Books like STAYING ALIVE by Neil Astley

Mitch Albom’s memoir follows his weekly visits to former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz as Schwartz confronts terminal ALS, exploring life, death, and personal growth through their poignant teacher‑student bond.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

C.S. Lewis’s personal journal of grief following his wife’s death, offering reflective meditations on loss, faith, and the quest for meaning.

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history's most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our "secular age" in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment's insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

Elie Wiesel chronicles the harrowing realities of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and how witnessing the loss of family and friends transformed his faith.