Meghan Riordan Jarvis, MA, LCSW is an author, podcast host, two-time TEDx speaker, psychotherapist, educator and consultant specializing in trauma and grief and loss. She founded the Grief Mentor Method(TM), an interactive therapeutic process that helps grievers learn to create a structured, personalized grief process. Meghan's memoir "End of the Hour" was published with Zibby Books in November 2023 and her next book "Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions About Grief and Loss" publishes with Sounds True Media in October 2024.
I grew up in a house filled with books and book-lovers. My father worked as a textbook editor when I was young. His job had one extraordinary perk as far as my five brothers and sisters and I were concerned -- the oversized box of children's books that landed on the door of the yellow farmhouse once a year. Books were transformation, imagination and conduits of truths that, once learned, could change us. They taught me empathy and the power of witnessing and being witnessed, and I have never missed my parents as much as the day I published my first book.
As an author and a trauma therapist specializing in grief and loss, I am often asked what books I recommend to support grievers. I have a ready list of books that people have told me taught them something and helped them to feel less alone in loss.
Because reading can be a challenge in the first few months after a loss, I often send a book a few months later with a note that says, "You might like it -- you might throw it across the room, but either way, you know I was thinking of you." Here are a few of my personal and professional favorites.