In the beautiful and thought-provoking Grief Is Love: Living with Loss, Marisa Renee Lee explores the idea of grief as love, coming to understand grief not as something to "get over" but rather a constant presence that stands as a testament to those we've loved and lost. Lee's own journey involving grief started early. Her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, later, stage 4 breast cancer, and then Renee herself experienced a miscarriage and fertility problems. She writes with candor about her grief, first repressing and denying it but eventually working her way toward giving herself permission to grieve "out loud."
As much as Lee draws on her own experiences to shape Grief Is Love, the book is not so much a memoir as a kind of personal guide, both for those grieving and those seeking to support someone through loss. Within that, Lee places grief in a 21st-century American context, identifying the role of race in grieving as well as the magnitude of grief brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. "We can no longer afford to ignore grief," she writes, "to relegate it to whispered conversations, to expect folks to navigate their brokenheartedness on their own." Grief Is Love is, in a way, a call to action, but more so a call to compassion: let us not grieve alone or ask others to, Lee suggests. There is power and healing in community and in standing together to acknowledge the weight of loss and what it means to go on living when someone we love does not. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer