Since March is always a rough month, marking the anniversary of the death of my childhood best friend, I often try to plow through the weeks. I worry if I stop to reflect or feel miserable (who has time to mourn?), I’ll be thrown off-track, unable to get back to my regularly scheduled programming.

A few months ago, I took a gift certificate I’d received to Brazos Bookstore and bought Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home, a memoir about the death of her close friend Caroline Knapp. I was both nervous and desperate to read the book. I started it on a Friday afternoon, when I knew it would be safe to fall apart. I read one page, cried like a switch was flipped, and put it down.

As the anniversary of the death of my own friend started to approach this year, I wanted to continue the book. By then, I had built a mental list of other books I wanted to own but was scared to read. I was doing a poor job of plowing through, and even I knew it was a total myth that I could get through the month and avoid my own grief. So I thought, why not get them all? Darin Strauss’s Half a Life, Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye–why not read them all, in row, now? I thought the thing so many people who’ve experienced a traumatic loss now think about commonplace challenges: How bad could this be?

As I suspected, it wasn’t that bad. The books I read were wonderful, which made things a lot easier, if more intense. One of the worst parts of mourning is feeling like you’re alone–or even if you’re not alone, that you’re burdening the people who love you with your grief. (Do you really want to hear about Melissa again? You never even met her.) You grow self-conscious about others’ kindness. But reading these books was a stark reminder that nobody who suffers is alone. These writers are brave for recording their suffering. Each book was painful to read, but they were all gorgeous in their own way, and I surprised even myself by how not-bad I felt as I finished each book.

None of the books addressed the same kind of loss I experienced, but together they created a kind of harmony to my own grief. Caldwell lost her best friend. Strauss was involved in an accident he walked away from but which killed someone his age, someone he knew. O’Rourke lost someone she’d never before had to live without. I’m not yet finished with O’Rourke’s book; while I was reading it, I learned that the person who’d given me the gift certificate would not be recovering from her own battle with illness. I swung between being unable to put down The Long Goodbye and, once I did, being afraid to pick it back up again. I’ve got a couple more chapters to go.

I moved to Houston to get a creative writing degree. I’d heard of Gulf Coast before I came, seen it in bookstores I browsed on my Manhattan lunch hours, and I applied to the program hoping that I’d get to work with the journal in some way while I was in Houston. I’m grateful to Marion for giving me a chance to work on such a wonderful literary magazine. I’m grateful for the incredible support she has shown to the arts, and I’m not alone in that. I’m grateful for her vision and enthusiasm and friendship. My love goes out to the people whose lives she touched, to the people who are mourning her today, together.