The art of living with loss is something most of us learn on the job. A Boston Globe culture piece recently asked what we watch, read, and listen to when we're grieving, and the answers reveal something quietly universal: the films, books, and songs we return to become companions through bereavement.
What we watch: grief on screen
Cinema has long given grief a shape. Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea (2016) remains one of the most unflinching portraits of a man flattened by loss, and Pixar has twice taken on the subject for family audiences: Coco (2017) makes remembrance itself the plot, while Soul (2020) uses a musician's brush with death to ask what makes a life worth living. Harvard's counseling service lists both films on its grief-resources page.
The theme is still evolving. Rachel Morrison's new film Love of Your Life, released on Prime Video this week, follows Maya, a Boston nurse played by Margaret Qualley, navigating life after losing her husband to COVID-19. Morrison lost her mother at 15 and her father at 30, and has said photography became her way of "freezing time" as her mother slipped away.
What we read: books that sit with the bereaved
Grief memoirs have become a shelf of their own. Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) captures the surreal stillness after sudden loss, the denial and strange mental negotiations that follow a death. Michelle Zauner, the indie rocker behind Japanese Breakfast, wrote Crying in H Mart (2021) about losing her mother to cancer. Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) gives mourning feathers and a beak, a crow that visits a widowed father and his sons.
- Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air (2016), the Pulitzer Prize finalist by the neurosurgeon who died of cancer, reflects on mortality from both sides of the hospital bed.
- Megan Devine's It's OK That You're Not OK (2017), written by a therapist who lost her own partner, argues our culture's push to "move on" is itself the problem.
- Joy Harjo's Cloud Runner (W.W. Norton, October 2026), the new poetry collection by the three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, reckons with the death of her daughter and explores how art can carry what the mind cannot.
What we listen to: the continuing bond
Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor, who wrote The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (2022), describes the brain's slow work of remapping a world without the beloved person. In one of her lab's daily-diary studies, widows and widowers reported interactions with their deceased loved ones that often came through music: one woman felt her late husband was "DJing her ride home" through whatever came on the car radio. Over time, the researchers found, these continuing bonds transformed, shifting from days of heavier grief to days of better emotions.
That transformation is the heart of writer and podcaster Nora McInerny's message. After losing her husband, her father, and a pregnancy within a single six-week period, her TED Talk "We don't 'move on' from grief. We move forward with it" became the fourth most popular TED Talk of 2019.
The takeaway
What we watch, read, and listen to in grief isn't distraction. It's rehearsal: stories and songs that let us practice living with absence until the brain, and the heart, catch up. The art we choose becomes the company we keep, and the company we keep carries us forward.
Watch: Nora McInerny's TED Talk "We don't 'move on' from grief. We move forward with it" — a 15-minute talk that is by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, on carrying lost loved ones into the future instead of leaving them behind.
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Mourning Song (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0
Sources: Maria Popova's exploration of Mary-Frances O'Connor's The Grieving Brain at The Marginalian; APB Speakers on Nora McInerny's TED Talk, ranked #4 of 2019; Harvard CAMHS grief resources, including its list of films for the bereaved; Tertulia's roundup of books about grief for every kind of reader.