Grief Kit

Grief is disorienting. It affects your body, your memory, your sense of time and your ability to do ordinary things, and almost nobody tells you that in advance. Most of what the world sends in response, flowers and food and a card, does not touch any of it, and it is gone inside a week.

The Grief Kit is a care package with work in it. Not a gesture. A guided path through the first year, in things you can hold, built to explain what is happening and give you somewhere to start on the days you cannot find one.

What is in the box

• Start Here guide. Written for the year after rather than the first week. What to expect, what is normal, and how to use the rest of the box when you have no energy to work anything out.
• Grief workbook. Twelve chapters explaining what grief does to your mind, your body and your memory, with grounding practices for when everything feels unsteady. No five stages, because that is not how it goes.
• In Loving Memory cards. Thirty prompts for remembering: the specific, ordinary things about them that nobody else thinks to ask you about.
• Building a New Normal cards. Small steps back toward the world at your own pace. Not moving on. Moving forward, when you are ready.
• Journal and pen. A private place for the parts you are not saying out loud yet.
• Keepsake vessel necklace. Holds ashes, a lock of hair, sand, a thread from a shirt. Choose the design that feels like them.
• Plantable seed card. Soak it, plant it, and it grows wildflowers.
• Tissues. You will need them. Everybody forgets to send them.
• Three months of the Thruology app. The whole kit on your phone, plus journaling, breathing and a small moderated room of people in the same chapter. A code is in the box.

Who it is for

Written without assumptions about the relationship or the kind of loss, so it works for a parent, a partner, a child, a sibling, a friend or a pet. It assumes no faith and no particular amount of time passed. Send it to someone who is grieving, or keep it for yourself.

Sending it to someone

Add a note at checkout and we write it on the card by hand. There is no price anywhere in the box and no invoice in the package. Ships within 24 business hours from South Carolina, free over $65, which a kit on its own clears.

What it will not do

It will not take the pain away and it is not a schedule for getting better. It is not treatment and it is not a crisis service. What it will do is explain what is happening to you and hand you something to do with it, for longer than the first hard week.