Sitting with Grief
A Therapist's Guide to Being Present with Loss
Most advice about grief is really advice about making grief stop. This book is not that. It is about what it means to stay with a person in the worst thing that has happened to them, and what it means to stay with yourself.
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What this book is
I had been a lawyer for thirty years when the phone rang and changed the shape of my life. A friend I had known since high school had pancreatic cancer, and it was terminal. I closed my practice, booked a flight, and went to be with him.
I had no framework for any of it. I was not a therapist or a chaplain. I was a lawyer who had spent three decades learning how to argue, how to find the angle, how to resolve the thing that needed fixing. None of it was any use in that room. There was nothing to argue and nothing to fix.
I stayed. That was the whole of it. I stayed.
What followed was palliative care, hospice grief counseling, and eventually a therapy practice in Boulder. This book collects what I have learned since. It covers what grief actually does to a body and a mind, why the stage models most people carry around are wrong, what helps, what does not, and how to sit with someone who is suffering without trying to fix them.
It is grounded in clinical research and in practice. The client stories are composites, assembled from many people across many sessions, with identifying details changed.
Who it is for
If you are grieving. You will not find a timeline here, or a set of stages to complete. You will find an explanation of what is happening to your body, your memory, and your sense of time, and why none of it means something has gone wrong with you.
If you are supporting someone who is grieving. Grief is hard to be around, and that difficulty can push us either into silence or into words that minimize the loss rather than support the person carrying it. This book offers a third option.
If you are a clinician. The frameworks are named and sourced, drawing on Worden's tasks of mourning, Stroebe and Schut's dual process model, Mary-Frances O'Connor's work on the grieving brain, Klass on continuing bonds, and current research on Prolonged Grief Disorder. An appendix organizes the sources by chapter.
What’s inside
Twenty chapters in five parts.
What Grief Actually Is takes apart the stage model, explains the physiology, and makes the case that grief is not a problem to be solved.
Why We Flee is about why people disappear on the bereaved, why the instinct to fix makes things worse, and how to stay anyway.
The Particular Griefs covers suicide loss, losses nobody acknowledges, ambiguous loss, perfectionism in grief, and grieving in a world of digital remains.
Sitting with Yourself is written for anyone who does this work, including a chapter on what thirty years of legal training got wrong about being in a room with a grieving person.
The Long Haul returns to integration and to the question that outlasts the rest: who are you now?
Why it is free
Because grief comes to everyone, and it does not check what you can afford.
The book is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are welcome to share it, forward it, print it, and give it to anyone who needs it. You may not sell it or alter it.
About the author
Grant Marylander is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Grief Counselor, and Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional practicing in Boulder, Colorado. He came to this work through palliative care and hospice, and facilitates grief support groups in the Boulder community, including a group for survivors of suicide loss. Before becoming a therapist he practiced law for more than thirty years.
If you are carrying something heavy and wondering whether therapy might help, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.