A number of literary grief memoirs can be read as lessons in living with loss. While their authors resist resilience, they endeavour a very modest programme: that of finding ways to get through the day. Their biggest challenge is loneliness, yet they come to relish solitude, which hosts the conversation they maintain with the deceased, as well as the comfort of literature, with its mirroring of one's suffering in another's words. Ultimately, their own writing allows the bereaved to spend time with the dead and with the loss itself. Acting as a ritual, it is able to capture the ever-shifting moments of grief, and to connect the writers to their inner life.