Sorry For Your Loss: What working with the dead taught me about life

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Evie's parents run the funeral home right next door to their home. She realizes what an important service they provide to their Jewish community and she looks forward to the day when she can take over for them. For now, she helps by cleaning, vacuuming, handing out tissues and water, etc. When a terrible accident occurs causing a boy Evie's age to become an orphan, her parents ask her to befriend him as he adjusts to the new situation (which includes living with his uncle). Evie says yes but it is difficult as the boy, Oren, has chosen to stop talking and Evie has sworn off friendships for reasons of her own.

A luminous collection examining collective and individual grief. In her moving essays, Gachman takes readers on a wide and careful journey, one that made me feel less alone, and thankful for her deep empathy and intelligence.” Use some unique and different words to let someone who has lost their partner know you’re sorry for such an awful loss. Or comfort your own partner who has lost a close one. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

What Can I Say Instead of Sorry for Your Loss?

Printz Honor winner Foley takes readers through tenderhearted and sometimes painfully funny observations. It’s a narrative that is threaded through with incredible feeling. A warm and clear-eyed examination of a family swimming through grief and a boy who finds the light.”— ALA Booklist (starred review)

Losing a parent is devastating for their children. If you know someone that’s lost their mother or father then let them know you’re thinking of them with these alternative phrases for “sorry for your loss”. This book takes you behind the scenes at a mortuary in a Northern Teaching Hospital. The author isn't a pathologist; she doesn't do postmortems-she assists behind the scenes-e.g. with family viewings of bodies, removing pacemakers etc. The book is a month by month account, e.g. May 2019, June 2019, July 2019, August 2019 etc., which suits me as I like diary format. This was a brilliant exploration into the after of death. I really appreciated the authors' focus on interacting with the families of the deceased. As someone who works in healthcare, there isn't much opportunity to follow-up and support the families of the deceased, since there are always more patients. Marshall reminds us of how defining grief is to the family. I could have done without a lot of the cultural stuff, but I realize upon finishing the book that it was all actually pretty important to character development, as well as to keeping the context fairly tame for the age group. The teacher in me also screamed at all the teachable moments with this stuff (I may or may not have planned a whole unit in my head with this lol) The storyline was incredibly well thought out. The writing was beautiful. We are given a story about death and grief and get to watch it transform into a story about hope and healing. The pacing of a story is a major thing for me, and I have to say this one is paced perfectly. The author manages to somehow slow everything down for a maximum emotional impact, yet keep the story progressing so nothing is overdrawn. You can feel the emotions of the characters as you progressed through the story. Their grief becomes yours; their healing becomes yours. The emotional impact is high. This book is absolutely incredible. I highly recommend it.Grief and mourning are difficult topics for anyone at any age, and Levy’s book treats her subject matter and her readers gently and with understanding. … While the themes might be painful, the book is anything but sad, and it will give its readers some insight into grief as well some tools and suggestions for dealing with it in a proactive and positive way. Highly Recommended.”— CM – Canadian Review of Materials But you may sometimes wonder if there isn’t more you can say. Or not even more, but just say it better. Better words, with more meaning. Words that offer extra understanding and support, that can give some hope or even help them to feel better. We learn that death is very much part of the everyday, but that our dead should still be afforded the respect and love they deserve. Dina’s writing is awesomely weird in the best way possible." - Jenny Lawson, author of Let's Pretend This Never Happened In this story, Evie works in her family's funeral home, and want to become the funeral director when she gets older. She helps her parents with jobs like making sure there's enough Kleenex and cleaning the chapel before services, but she hasn't seen a body or been part of the Jewish rituals that take place prior to a funeral. When a boy who has lost both of his parents in a car accident comes in with his uncle to make arrangements, Evie is asked to sit with Oren while the adults discuss some of the details. Oren hasn't spoken since the accident, but Evie desperately wants to help comfort him. As the pair are brought together by the grownups during the summer, Evie and Oren discover they can communicate by text. Oren wants to see what happens behind the scenes at the funeral home to understand what happened to his parents, but Evie is afraid she'll get in trouble if they get caught.

I loved this memoir! Kate has a lovely style of writing and it is just like sitting with her while she reminisces, the book sometimes following a thought all the way through to the end but sometimes like a butterfly hopping from memory to memory, a piece of wisdom to a fact about how things work in the mortuary of an English hospital.These phrases will hopefully give you some ideas of alternatives to say instead of “sorry for your loss” to family members. The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. Teased, bullied at school and to escape a painful memory, Evie decides that she is "done with having friends." p.4 . This was such a great book! After I started it my Kindle did not turn off until I was finished. This author also handles the sensitive topic of death in a very age-appropriate way that made me laugh out loud, which I was not expecting! Evie and Oren were very realistic and their voices felt very real (or texts, in Oren's case). I cannot think of anything bad to say about this book and am looking to read more of Joanne Levy's work!