Letters of Note: Grief

by Shaun Usher (contributor)

An immensely moving collection of letters on the theme of Grief, curated by the founder of the globally popular Letters of Note website.The first volume in the bestselling Letters of Note series was a collection of hundreds of the world's most entertaining, inspiring, and unusual letters, based on the seismically popular website of the same name--an online museum of correspondence visited by over 70 million people. From Virginia Woolf's heartbreaking suicide letter, to Queen Elizabeth II's recipe for drop scones sent to President Eisenhower; from the first recorded use of the expression 'OMG' in a letter to Winston Churchill, to Gandhi's appeal for calm to Hitler; and from Iggy Pop's beautiful letter of advice to a troubled young fan, to Leonardo da Vinci's remarkable job application letter. Now, the curator of Letters of Note, Shaun Usher, gives us wonderful new volumes featuring letters organized around a universal theme.In this volume, Shaun Usher turns to the theme of grief. Contributors to be confirmed.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Grief

144 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2022

About the author

Shaun Usher is a writer, editor, and compulsive collector of remarkable words. He is the author of Letters of Note, an international bestseller that began life as a blog and grew into a celebrated series of books and inspired the live stage show Letters Live, which he has co-produced since 2013. He has published 16 books so far, covering everything from love and grief to music, dogs, and outer space, and in October 2025 will release his 17th, Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time, a curated journey through a year’s worth of diary entries from history. He lives in Manchester with his wife, Karina, and their three children.

Reviews

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves.
-Nick Cave

Ainda que o título deste conjunto de cartas aponte para o pesar e para o sofrimento, para mim o nível de comoção não atingiu o da compilação de Shaun Usher que li anteriormente, “Letters of Note: War”, talvez porque a vivência do luto seja uma coisa extremamente pessoal, talvez porque muitas das condolências não passem de frases feitas, talvez porque muitas destas mensagens apelem à espiritualidade e à religião e eu não perceba nem encontre conforto no dito “Deus leva os que mais ama”.
Mais uma vez a recolha de Usher é irrepreensível na sua universalidade, recuando, por exemplo, ao século V a.C. e incluindo cartas de locais tão remotos como a Coreia do Sul, abarcando outras crenças que não a cristã, como é o caso da Fé Bahá’i; além de selecionar remetentes e destinatários de todos os quadrantes, como escritores, músicos, estadistas e líderes espirituais, dando relevo também a gente perfeitamente anónima, como a mulher que escreveu a Jackie Kennedy a temer que, com a morte do presidente, a família que os americanos adoravam saísse da esfera pública, ou como uma mãe enlutada que escreveu ao “Irish Times” no Natal de 2019:

At night I sleep to the rattles of an empty house. Even the wind has a faraway cry when it rattles at the window. My three children, my daughter and two sons died from Cystic Fibrosis. (…) Grief gets in the way of daylight, not to mention the nocturnal dark.

Um dos grandes dons de Usher é encontrar sempre missivas mais ligeiras e, nesta colecção, ela é assinada pela mordaz Jessica Mitford a respeito da primeira reunião social de uma amiga depois de ficar viúva:

The crème de la crème was Barb Kahn, who came up & said how sorry she was that David died and that she meant to write a letter but was awfully busy. After she left, Edith said the next time anyone says that she’ll say “As you were too busy to write, please shut up!”

Houve, porém, um texto que me dilacerou, a carta aberta que Antoine Leiris escreveu aos assassinos da sua mulher, os terroristas que realizaram o ataque ao Bataclan em Novembro de 2015, um post que depois daria origem ao corajoso livro “Não terão o meu ódio”.

I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls. If this God for whom you kill blindly made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife is a wound in his heart.

[Ivana - Diary of Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wishlist | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Ko-fi



I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to participate on the readalong for Letters of Note: Grief. Huge thank you to the team at Tandem as well as the publisher Canongate Books for sending me a copy of the book to read and review!

Synopsis:

Letters of Note started as a website where Shaun Usher was sharing people’s letters. Now it is a collection of the world’s most inspiring, compulsive and powerful letters, curated into different books based on their topic.

My Thoughts:

When I signed up for the readalong, I didn’t know which topic I will get, and when I got grief, I was a bit let down. I thought to myself – “another book that is sad”. Now, looking back, I am grateful I have read this book, as it allowed me to get closer to my grief and feel emotions I deliberately refused to feel. It also gave me a bit of comfort, an unexpected hug, one of those that you didn’t know you needed.

Through the 31 letters, I felt different people’s sadness of losing someone. I read words of sympathy, empathy, love and joy. For such a short book, it made me feel so much!

My favourite letter is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s letter to his grandma, when his grandpa died. My grandpa’s death is still so painful to me – even though it’s been a couple of years now. He died on Christmas Eve, and I never got the chance to say goodbye. On my last visit, I was certain I would see him again. A year later, my grandma passed away as well, and the pain stacked itself on top of the pain I was already feeling.

Is that how grief works? We just keep stacking pain on top of each other like tower blocks through the years… waiting for it to collapse on us? Does it ever go away, or do we always carry it with ourselves? I guess only time will tell…

“It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined.”

I am very grateful for this book. Being able to dive into how other people feel helped me understand my emotions better. Even though, we are never quite ready for grief, and we never fully heal. But without knowing pain and sadness, how will we ever really know happiness?

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note series – compilations of letters on a variety of topics (war, love, dogs, NYC) written by notable figures of our time and the distant past. The new Letters of Note: Grief helped me with my own struggles. Grief can feel like a lonely business, but these letters, from Cicero to Nick Cave, connect the reader with people across the centuries who sought ways to come to terms with their losses. Included in this volume: Lincoln writes to a young woman whose father was killed in the Civil War (“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.”). Rilke advises his reader to “continue his life inside of yours.” And one hilarious letter describes a widow avoiding well-wishers at a party.

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned:
“Grief gets in the way of daylight, not to mention the nocturnal night.”

An amazingly difficult collection, but something that offers extreme heartache and attempted comfort. Gut wrenchingly real, but something that I can imagine being a great concentrate of solace when trying to escape - healthy to communicate through writing

“Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts…will find their own intuitive way”

[Vix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst this is a good book I can't really say it was "enjoyable" to read, as reading letters about grief is never going to be a happy occasion. It was heavy going and it took a while to complete even though it's a short book.

All of the letters are packed full of emotion and a few really resonated with me and made me think about my own losses. This is definitely a book where you need tissues nearby, I did tear up at a couple of letters. I thought letters 8 - "What a World", 11 - "I Will Be There in the Trees", 13 - "How Could You Go Ahead of Me", and 23 - "You Will Not Have My Hatred" were the ones that stood out the most for me.

I would recommend this to anyone grieving as I think they would find something that related to their situation and feelings. However, this is not one for a casual read. It was a good introduction to the Letters of Note series and I am interested in reading a few of the other titles.

*I received a complimentary copy of the book through the Tandem Collective and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

[Vanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

So. Many. Tears.
I hated the partsi related to but it brought me way more comfort than I had expected

[Faiza Sattar · Rating 4 out of 5]

★★★★☆ (4/5)
A selection of my favorite passages

• A letter is a time bomb, a message in a bottle, a spell, a cry for help, a story, an expression of concern, a ladle of love, a way to connect through words. This simple and brilliantly democratic art form remains a potent means of communication and, regardless of whatever technological revolution we are in the middle of, the letter lives and, like literature, it always will.
• Some people grieve in silence, either through choice or circumstance; others need to find a way to put their grief into words, to make sense somehow of the experience and translate it into a recognizable form.
• It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.
• I perceive now that I, who thought I loved solitude, was never for one moment alone—& a great desert lies ahead of me.
• I have felt this loss with all my heart; and what to us is the world around us, when we lose what we love?
• all happiness in the world is only lent.
• You have lost much, but much remains to you. Look at us, love us, and be happy.
• But what is your true self? Your body has life and death. But your true self has no life, no death.
• We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God—when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain instead of pleasure—instead of an aid, become an incumbrance and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way.
• To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.
• On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.
• Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease. Whatever had such steady influence on us had already been a reality independent of all the circumstances familiar to us here. This is precisely why we experienced it as something so different and independent of an actual need: Because from the very beginning, it had no longer been aimed at and determined by our existence here.
• We are true and pure only in our willingness to the whole, the undecided, the great, the greatest.
• Grief gets in the way of daylight, not to mention the nocturnal dark.
• I know he has done this all for you: he is all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too.
• How could you go ahead of me?
• You are just in another place, and not in such a deep grief as I am. There is no limit and end to my sorrows that I write roughly.
• I was so certain it would be me first of either of us. I’m even sure it was supposed to be me and he somehow contrived in his wretched Johnny-fashion to get in my way just as he always would when he was small. I want to tell him to mind his place.
• So much more will you rejoice in the radiant beauty of Edina’s new life as she comes back to you in memory and the gentle inspiration of her earthly endeavors.
• Tell me, Bernardo, what is it that you mourn in a friend’s death? Is it death? Or is it the person who is dead? If it is death, mourn your own, Bernardo.
• Now what was it that loved you? Was it not the soul itself, the soul which also knew you? But you saw his soul no differently then than now; and you see it now no less than then.
• You will perhaps complain of his absence. But, as souls do not fill space, they become present not in any particular place but in thought.
• No one you love is ever dead.
• We see so darkly into futurity, we never know when we have real cause to rejoice or lament.
• A grateful remembrance, and whatever honour we can pay to their memory, is all that is owing to the dead.
• our separation from those whom we love is merely corporeal;
• I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do
• For something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love as God loves.

[Miss Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each of these letters had a slightly different purpose. Some were written to console, others to give advice, whilst others celebrated the life. They spoke honestly and (as expected) religiously. At times, I found myself wanting to read the reply which wasn't part of the collection.

Some that were very touching included the letter recounting the release of organs for donations, and the monk’s words re the loss of a father which held similar consoling words to those from Helen Keller to her Japanese friends. In another letter, a pregnant wife addressed her husband in which it was obvious that she loved him and that she wanted him to continue to guide her by speaking to her in her dreams. Hemingway’s letter expresses the benefits of a young early death and ultimately of a shared experience as parents who are “on a boat now together” one that “will never reach port”.

The most interesting letter was from a soldier angered by his younger brother’s death. It was also great to read a letter penned by a scientist (Einstein) speaking eloquently to a Queen.
The most humorous letter was from Jessica Mitford expressing how to deal with mournful dirges on repeat.
My favourite (if you can have a favourite letter of grief) was from Kathleen Keyes, the soul survivor of her family, who wrote to the Irish Times around Christmas.
The strangest letter was addressed to the First Lady regarding her husband’s assassination which spoke of what she’d lost – seeing the family on television! The second half of the letter made more sense to me which was more consoling of Jacqueline Kennedy's loss: “rest against us, knowing that our love does sustain you and is there for you and the children, dear Mrs Kennedy.”

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love handwritten letters so the idea of a book which is a themed compilation of letters spanning centuries definitely peaked my interest. The description of letters that Usher included at the begining of this book (swipe to see it) is lovely. I recieved the book Grief but I'll definitely be on the look out for the rest of this collection and the original one, particularly Space, Art, Love and War.

This book was beautiful, the letters brought up a range of different emotions with some letters being particularly touching.  As with any compilation I found some letters easier to relate to and more meaningful than others and I'm sure others who have read this book will have different favourites. My favourites are letters 5, 6, 14, 28 and 30.

The letters in this book span from 45BC to 2019 and include letters from a range of well known names including Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller and Samuel Johnson. Between them the letters cover so many different forms of grief and attitudes towards it. Some writers are near the begining of their grieving while others have been grieving for a year or more.

I would recommended this book to anyone experiencing grief in the hope that they would be able to find a letter that they could relate to. I believe that Usher has achieved his hope that this book would ease the pain of those who are grieving "by reminding you that you are not along in your suffering, that there have been others out there and will be others again. Similar paths have been walked." 

[Squilvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and heartfelt compilation of letters. I found it fascinating how there's no escaping grief for anyone on this earth. For there is love, there will always be grief.

[Pers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving collection of letters centring on grief.

[Brittany Petruzzi · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, this was quite the letdown after creating C.S. Lewis’s “A Gfrief Observed.” It takes a supreme amount of skill to work through your grief on paper without coming of as a narcissist, and, unfortunately, Adichie does not have that skill. She’s likely not a narcissist, but making a largely private thing so public tends to make it seem that way.

[Tracey Pearce · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately this book was not for me. I think it was the old style of writing