Death — something to talk about
Talking about death won’t kill you — but sometimes it can be frightening or awkward. The 100% Certainty Project promotes books to read and talk about, which will help to get conversations started about what’s important to you when you face what is inevitable.
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Read. Reflect. Talk about books.
Talk about death. Live your fullest life.
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Events
check back for upcoming events
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Past Events
Wednesday,
August 7, 2024
6:00–8:00 p.m.
Death Cafe
DBHSC - 100 Main Street W, Hamilton - room 2036
ALL WELCOME
group directed discussion of death
FREE EVENT
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024
6:45 p.m.
The Big Chill free movie at
The Westdale Theatre
1014 King St W
Wednesday, November 1, 2023; 4:00–7:30 p.m.
Living in the Gap: an honest look into how death, dying, loss, grief and bereavement are experienced in Hamilton
Hosted by Compassionate Hamilton
Thursday, September 28, 2023; 6:00 p.m.
Hope for the Best Plan for the Rest
Conversation with the expert authors, Dr. Hsien Seow and Dr. Sammy Winemaker
Hamilton Public Library, Central branch
2025-2026 Books
This year we did not have to look far to find great books about death, dying, bereavement and loss. Our picks provide plenty to talk about.
From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life’s biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.
In The Book of Alchemy, Suleika explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.
A companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy is broken into themes ranging from new beginnings to love, loss, and rebuilding. Whether you’re a lifelong journaler or new to the practice, this book gives you the tools, direction, and encouragement to engage with discomfort, ask questions, peel back the layers, dream daringly, uncover your truest self—and in doing so, to learn to hold the unbearably brutal and astonishingly beautiful facts of life in the same palm.
Borrow —
contact your local library
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Lessons for all of us in how to approach life—from someone in the process of dying. • "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality." —Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, author of Nothing to Fear
In his mid-40s, aid worker Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer—it had been caught too late, and spread throughout his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live—optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritizing what really matters in life. Deemed “a funny, touching meditation on death” by the Sunday Times, this warm and wise book offers lessons for all of us in how to approach life.
The advice includes: “Do get in touch, but don’t just turn up unaccounted,” and “Do listen, but don’t minimize things.” And just as wisely: “to exist is to have won the lottery of life.”
This remarkable book, a runaway bestseller in the UK, is not just a meditation on dying, but also a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying is destined to become a modern classic.
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Borrow —
contact your local library
A bestseller throughout the English-speaking world and a multiple award winner, H Is for Hawk is the exquisitely written story of one woman's journey to the limits of grief and love.
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge, embarking on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
H Is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey--an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. It's a book about memory, nature, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
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Borrow —
contact your local library
From Stonewall Award–winning illustrator Charlene Chua comes a tender, heartfelt story about love, loss, and the innumerable ways to carry someone in your heart, always, as a young girl honors her aunt’s memory by wearing the pink pajamas she sewed for her.
There are many ways of saying, “I love you.” For Ah Yi, it’s with her sewing machine, making extra soft, perfectly tailored pajamas for her niece. The little girl loves each pair, except the latest one which is pink, her least favorite color. She keeps a happy face on, but her aunt can always tell. She reassures the little girl there’s no need to worry—she’ll just make another pair.
But then Ah Yi gets too sick to use her sewing machine, so sick she has to go away to the hospital…and never comes home. Her niece doesn’t know what to make of the funeral customs until she finds her own special remembrance: wearing her pink pajamas, which were perfect all along.
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Borrow —
contact your local library
2024-2025 Books
Our last year's picks.
A mother's death forces a teen girl to reevaluate their tumultuous relationship in this powerful coming-of-age novel for teens. For fans of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.
After years of physical and verbal abuse from her mother, fourteen-year-old Coi moved in with her father, and together they created a peaceful life. But now, four years later, that peace is shattered when her mother dies.
While Coi struggles to find kindness in her heart for the woman who did nothing but hurt her, her mother's passing does help reopen the door to her mother's side of the family. It's only through reconnecting with her estranged family members, especially her younger half-sister Kayla, that Coi's long-held views about her mother are challenged.
And when Coi begins to see visions of her mother in her dreams, she is forced to ask herself what it means to forgive and be forgiven, and, most importantly, what it means to be family.
Borrow —
contact your local library
Life is short. No-one knows that better than seventeen year old Lenni living on the terminal ward. But as she is about to learn, it's not only what you make of life that matters, but who you share it with.
Dodging doctor's orders, she joins an art class where she bumps into fellow patient Margot, a rebel-hearted eighty three year old from the next ward. Their bond is instant as they realize that together they have lived an astonishing one hundred years.
To celebrate their shared century, they decide to paint their life stories: of growing old and staying young, of giving joy, of receiving kindness, of losing love, of finding the person who is everything.
As their extraordinary friendship deepens, it becomes vividly clear that life is not done with Lenni and Margot yet.
Fiercely alive, disarmingly funny and brimming with tenderness, THE ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LENNI AND MARGOT unwraps the extraordinary gift of life even when it is about to be taken away, and revels in our infinite capacity for friendship and love when we need them most.
Borrow —
contact your local library
It was February 2020 when Ed O'Loughlin unexpectedly heard that Charlotte, a friend from the old days, had just died young and before her time. He realized that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family, and his career as a foreign correspondent and novelist in a new, colder light.
This search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. The result is a haunting examination of the author's early life and love, the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa and the Middle East, the suicide of his brother, his new work as an author, a family home on the edge of a graveyard, and the mysteries of memory, aging, and loss. He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets.
Borrow —
contact your local library
A sweet picture book about a kid welcoming new people into her grammie's old house.
"You're going to love my Grammie's house. You'll love every single thing about it."
A precocious and delightful tour guide walks some potential buyers through Grammie's old house, showing them all the great things about it: a shaggy rug for shuffling, a shady closet that makes a great clubhouse, the perfect spot for eating cookies — even a climbing tree.
And with each new detail eagerly pointed out, we get to see hints of what the house was like when Grammie was still there and experience the love that lived in every nook and cranny.
This charming and tender story celebrates the connections we make between people and the spaces they inhabit, and the memories that can live on even when new connections are being made.
Borrow —
contact your local library
2023-2024 Books
This year we did not have to look far to find great books about death, dying, bereavement and loss. Hamilton’s own Drs. Sammy Winemaker and Hsien Seow have published Hope for the best, Plan for the rest, a fantastic guide to help individuals navigate life-changing diagnoses.
And our other picks provide plenty to talk about too.
In Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest, Dr. Seow and Dr. Winemaker have combined their decades of palliative care research and experience in caring for seriously ill patients. They have harnessed the advice of thousands of patients to create a roadmap that every patient and family will benefit from. In it, they share the 7 keys to unlock a better illness experience and reveal stories, tips and exercises to improve your journey right from diagnosis. These two compassionate experts empower you with practical tools to take charge of your life-changing diagnosis and navigate the health care system with confidence, knowledge, and calm.
Borrow —
contact your local library
The doctor’s report is final: David has cancer. Now the whole family is under the same terrible verdict. David’s wife becomes progressively consumed by the looming shadow of death while his daughters struggle to be as helpful as possible. Meanwhile, David soldiers on, not wanting the tumor to rob him of everything, including the chance to see his granddaughter grow up.
Vanistendael’s extraordinary art and sensitive text provide a powerful portrayal of a family preparing for life after unimaginable loss.
Borrow —
contact your local library
Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family? Thoughtful in its reflections on race and lineage, unflinching in its insights on grief and loyalty, Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity.
Borrow —
contact your local library
A Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and beloved author of The Guncle.
A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going, coupled with Steven Rowley’s signature humor and heart, The Celebrants is a moving tale about the false invincibility of youth and the beautiful ways in which friendship helps us celebrate our lives, even amid the deepest challenges of living.
Borrow —
contact your local library
“Reading these books gave me the courage to talk to my parents about what they wanted.”
~ Maria, University Student
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