The way we mourn in America is deeply broken

s. e. smith is the author of All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning, out now from HarperOne. Below, smith recommends books about grief and mourning. As a writer who’s been covering death and grief for a very long time, my inbox is constantly filled with letters from readers desperate for someone to hear them and sit with them in their grief for a while. There’s a sense of well, you’re the expert, can you help me figure this out?Sifting through these deeply intimate letters, I keep coming back to two themes as I think about how the way we mourn in America is deeply broken.It’s in part because we consider it a personal problem, rather than something we should carry and witness together. It’s also because we value some lives and losses more than others—sometimes society doesn’t even recognize a life or a loss at all. Thinking about the way grief is bigger than ourselves, not something we can repair like a lamp we learned to rewire by watching a YouTube tutorial, brings me to these recommendations.Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim brings up confrontational questions about whose lives are valued by society, and whose are marked for loss, ...