Post 9: The Books That Found Me

After the doctor told us Rex had died, I had a few minutes alone with him in the curtained hospital room.

I asked my son and his wife to call my other children and tell them. Then I turned back to Rex and told him he had to find some way to talk with me.

I was thinking of a book I had read years before — the story of a spouse who died and was still able to communicate afterward. I couldn't remember the title. I just knew it existed, and I needed Rex to know it was possible. That whatever came next didn't have to be silence.

I told him to find a way like the person in that book.

When I got home, I went straight to my shelf. I could clearly picture the gold cover. I found it, but it was a book by Sheri Dew. 

The wrong gold cover. 

Just a wrong memory, a missing title. 

In those hours when everything else that had gone wrong was enormous, this was a small one. But small wrong things can feel strangely devastating when everything is already broken.

I started searching. I couldn't find the right words to locate it. Every search turned up empty. No one I asked had heard of it. 

I just held onto the memory — that it existed, that it had mattered once, and that I had already asked Rex to find a way.

Three months later, I flew to Dallas for my birthday. My mother was there, along with several of my siblings — a family gathering shortly after everything had fallen apart. 

On that trip, I found two books that changed everything.

My sister gave me The Road Back to You. I had never heard of the Enneagram. When I read about the personality of Sevens, I cried — not from sadness but from recognition.

Sevens are wired to find the silver lining, to reframe, to locate possibility inside difficulty. 

At the time, I had been teaching the Doctrinal Mastery steps in seminary, and I loved the Reframe step with an enthusiasm I couldn't fully explain. I laminated the three steps. I told my students they were lucky to have me because no other teacher had the ASK steps laminated. I brought reframing up constantly. 

I just didn't know why it felt so magical to me.

Reading about Sevens, I understood. It's in my DNA.

What I finally understood in Dallas was why death kept taking my breath away again and again. 

There is no way to reframe death. 

The finality doesn't yield. And for someone whose whole operating system runs on finding the angle, finding that possibility, finding the way through, I didn’t know what to do with something that would not move.

I remember being so heartbroken it scared me. I had no way to contain the feeling.

Reading about Sevens didn’t make the grief smaller, but it helped me understand why it felt so overwhelming to me. My personality style had always helped me find light, movement, and possibility. In grief, that same instinct kept running into the one thing I could not reframe.

The second book I found on that trip was the one I had been searching for since the hospital.

Sitting front and center on my mother’s bookshelf, with the cover facing out, was a gold-covered book: Guide Me to Eternity by Christine Tuttle Monsen. 

The elusive book.

Here I am. 

This is the right time.

I opened it immediately and started reading. The mortuary her family used was in Fillmore, Utah — owned at the time by Rex's grandfather and later run by his uncle. There were pages of references to “Mr. Olpin.”

I had been searching for a book about what continues after death. 

I found that.

And I found Rex’s family woven through the story.

The timing of everything in those months was impeccable. Accepting that timing meant accepting that Rex's passing was part of it. 

I won't pretend that it is fully settled. It still takes my breath away sometimes. But the evidence kept accumulating, and eventually I could no longer argue with it.

About a year after Rex died, I enrolled in a neuropsychology class as a requirement for my Master's degree in counseling. I was hoping for something psychology-heavy. 

It was full-on biology — the subject that had haunted my school nightmares for decades.

But somewhere in that material, I began to understand what my brain had been doing all along. 

The searching. 

The wrong gold cover. 

The way grief kept ambushing me in ordinary moments. 

My brain wasn't broken. It was trying to update a world where Rex was no longer physically here. That process takes time — far more time than I understood — because the brain is working against years of encoded predictions and patterns.

Books like The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O'Connor and The Other Side of Sadness by George Bonanno gave me language for what I had already lived. 

The science didn't replace what I had experienced. It confirmed it. 

It told me that what I had survived made complete sense, right down to the biology.

I didn't learn the science first. I lived the experience, and later, the science helped me understand what my heart already knew.

I caught myself humming one of Rex's favorite lines the other day. 

“You can't always get what you want.”

He dealt with unfairness differently than I did — more practically, less resistance. I envied that sometimes.

The feeling that everything is unfair is monumental in grief. And underneath it is something even harder: the realization that you have no control. 

You have to learn to absorb that and keep going. 

There is no reframe for it. 

There is no shortcut through it. 

It is a tougher road than anyone can fully explain to you in advance.

But there are mercies along the way.

For me, some of those mercies came through books.

Not all at once. Not in a neat order. Not always the books I was looking for.

But again and again, a book would arrive with something I needed: a sentence, a story, an explanation, a witness, a little more language for what grief was asking me to live.

I know how much it matters when a book finds you at the right time and gives you language for what you are living.

You don't have to find your way to that alone.

Understanding does not fix grief. But it can make it less terrifying. It can give you a little more ground beneath your feet. It can remind you that you are not losing your mind. You are grieving.

Below is a list of the books that shaped my understanding of grief — from the first days through the years that followed. Some are practical. Some are spiritual. Some are scientific. Some are not grief books at all, but they still helped me see something I needed to see.

They arrived in the order I needed them. And I have come to believe that was not my own doing.

Early Grief Support 

My Husband Died, Now What? — Debra L. Morrison 

Living Without the One You Cannot Live Without — Natasha Josefowitz

Spiritual Perspective & Meaning 

Guide Me to Eternity — Christine Tuttle Monsen 

The Message — Lance Richardson 

The Gateway We Call Death — Russell M. Nelson 

Sunset: On the Passing of Those We Love — S. Michael Wilcox 

Life Everlasting — Duane S. Crowther 

Visions from Beyond the Veil — Lee Nelson 

I Knew Their Hearts — Jeff Olsen

Understanding Yourself in Grief 

The Road Back to You — Suzanne Stabile

The Science of Grief 

The Grieving Brain — Mary-Frances O'Connor 

The Other Side of Sadness — George A. Bonanno 

The End of Trauma — George A. Bonanno B

Before and After Loss — Lisa M. Shulman

Reflection & Perspective 

The Correspondent — Virginia Evans 

Remarkably Bright Creatures — Shelby Van Pelt 

The Midnight Library — Matt Haig 

All the Light We Cannot See

The 100-Year Life — Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott