You're So Strong: On Grief and Letting Go of My Favorite Compliment

How do you continue on with life while grieving something you were never prepared for?

One moment, Leslie Harter-Berg had it pretty darn good, and the next, she was a thirty-year-old widow and single mom to two rowdy boys under the age of three. Thrust into the arms of grief, her new life consisted of strange tasks, like notifying AT&T that her husband no longer needed unlimited data and deciding what to do with his grown-man Lego collection while she also planned a memorial and parented solo.

This is Leslie Harter-Berg's story, but it could be anyone's. Anyone who has lost a spouse or experienced another kind of grief--when life doesn't go as planned, but it keeps right on truckin' without waiting for you to catch your breath.

But Leslie's learned a thing or two since her husband's sudden death in 2019. Throughout her poignant and funny attempts to "do grief right," she came to accept that no one was grading her on her grief and that surviving is often a lot more profound and beautiful than thriving.

In this poignant, humorous, slightly irreverent yet totally relatable memoir-meets-grief-guide, Leslie will help you:

• Let go of the need to find a silver lining or a greater purpose in your grief • Validate the odd, mundane, and very real things that happen after the death of a loved one or another traumatic life event • Redefine the stages of grief--and do the best living you can muster • Embrace the beautiful tension of conflicting emotions as you accept a life you never expected to live • Know that life can still be amazing as you move forward and find hope again

You can be simultaneously splitting your gut laughing while carrying a constant ache of sadness in that very same gut. You can look forward to a future with someone while also resenting that a future has stopped being with another. And you can move through life after loss by relinquishing the need to "be so strong" and allowing yourself to fall apart--so God can grieve with you and put you back together.

© 2026 Zondervan (Audiobook): 9780310369363

Release date

Audiobook: 24 March 2026