After a loss, the survivor must grapple with living

DEATH, when it touches a life by taking away the presence of a loved one, leaves the survivor forever altered. No one, says the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, steps into the same river twice. After we’ve experienced a death, we join the ranks of those who know only too well the infinite pain of loss.

Anneli Rufus in “The Farewell Chronicles” -- an examination of how death influences survivors -- says it’s like joining a club without intending to. “It is a vast worldwide society whose members share no privileges, no solidarity, no secret handshakes.... Passing each other on the street, sitting side by side on the subway, members of this club do not know each other for what they are, and don’t even look up.”

In this honest, by turns brutal and funny book, Rufus pulls together stories from friends, family members and her own life to illustrate the various emotions that death inspires. Sometimes we’re left feeling guilty when someone dies, or awash in regret. With other deaths, we may become isolated and withdraw. Sometimes death inspires relief or rejoicing, and in other instances, horror or irreverence. When people we know become mortally ill, we don’t know how to interact with them: “You are going to die and I am sending you this card because I am afraid to visit you.”

We may find ourselves flooded with greed by a promised inheritance, while reminiscences may have a way of haunting us: “Even one small awful memory has a way of crowding out twenty good or at least placid, unremarkable ones. It is as if bad memories are made of some entirely different substance than all the other kinds, transmitted to the brain by different means.”

“The Farewell Chronicles” is a book that those who’ve joined the club will want to read when the acute pain of loss has passed, and they’re ready to look objectively at the sting of survivorship.

P.F. Thomese’s “Shadowchild,” on the other hand, is a book for one in the depths of despair. In stunningly beautiful prose, Thomese writes of losing his few-weeks-old daughter and how this loss has inscribed itself indelibly on his life: “Our house has become the house of other people, and we’ve become strangers in our own lives as well.” With short chapters that read like poems, he searches for the words to not only depict his loss, but also to keep the memories of his infant child close by.

Thomese recounts the preparations for her birth and writes of the young family’s first night together: “And now we’re lying here with this amazing bundle between us.... [S]he’s lying here in her first moonlight, her first bed, her first world ....” It’s a magical, love-infused time, until illness and death separate them.

“So this is it,” he begins one of the short, burst-like chapters. “This is the worst that could happen to me, and now it’s happening.”

The author uses language as a way to define this loss and, at the same time, to illustrate just how impossible a job that is. The bereavement overwhelms him, defines him, defines everything he sees and touches, smells and tastes.

And still, he struggles for words, as if in capturing the right ones, he might yet be able to hold on to his daughter for just a moment longer.

“If she’s still there, then it’s in the words I wait for at night. Sometimes I still feel her too, but my arms, my hands, my skin are less, less and less, used to her.”

This is a gorgeous book that will splinter open hearts touched by loss, leaving readers aching at the sorrow of death and the screaming, abyss-like emptiness it leaves in its wake.

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Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.