Featured Book Review | Talk About Finding the Right Book at the Right Time—My Review of ‘Grief is for People’ by Sloane Crosley
When Death Comes in Threes
This past spring, around the same time I started a promising new job, I lost my grandmother. While her death was somewhat expected, we did not expect the timing of it. I adored Granny. I don’t think I ever heard a bad thing said about her my whole life. She was sweet and spicy, all rolled into one, with a zest for life and a deep love for her people that I have scarcely known in this life. The loss was hard.
As my family merely began to settle into the grief of losing such an amazing woman, my uncle passed away only a week and a half later due to a heart attack. Needless to say, we did not expect her son to go so quickly after. It was a shock having the deaths so closely together.
Less than a month later, my grandfather’s death followed. They often say that death comes in threes, but none of us ever expected them all to be in the same family. None of it felt fair.
The Right Book at the Right Time
Unable to attend my uncle’s or grandfather’s funerals due to work commitments and travel expenses—and, if I’m honest, a swirl of complicated emotions—I found myself in Oakland, California, for a leadership summit for my job. After a long day of meetings, I wandered into East Bay Booksellers. That’s when I found Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley.
The sleek cover and the title immediately pulled me in. It felt like the universe was guiding me to exactly what I needed due to the significant loss I was grieving at the time. As I began reading, I was struck by how tangibly Crosley wrote about grief—her words mirrored the rawness I was feeling, helping me process my own compounded sorrows.
“…Grief Is for People is a beautifully written and sharply observed memoir about grief, yes, but also: secrets, betrayal, rage, work, community, and most of all, love. It’s both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Family History
Crosley chronicles her loss in three waves.
- A burglary
- A death
- A global pandemic
The book begins with her apartment in New York City being burglarized, and jewelry passed down from her grandmother is stolen. The jewelry was valuable not just for its monetary worth but more so for its deep familial history. Though her relationship with her grandmother was complex, she defines the burglary as exactly as it was—a profound loss—not just of the items but of her sense of security. As Crosley puts it, “…people hide behind violation because it eliminates the hierarchy of loss in their favor. They foist this belief on me, as if the jewelry is a minor concern. But the violation is the part of the space shuttle that breaks off so that the greater loss can go the distance.” The initial violation serves as a gateway to confronting deeper, more personal grief.
Obsessively, she searches for the stolen jewelry on sites like eBay, trying to aid the police investigation and, in her own way, make sense of the chaotic emotions and events and, through it all, to somehow make sense of what is happening to her and why and perhaps gain some sense of closure in the midst of it all.
The second wave deals with the loss of her former boss, who had also become her closest friend over the years. This friend passed away from suicide shortly after the loss of her family heirlooms. The contrasts and parallels between losing material items and losing a person dear to you are handled with such intention that anyone who has experienced loss can understand the waves of anger, guilt, sorrow, and the other myriad of emotions that ebb and flow when faced with the beast of the thing that is grief. Even the title phrase “grief is for people” Crosley uses within the pages of the memoir in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way when she is talking about the theft of her grandmother’s ring and necklace. Grief is for People. Implying, of course, that it is silly to grieve over objects and yet, grief is a loss is a loss is a loss. Read that again. Say it as many times as you need to to understand that every human being has universally experienced this in some way or another. The thing is, this is rarely talked about outside the lines of the death of a person.
In the final portion of the book, Crosley is deep in the throes of grieving the loss of her friend when the world is hit with the global pandemic of COVID-19, which brought with it a whole new wave of grief—a collective grief as we dealt with the grief of lost plans, lost routines, and even countless lost lives worldwide. She brilliantly drives her point home that every single person who quarantined, who walked the busy streets of their city now mostly empty, who lost the ability to hold their friends and loved ones close because of the very legitimate fear of the illness spreading… every single one of us experienced the mutual loss of our ways of life that we knew.
Crosley’s book came at a moment when grief dominated my life.
As I neared the end of the book, life dealt me another blow—I lost my job.
On my last day, I read in Publisher’s Weekly that East Bay Booksellers, the very store where I bought Crosley’s memoir, had caught fire. Their building, along with thousands of books, was destroyed. It felt like a strange, almost macabre bookend to what I thought would be the beginning of a dream job—only to be met with loss after loss after loss. The synchronicity was impossible to ignore. The universe had brought me that book at exactly the right time, and maybe, just maybe, it brought me to the bookstore in preparation for their time of need, too.
East Bay Booksellers is working to rebuild through both a gofundme campaign and continuing with online sales to help raise enough money to reopen eventually.
In the same way, I am working to recenter myself and do what I need to to keep moving forward. One thing is for sure, the synchronized patterns of my finding this book are a little too obvious to ignore. I’m still wading through grief, trying to make sense of it all. But Grief is for People offered me a lifeline when I needed it most. Life doesn’t stop for loss, but this book reminded me that, while we can’t control everything, we can keep moving forward.
If you’re navigating loss, in whatever form that takes, I highly recommend reading Crosley’s book. It might just be the companion you need to feel seen and understood. It arrived at exactly the right moment for me, and perhaps it could do the same for you.
Have you read this book or something similar? What resonates with you regarding grief? Do you have a nonfiction recommendation we should check out? Let’s have a conversation in the comments.
