Grieving Us

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?

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

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 shares how she discovered the power of Tiny-Come-Back-to-Your-Senses Rituals to turn her two-year struggle with unrelenting sorrow after the death of her mother into a life of deeper meaning and joy. While writing the book, she also explored the realities of anticipatory grief as she helped her husband navigate advanced heart failure in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ultimately Kimberley offers those living with loss a fresh perspective that:
• explores grieving mindfully, including grief healing concepts based on experience & science,
• pushes back on societal biases that value some losses as more grief-worthy than others,
• challenges the idea that you should ‘bounce back’ from loss,
• 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.

Kimberley speaks to you from a place of empathetic wisdom, with a poet’s sensibility and an understanding that human beings need to laugh and sing even when they’re sad.

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 looking for meaning after the loss of a spouse, partner, child, parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or beloved animal to illness, accident, suicide, or traumatic death.

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