What happens to you when someone you love dies? Who was that person or animal companion in your life?

Loss comes along. First it breaks your heart, then it stays.

How do you live with loss without losing yourself?

While loss comes along with you for life, grief doesn’t have to be forever. This book is about learning to live with loss and with joy every day.

Through storytelling and simple practices, you’ll take a break from grief, find new ways to hold on to the one you love, and design your life-support system for living with loss.

In Grieving Us: A Field Guide for Living With Loss Without Losing Yourself, Kimberley Pittman-Schulz offers a fresh perspective that:

• explores grieving mindfully, including concepts based on experience & science,
• pushes back on societal biases that value some losses as more grief-worthy than others,
• encourages curiosity and reconnecting to what she calls “your animal body” to cultivate well-being,
• offers the missing “how-to” instructions for navigating a new world in which you get to go on living but have to do it without the person or animal companion that you love.

Her life shaped by loss, beginning with the death of her two sisters in a house fire as a toddler, Kimberley went on to spend 25+ years as a philanthropic and end-of-life planning advisor. She’s worked with incredibly diverse people seeking meaning after the loss of a spouse, partner, child, parent, sibling, or beloved animal to illness, accident, suicide, or traumatic death.

Written during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic while helping her husband live with advanced heart failure, this book feels more like a conversation.

Grieving Us is an upbeat field guide for living your one-and-only, heart-broken-and-still-beautiful life.