You do not have to know where to start

Most grief books open at chapter one and assume you can read a book. In the first weeks you cannot, and two years in you do not need to — you need the four pages that are actually about your problem.

So page five is a router. Sixty sentences, grouped by what is loudest, each pointing at a real page number:

You can use the whole book and never read it front to back. Plenty of people will.

What is underneath this

Grief almost never announces itself as grief. It announces itself as not eating, not sleeping, snapping at someone who did nothing, or a flat nothing where the sadness was supposed to be.

Chapter five takes each of those symptoms and lists what is commonly underneath it — because the handling is completely different. Not eating because meals were the thing you did together is a different problem from not eating because anxiety has shut your stomach down, which is different again from not eating because part of you is furious and has nowhere to put it.

Then it gives you a way to find out which one is yours. Most people working through it honestly find at least one thing they had not seen, and it is usually the thing that has been running the show.

Thirteen chapters, in the order these things tend to arrive

Then: twenty-one rituals for remembering and for putting something down, a section on being kinder to yourself, eight tear-out cards, ten groups of affirmations that are true on the bad days, and a fourteen-week plan with two rest weeks built in.

Neuroscience, psychology, the body, and how other cultures do it

Each chapter carries the same four lenses, each with a plain-terms box for the days when you cannot read carefully. The cultural lens is there because the English-speaking world kept the funeral and dropped almost everything after it, and most traditions that handle grief well do the opposite.

Where the book is summarizing someone else’s work — Stroebe and Schut on oscillation, Klass and Silverman on continuing bonds, Doka on disenfranchised grief, Boss on ambiguous loss, Tonkin on growing around it, Neff on self-compassion — it says whose work it is.

Who this is not for

What has not been reviewed

Nothing in this workbook has been clinically reviewed. It has not been read by a therapist, a grief specialist or a physician before publication. It is built from the research it cites, from work with people in the Conscious Cues community, and from reading well outside one person’s experience.

I would like that to change in a later edition. Until it does, this paragraph stays on the sales page as well as in the book.

Twelve of the worksheets are free

If you want to know whether this way of working suits you before paying for it, take the free grief worksheets. Twelve printable pages drawn from the same book — the symptom map, the body map, the trigger map, the guilt audit, the letter and the ritual planner — plus two pocket cards. No payment, no trial.