Everything here is written or chosen by people who have lost someone. Nothing is a course, nothing is a subscription, and none of it will tell you to move on.
A neuroscience grief workbook
What Your Brain Is Doing During Grief
Five things your grieving brain is doing, and what actually helps.
29 pages
The guide · pay what you want
What Your Brain Is Doing During Grief
Written by someone who lost his sister and his brother, and went looking for what was really happening inside his own head. Five mechanisms, what helps for each, and a page to write your own grief into.
Pay what you want, including nothing. Nobody in the first month of this should be deciding whether they can afford an explanation of their own head.
Also here
Guide
Free
What to say, and what not to
The six sentences people reach for that make it worse, and why. Written to be forwarded to the person who keeps saying them.
Read it
Worksheet
Free · PDF
Your grief body map
Where it sits, what it feels like, when it shows up, what helps. One page, printable, from Part Two of the workbook.
Download
Reading
10 sources
The research behind all of it
O'Connor on the predicting brain, Stroebe and Schut on the swing, Bonanno on trajectories, Klass on continuing bonds.
See the list
Writing
Free
Say it out loud
The one practice that helps almost everyone. A prompt, a name, and one true sentence to start with.
Open it
For families
Free
When nobody in the house will talk
Written after the author lost his brother to a silence that had nowhere to go. For families who are blaming each other instead of sitting together.
Read it
Support
UK and beyond
Where to get real help
Samaritans, Cruse, and how to tell the difference between grief doing its work and prolonged grief that needs a professional.
Find help
Shaped by people who heard it
Words we needed.
Nobody wrote this page. It is built out of what bereaved people say actually helped, and what they wish had never been said. Light a candle beside a line and it grows.
When you first hear
Checking in later
When you say their name
To a parent who lost a child
Instead of offering to help
From people who lost
Anyone
A parent
A child
A partner
A sibling
What helped
5 lines
I do not know what to say, but I am not going anywhere.
341
You do not have to reply to this.
288
I heard about your dad. I am so sorry. I am around all week if you want company.
214
I am bringing food on Thursday. No need to answer.
197
I remember him. He taught me to reverse round a corner.
156
What did not
4 lines
Everything happens for a reason.
249
At least she is not in pain any more.
203
Sorry for your loss.
176
Let me know if you need anything.
142
Add a line you were on the receiving end of
This helped me
I wish they had not
Goes up without your name on it. Nothing is taken down for being uncomfortable, only for being cruel.
Add it
Written by people here
Nothing here is from a clinician. These are pages someone in a room wrote after they had lived through it, kept because other people said it helped.
Everything
Suicide
Losing a child
Siblings
Sudden
The first year
Practical
P
Priya
Suicide
The questions you will never get an answer to
I spent a year building theories about why. This is what I wish someone had said to me in month two.
Did this help?
6 min · 412 found it useful
T
Tom
Losing a child
How to go back to work when your son is dead
The first week, the meeting where someone asks how your weekend was, and what to say to the one colleague who gets it right.
Did this help?
9 min · 288 found it useful
A
Aoife
Practical
Every account, subscription and phone you have to close
A list in the order that actually works, written after doing it wrong. Includes the ones that ask for a death certificate by post.
Did this help?
11 min · 604 found it useful
D
Dan
Siblings
Being the one who is left
Nobody asks the brother how he is. They ask how your parents are. On carrying a grief that everyone routes around you.
Did this help?
5 min · 197 found it useful
M
Marta
The first year
Anniversaries nobody else has in their calendar
The day of the phone call. The last normal Tuesday. Why the second year was harder, and what I did differently.
Did this help?
7 min · 341 found it useful
S
Sam
Sudden
When there was no goodbye
On unfinished conversations, and the letter I write every year to a person who cannot read it.
Did this help?
4 min · 259 found it useful
Write what you wish someone had told you
If you need to talk to someone now
In the UK, Samaritans are there day and night on 116 123, and Cruse Bereavement Support helps specifically with grief. Wherever you are, your doctor can point you toward local help.
If the weight has not lifted at all over a long stretch, if daily life has become impossible, or if you have had thoughts of not wanting to be here, please treat that as information, not weakness.