This Dying Matter’s Awareness Week, we’d like to shine a spotlight on some of our favourite books that challenge preconceptions and normalise public openness around death, dying and bereavement.

‘With the End in Mind’ – Kathryn Mannix

Told through a series of beautifully crafted stories taken from nearly four decades of clinical practice, this book answers the most intimate questions about the process of dying with touching honesty and humanity.

‘We All Know How This Ends’ – Anna Lyons & Louise Winter

End-of-life doula, Anna Lyons and progressive funeral director, Louise Winter, teach us how and why we all need to think about death in a radically different way.

In We All Know How This Ends, Anna Lyons and Louise Winter share a collection of the heart-breaking, surprising and uplifting stories of the ordinary and extraordinary lives they encounter every single day. From working with the living, the dying, the dead and the grieving, Anna and Louise share the lessons they have learned about life, death, love and loss. And from their experience, they have suggestions of how we should address death differently, both on a personal level and a societal level. The changes they suggest are simple, but they could make a remarkable difference to our experiences of death, grief and beyond.

‘Grief Works’ – Julia Samuel

Using stories from her practice, an experienced grief therapist talks us through the pain and challenges of grief and offers tools that all of us can use to help us cope with bereavement.

 ‘In Search of You: letters to a daughter’ – Patsy Freeman

Patsy is a psychologist and grief counsellor. Her book, ‘In search of you’ is a compilation of letters to her daughter who dies in 2013. Heart-rending and raw, Patsy describes the shock of bereavement, her grief and guilt, and the confidence she now enjoys in life after loss.

‘Living Fully, Dying Consciously: the path to spiritual wellbeing’ – Sue Brayne

Everything changed for Sue 30 years ago, after surviving a light aircraft crash. In her book, Sue argues that confronting our fear of death and accepting our physical mortality helps us to create a more conscious way of living. This is essential for our spiritual wellbeing, for the wellbeing of the planet and for future generations.