This blog is a sister blog to our parent website, GoodBooksNW, where we have an online catalogue and we sell books on grief, divorce and blendedfamilies. By having this sister blog, we can review books and cover a lot more territory on grief.  My partner, Michael, died from a heart attack 4 years ago this week, and I have been profoundly changed by both his death and the experience of grief that accompanied his death. I have learned that grief is a rich teacher, and I started looking around at how little we prepare ourselves for an inevitable relationship with it. There are a number of good books I have read in the past few years to help me sort out and understand my new relationship with grief. Many of these are found in the catalogue and will be reviewed here.  We will explore grief in a very broad way on this blog. We will not only look at grieving around death, but will consider grief’s relationship with health, pets, aging, job loss, many different personal relationships, money, sense of home, and any other interesting areas people bring to his blog. Please stop by, let me know what you have learned about grief, and make suggestions about what you would like to see here.  Deborah Coryell, in her book Good Grief: Healing Through the Shadow of Loss  says “One of the wisdom teachings of grief is that we are all connected in our experience of loss. Just at the moment when we feel the pain of separation from the one we love or the place we love, we are connected to every single person who has or ever will experience a similar loss. …Birth, death, and grief are the only life events that every single one of us encounters.”