Living Well with Advanced Illness & End of Life

Here’s a carefully curated book list about death, grief, and living well. Enjoy!

Helping kids, teenagers, and young adults cope with the death of a parent or caregiver means giving them clear information, connection, trust, inclusion, and space to be young, too.

If I Had 6 Months to Live, Here’s Where I’d Start

A therapist’s perspective on navigating the unimaginable

Let me begin by saying this clearly: I am not currently facing a life-limiting illness. How I would feel in that position, personally, I can only speculate.

I do not write this from lived experience of dying.

I write it from years of sitting beside people in grief. People facing devastating diagnoses. People losing partners, children, parents, futures. People learning — often against their will — how to live inside uncertainty, heartbreak, fear, love, and meaning all at once.

And over time, I’ve noticed something important:

The people who navigate profound loss with the greatest sense of peace are not necessarily the strongest, the most spiritual, or the most “positive.”

They are usually the people who slowly learn how to become more conscious inside the experience.

Not perfect.
Not fearless.
Not endlessly composed.

Just willing — eventually — to stop running from what is true.

When Grief Doesn’t Feel Heavy… But Still Feels Far Away

There’s a certain kind of person who doesn’t fall apart, even after losing something or someone they love, deeply.

Not because life hasn’t been devastating at times.
Not because they don’t feel deeply.
But because somewhere along the way, they learned how to stay together no matter what.

They keep going.
They function.
They take care of others.
They show up at work, in relationships, in life.

Even after loss.

When Is It Grief? And When Is It Trauma?

Sometimes people come to therapy carrying something heavy for a very long time before they ask the question out loud.

“Is this grief?
Or is this trauma?”

Usually, the answer is not simple.

Sometimes it is grief.
Sometimes it is trauma.
Very often, it is both, woven together so tightly that the nervous system no longer knows where one ends and the other begins.

Searching for the Best EMDR Therapist in Toronto?

What “best” really means when you’re looking for therapy

If you’re searching for the best EMDR therapist in Toronto, chances are you’re not looking for perfection.

You’re looking for care that feels high-quality. Thoughtful. Effective. You want someone competent, experienced, emotionally attuned, and capable of helping you create real change.

You want good outcomes.

You want to feel better—not temporarily, but meaningfully.

And if you’ve been struggling for a while, or carrying something heavy for years, it makes complete sense that you would want robust support. Therapy is an investment of your time, energy, money, vulnerability, and hope. Of course you want to choose carefully.

But here’s something important to understand:

The “best” therapist is not an objective ranking.

It’s a relational fit.

Why Grief Feels Heavy (and Why That’s Not a Problem to Fix)

Grief doesn’t just feel heavy in a metaphorical way. It often feels like actual weight—pressure in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, a kind of gravitational pull toward stillness or fatigue. People will say, “I feel weighed down,” or “I can’t move through this,” as if something in them has become denser.

And in a way, it has.

Not because something is wrong—but because something is happening.

Grief is not just an emotion. It is a whole-system response: emotional, physiological, energetic, and relational. It asks the body to slow down, to process, to metabolize meaning and loss over time.

“What’s wrong with me that I can’t move on?”

When grief turns into self-criticism

These are the kinds of questions that often don’t feel like questions at all. They feel like conclusions.

What’s wrong with me that I can’t move on?
Why am I so weak for still being affected by this?
Why can’t I handle things like other people?
How do I stop being stuck?

And underneath all of them, something very human is happening.

A person is in pain.
And instead of being held in that pain, they are turning toward themselves with judgment.

This is one of the most common ways grief becomes harder than it already is: it gets layered with self-criticism.