Thank you for the suggestions, it is always helpful to have material to bring us closer to understanding the experience of grief and loss. A few suggestions of my own if I may add to the discussion:
I echo Seeker’s suggestion of David Kessler's Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. I found it was written in plan language and helped to better understand grief and the variations that can occur within it.
I also recommend A Grief Observed by C.S Lewis. It is a brief book exploring the author’s experience of losing his wife and I found helped to articulate some of the feelings of loss as well as highlight the implacability of some emotions. A couple of quotes that stand out:
“Part of every misery is [the…] shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each day in endless grief but live each day thinking about living each day in grief” (p.10-11)
“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. […sometimes] you are presented with exactly the same sort of country as you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial reoccurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat” (p.50-51)
Irvin Yalom’s Staring At the Sun is my third suggestion. The book is not directly about grief, but about feelings of anxiety around death. I find Yalom does a good job of writing books that walks the line between therapist and client audiences without being to “inside-baseball” for non-therapists. Not my first recommendation for loss and grief, but I found it helpful in better understanding certain emotions around loss.