View your shopping cart.

Grief & Loss

Sitewide Banner Message

Please note our hours have been adjusted. Please see below for details.

The Well Bookstore is open for in-person shopping Tuesday thru Thursday 9am-2pm and Sunday from 8:30am-12:45pm (curbside pickup not available). All orders placed online or over the phone after noon on Thursdays will not be processed until the following Tuesday.

The Invisible String

The Invisible String

$18.99
More Info
With over 1.5 million copies sold, this accessible, bestselling picture book phenomenon about the unbreakable connections between loved ones has healed generations of children and adults alike. This new hardcover edition includes the vibrant illustrations from the 2018 paperback edition. A Spanish edition (El hilo invisible by Patrice Karst and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff) and companion workbook are also available (The Invisible String Workbook).

Parents, educators, therapists, and social workers alike have declared The Invisible String the perfect tool for coping with all kinds of separation anxiety, loss, and grief. It's also been joyfully embraced as a year-round celebration of love--gifted at births, graduations, weddings, Valentine's Day, and beyond. In this relatable and reassuring contemporary classic, a mother tells her two children that they're all connected by an invisible string. "That's impossible!" the children insist, but still they want to know more: "What kind of string?" The answer is the simple truth that binds us all: An Invisible String made of love. Even though you can't see it with your eyes, you can feel it deep in your heart, and know that you are always connected to the ones you love. Does everybody have an Invisible String? How far does it reach? Does it ever go away? This heartwarming picture book for all ages explores questions about the intangible yet unbreakable connections between us, and opens up deeper conversations about love.

Recommended and adopted by parenting blogs, bereavement support groups, hospice centers, foster care and social service agencies, military library services, church groups, and educators, The Invisible String offers a very simple approach to overcoming loneliness, separation, or loss with an imaginative twist that children easily understand and embrace, and delivers a particularly compelling message in today's uncertain times.

Recommended by Oprah Daily!

Read all the books in The Invisible String series:
The Invisible String Backpack: Your very own tool kit for school--and life!
The Invisible String Workbook: Creative Activities to Comfort, Calm, and Connect
The Invisible Leash: An Invisible String Story About the Loss of a Pet​
The Invisible Web: An Invisible String Story Celebrating Love and Universal Connection
You Are Never Alone: An Invisible String Lullaby

The Next Place

The Next Place

$16.95
More Info
"The Next Place" is an inspirational journey of light and hope to a place where earthly hurts are left behind. An uncomplicated journey of awe and wonder to a destination without barriers.
The Rabbit Listened

The Rabbit Listened

$18.99
More Info
A moving and universal picture book about empathy and kindness, sure to soothe heartaches big and small--now a New York Times bestseller and a perfect gift for any special occasion

When something sad happens, Taylor doesn't know where to turn. All the animals are sure they have the answer. The chicken wants to talk it out, but Taylor doesn't feel like chatting. The bear thinks Taylor should get angry, but that's not quite right either. One by one, the animals try to tell Taylor how to act, and one by one they fail to offer comfort. Then the rabbit arrives. All the rabbit does is listen . . . which is just what Taylor needs.

With its spare, poignant text and irresistibly sweet illustration, The Rabbit Listened is about how to comfort and heal the people in your life, by taking the time to carefully, lovingly, gently listen.

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking

$17.00
More Info

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later--the night before New Year's Eve--the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion' s attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Understanding Your Grief (Updated): Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

Understanding Your Grief (Updated): Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

$14.95
More Info
Since its debut thirty years ago, this favorite by one of the world's most beloved grief counselors has found a place in the homes and hearts of hundreds of thousands of mourners across the globe. Filled with compassion and hope, Understanding Your Grief helps you understand and befriend your painful, complex thoughts and feelings after the death of someone loved. Befriending grief may sound counterintuitive, but actually, your grief is your love for the person who died in a different form, and like that love, it's also natural and necessary. Perhaps above all, Understanding Your Grief is practical. It's built on Dr. Wolfelt's Ten Touchstones, which are basic principles to learn and actions to take to help yourself engage with your grief and create momentum toward healing. This second edition maintains the content of the first edition but builds on it by adding concise wisdom on new topics such as the myth of closure, complicated and traumatic grief, grief overload, unmourned grief, loneliness, the power of ritual, and more. Excellent as an empathetic handbook for anyone in mourning as well as a text for support groups, Understanding Your Grief pairs with a guided journal.
Understanding Your Grief Journal (Updated): Exploring the Ten Essential Touchstones

Understanding Your Grief Journal (Updated): Exploring the Ten Essential Touchstones

$14.95
More Info
This companion workbook to the second edition of Dr. Wolfelt's bestseller Understanding Your Grief helps you explore the many facets of your grief through guided journaling. After you read a section in Understanding Your Grief, the journal asks you questions about what you've just read. It invites you to consider, clarify, and jot down your thoughts and feelings. A good grief journal is a safe place of solace--somewhere you can express yourself no matter what you are experiencing. If you're grieving a death or a significant loss of any kind, this journal and its companion text will help you understand and embrace your grief, actively mourn, and move toward healing. You'll find that the journal can also be used to help honor the person who died and/or work through any lingering relationship issues. As you express your emotions in this journal, you will feel them beginning to soften as well as become more integrated into your ongoing life. Write as much as or as little as you'd like. Even just a little engagement with this journal will help you befriend your grief and give you healing momentum.
Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart (Understanding Your Grief)

Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart (Understanding Your Grief)

$14.95
More Info
For anyone who has experienced the suicide of a loved one, coworker, neighbor, or acquaintance and is seeking information about coping with such a profound loss, this compassionate guide explores the unique responses inherent to their grief. Using the metaphor of the wilderness, the book introduces 10 touchstones to assist the survivor in this naturally complicated and particularly painful journey. The touchstones include opening to the presence of loss, embracing the uniqueness of grief, understanding the six needs of mourning, reaching out for help, and seeking reconciliation over resolution. Learning to identify and rely on each of these touchstones will bring about hope and healing.
What Was Lost: A Christian Journey Through Miscarriage

What Was Lost: A Christian Journey Through Miscarriage

$22.00
More Info

United Methodist pastor Elise Erikson Barrett draws on her own painful experiences, as well as on interviews with others who have gone through the devastation of miscarriage, in an effort to help women grieve and, in time, to think theologically about pregnancy loss. Barrett also offers some much-needed practical advice about breaking the news to others, coping with insensitive comments, and grieving what is often a private loss, unmarked by the world.

When the One You Love Is Gone

When the One You Love Is Gone

$10.99
More Info
When a loved one dies, you don't get over it, but you can move forward. The bad news is that we never fully "get over" the loss of those we hold most dear; we bear those scars to the grave. The good news is that God is at work in us turning our loss and pain into something beautiful. God can take the scars and the mess and the heartache of our lives-- yours and mine--- and use it to give new life, new life to us and new life to others. God is not in the business of zapping our loved ones and stealing them away from us. But in a world where death waits for every person, God stands ready. God stands ready to receive our beloved dead as they cross over; and God stands ready to guide us through the saddest days, to walk with us through our grief, and to take us into places we never could have imagined places of hope and renewal. If God could take a cross and broken body and make of them redemption, God can take your pain and heartache and fashion them into new life. This book is composed of the reflections that point to broader lessons that will help those who find themselves passing through grief, as well as the pastors, counselors, and friends whose job is to accompany the traveler.
When Your Child Dies

When Your Child Dies

$4.19
$6.99
You Save:
$2.80
Sale 40% off 1 item
More Info

The loss of a child is something no parent is prepared to face. Drawing on her experience as a counselor, Theresa Huntley gives grieving parents tools to begin to cope with this devastating loss. She discusses the difficult task of mourning and the different ways of grieving. Huntley also reveals how the magnitude of the loss will affect parents' other relationships.