Grief Journal Prompts: 60 Questions That Actually Go Somewhere

Most grief prompts ask you to describe your feelings, which is the one thing grief makes impossible. These ask for something specific instead.

Why most grief prompts fail

Open a typical list of grief journal prompts and you will find questions like 'How does your grief feel today?' and 'What would you say to your loved one?'. They fail for the same reason: they ask you to summarize an emotional state, and grief fog makes summarizing the single hardest cognitive task available to you.

Prompts that work do the opposite. They ask for a specific, retrievable, often physical detail — a time, a room, a sentence somebody said, a thing you did with your hands. The feeling arrives on its own once the detail is on the page, and it arrives in a form you can actually read back.

There is decent evidence that the writing does something. James Pennebaker's expressive writing paradigm — short sessions on consecutive days, writing about an event and the feelings attached to it — has produced measurable effects on health and mood across a large number of studies. The effects are modest and they are not universal, and the results in bereaved populations specifically are more mixed than the popular write-ups suggest. But the shape of the intervention is worth copying: short, specific, feelings included, repeated.

How to use these

Set a timer for fifteen minutes and stop when it goes. Longer sessions are not better and tend to turn into rumination, which is the same material with none of the benefit.

Write by hand if you can bear it. It is slower, which turns out to matter — the lag between thought and page is where the sorting happens.

Do not fix the grammar and do not reread while writing. Nobody is going to read this. If you are worried somebody might, write it and tear it out; the writing is what does the work, not the keeping.

Pick one prompt from the section that matches where you are stuck. Not the whole section, and certainly not the whole page.

If a prompt does nothing, abandon it after two lines. If a prompt undoes you, that is usually the one worth returning to when you have more room.

Prompts for the first weeks

1. What did you do in the last twenty-four hours? Hour by hour, no commentary.
2. What has somebody done for you this week that actually helped?
3. What are you being asked to decide right now, and who is doing the asking?
4. What is on the admin list that you have not been able to look at?
5. Who have you not told yet, and what is stopping you?
6. What do you keep forgetting, and what happens in the second you remember?
7. What did you eat yesterday? All of it, honestly.
8. Who could you hand one specific job to, and what is the job?
9. What have you said out loud this week that was not true?
10. What has held together in the last two weeks that you have given yourself no credit for?

Prompts for the feelings you cannot say

1. What have you not said out loud about this loss? Start with the smallest one.
2. What are you relieved about?
3. What are you angry at them for?
4. What would you least want written on a card about how you have handled this?
5. Who are you envious of at the moment, and what exactly do they have?
6. When you feel nothing, what do you tell yourself about that?
7. Whose reaction have you been managing since the day it happened?
8. What do you feel guilty about? For each one: did you know then what you know now?
9. What is the thing you would only say to somebody who had had the same loss?
10. If nobody would ever read the next paragraph, what would it say?

Prompts for what the body is doing

1. Where in your body do you notice this most, and what does it feel like — pressure, heat, hollowness, weight?
2. What time do you wake, and what is running when you do?
3. What has happened to your appetite, and what is actually underneath that?
4. What have you been drinking, taking or scrolling more of since it happened?
5. When did you last go outside for no reason?
6. What did you used to do with your body that you have stopped doing?
7. Describe the last time you slept well. What was different about that day?
8. What physical symptom have you been quietly worried is something serious?
9. Where does the tension sit when you think about the hardest part of it?
10. What does your body do in the ten seconds before a wave arrives?

Prompts for waves, triggers and hard dates

1. What set off the last wave, and had you seen that trigger coming?
2. Which date on the calendar are you dreading, and what specifically about it?
3. What place have you been avoiding, and what has that cost you?
4. Which song, smell or route takes you out every time?
5. What is the trigger you want to keep, even though it hurts?
6. Where were you the last time it hit in public, and what did you do?
7. What happened after the last big wave — how long until you were level again?
8. What would a good version of the next anniversary look like, in detail?
9. Who do you want with you on the hard dates, and have you asked them?
10. What do you want to be doing at the exact hour of the anniversary?

Prompts for the relationship that continues

1. What has happened since they died that you wish you could tell them?
2. What would they say about how you are handling this? In their phrasing.
3. What do you already do to keep them present that you have never called a ritual?
4. What did they say that you still use?
5. What are you deliberately carrying forward from them?
6. What did you argue about, and where has that argument gone?
7. What is the story about them you tell most often, and why that one?
8. What do you want somebody who never met them to know?
9. What have you kept, and what does each thing actually stand for?
10. What has the idea of 'closure' cost you?

Prompts for who you are now

1. Write about yourself in the present tense without mentioning the loss.
2. What did their absence take away that was not them — a role, a routine, a version of the future?
3. What are you now responsible for that you were not before?
4. Who has surprised you in the last six months, in either direction?
5. What can you do now that you could not do a year ago, however small?
6. What would a life look like that had grown around this and still had them in it?
7. What are you still waiting for permission to do?
8. What would you tell somebody at the start of the loss you are eight months into?
9. What do you want to have written here in a year?
10. Read your earliest entry. What is different, and what is exactly the same?

What to do with what you have written

Date every entry, without exception. This is the single most useful habit here, and it is the one people skip. Change in grief happens far too slowly to feel, and the only reliable way to see it is to read something you wrote when you could barely hold the pen.

Do not reread for at least a month. Rereading fresh entries pulls you straight back into the state that produced them, with no distance and no benefit.

Some pages are for writing and not for keeping. Anything in the 'cannot say' section is a candidate — write it, read it once, then tear it out and get rid of it deliberately. The expression is the mechanism, not the archive.

If a prompt produces something you want a person to hear, that is worth noticing and acting on. Writing is a good way to find out what needs saying. It is a poor substitute for saying it.

Grief Journal Prompts: frequently asked questions

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