In the days and weeks after my sixteen-year-old son, Jake, was killed in the summer of 2020, time lost its structure and any sense of a future had collapsed into something shapeless and irrelevant. There is a particular silence that follows the death of a child. It is not the absence of sound, but the absence of orientation. You no longer know where to stand inside your own life.

In those early days, survival was the only measurable goal. Breathing. Standing. Enduring. Reading was the last thing on my mind.

Books had always been companions. They were tools for growth in a life that felt expansive and forward-moving. But after Jake’s death, growth felt impossible. What could possibly grow in scorched earth?

And yet, quietly, almost reluctantly, I was drawn to books. It began when fellow bereaved parents generously dropped off books. I didn’t believe they would heal me. But I needed someone, somewhere, to explain how a person continues after the unthinkable. I was rudderless and lost.

Grief is not only emotional, it is neurological. The brain in acute grief shifts into survival mode. The amygdala, responsible for threat detection, becomes hyperactive. Sleep is disrupted. Memory falters. Concentration fragments. The prefrontal cortex struggles to function under the weight of shock.

Reading, at its core, is a high-order cognitive task. It requires working memory to hold sentences together and absorb meaning. It also necessitates sustained attention across paragraphs and pages. In grief, those capacities are compromised.

The grieving brain is under siege and is trying to reconcile an impossible reality: someone essential is gone, yet the world continues. The brain’s internal model of the world still expects the loved one to exist. When that expectation collides with reality, the brain repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to update itself. This loop consumes cognitive bandwidth.

In this state, my attraction to books was counterintuitive. Yet, it proved to be the one activity that somehow, someway, offered a respite and a level of peace I couldn’t find anywhere else. I was consuming books as if they were oxygen.

Why would someone whose concentration was shattered choose an activity that demanded concentration? Why turn toward language when language felt so insufficient? Why seek abstraction when pain was visceral?

The answers resided in what reading offered beneath the surface.

First, books provide structure when the universe has destroyed it. Grief dissolves routine as days blur and time is distorted. A book, however, has order. Sentences build and become paragraphs and then chapters. That order reminded my brain that some form of coherence still existed somewhere.

Second, reading offers borrowed cognition. With my own thinking fractured, I could lean on someone else’s fully formed thoughts. Authors who had endured loss or adversity articulated emotions I could not yet name. This reduced cognitive strain. Instead of generating language for my pain, I could simply recognize it on the page.

Third, books provide safe exposure to meaning. Through someone else’s story, I could approach existential questions indirectly. Reading, for me, became a buffer between devastation and reconstruction.

Neurologically, this mattered. Research suggests that narrative processing activates networks in the brain associated with empathy, memory integration, and perspective-taking. These networks help weave fragmented experiences into coherent identity. Grief shatters identity. Reading helps stitch it, slowly, back together.

Still, it was not easy. There were early days I could not get through a page and times when a single sentence triggered tears. The act of reading was uneven, mirroring grief itself.

What made this attraction to books particularly powerful was that it defied the instinct to withdraw cognitively. Many grieving individuals retreat from complexity. Television becomes easier than text. Distraction becomes preferable to depth. I, however, decided early on to lean into my pain, even when it hurt. There’s no way around grief: you either walk through it or it walks all over you.

Reading demanded presence. It also validated the nonlinear nature of grief. Books normalized the rage, anxiety, pain, grief, and sadness I was feeling. If what I was experiencing was documented, studied, and survived by others, then perhaps there was hope for me. There is a subtle but important neurological shift that occurs when pain is named. Naming activates language centers in the brain that help regulate emotional intensity. So when I read words that matched my internal chaos, it made me feel less alone in my circumstances.

Grief is isolating not only because of what you’ve lost, but because of how difficult it is to articulate what remains. When an author described the disorientation, the anger, the guilt, or the strange numbness, it loosened something inside me, reminding me that I was not broken beyond recognition. I was broken within the spectrum of human experience.

Others had stood where I now stood. Others had survived. The dual capacity of pain and perspective signals neural integration. Integration is not forgetting. It is incorporation. Books modeled lives reshaped by tragedy, not erased by it, and that purpose can emerge not in spite of suffering, but because of it.

Books also reintroduced me to future orientation. Every book moves forward. Even memoirs written about loss are structured toward progression. By following narrative arcs, my brain was rehearsing movement again. Page by page, story by story, my brain quietly practiced moving forward.

Importantly, reading did not remove my pain nor did it rewire my brain overnight. But it offered small moments where cognition strengthened, language sharpened, and my identity expanded beyond the singular event of my greatest loss.

The counterintuitive attraction to books became my quiet act of resistance. Instead of numbing complexity and avoiding reflection, I entered it and cultivated it. The books became scaffolding for me. They did not rebuild the life I had. Instead, they supported the construction of the life I would now live. The books also became witnesses to my pain. They did not interrupt nor did they rush me toward any acceptance. They simply told the truth.

Meaning, I discovered, was not found in avoiding suffering. It was found in what I chose to do with it. I read stories of people who had endured unimaginable loss, profound hardship or extreme adversity and still found ways to keep moving forward, contribute, love, and lead.

They did not move on. They walked on. That difference mattered.

Books helped me see that while I could not change what happened, I could choose how it shaped me. They helped me take the first steps. And then the next step. And the next.

Until, without fully realizing it, I was walking on.

• Stephen Panus is the author of the best-selling book, Walk On, which was featured on “Good Morning America” and which Kirkus Reviews proclaimed, “a raw, moving memoir that deftly explores grief and hope in equal measure.” His debut novel, The Circles We Carry, is set to publish on December 8, 2026.

Here’s a few of my favorites from the many, many books I read (listed in alphabetical order):

After the Death of a Child by Ann Finkbeiner

Bearing the Unbearable by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

Good Grief  by Deborah Morris-Coryell

Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief by Martha Whitmore Hickman

Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, PhD.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

On Life After Death by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Swallowed by a Snake by Thomas R. Golden

The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived by Admiral William H. McRaven

Where God Lives by Melvin Morse, M.D.

Stephen Panus is an author (Walk On and The Circles We Carry), speaker, coach, and sports and entertainment communications/marketing executive whose work explores grief, resilience, human connection, and the transformative power of hope. Following the sudden and tragic death of his sixteen-year-old son, Jake, in 2020, Panus wrote the critically acclaimed and widely shared Walk On, a deeply personal reflection on loss, perseverance, purpose, and choosing hope when life seems impossible to navigate. His debut novel, The Circles We Carry, is scheduled to publish on December 8, 2026. The Circles We Carry is a testament to the invisible threads that bind us and how love, in all its forms, endures beyond loss and the boundaries we believe separate us. Through his writing and speaking, he has inspired individuals, leaders, and organizations facing adversity, helping them discover strength, meaning, and possibility amid life’s greatest challenges. Stephen resides in the Northeast, where family, resilience, and the enduring power of human connection continue to inspire his work. Learn more, visit: www.stephenpanus.com