, but for now I’ll focus on fiction, which has, for me, been the only salve at many different points in my own grief. To enter a fictional world where loss is real and important and painful, but not exactly yours, is like being in a pool. You can’t entirely escape the effects of gravity, of your real loss, but you can feel temporarily buoyed, temporarily connected to all the other people who’ve ever known what you’re talking about. You can breathe more deeply in the protective embrace of another world.

 grief & loss in fiction

To read about the experiences, meaning making, and pain of others going through loss can also help you make meaning yourself. But sometimes nonfiction can be too confronting, too similar. The safe distance of fiction allows you to see in words what you know so deeply to be true. “Ah, exactly!” is the feeling. And somehow, in giving language to grief, it feels just a little more bearable, a little more understandable. It can also be easier to offer empathy for made up others going through grief, and this can trick us into offering empathy to ourselves. It’s alchemic, really, what happens through fiction. I can’t completely explain it. Nothing is really real, and yet, it is.

 Here are a selection of my favorite made up stories about the most real thing there is.

Fictional Grief Book Recommendations*

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

• Inland by Téa Obreht

• The Passenger/Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

• A Little Life by Hanna Yanagihara

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

• The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

* Trigger warning: These books are all pretty sad! They contain painful and potentially upsetting themes of loss, death, suicide, and varying kinds of violence. 

Anna Kim is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, a writer and an adventurer. Anna enjoys working with individuals, intimate relationships, and groups to support growth and change. She is especially interested in grief & loss, identity & authenticity and attachment, but appreciates all the infinite, complicated parts of being alive.

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