Carrying a lossStep 1 of 8

Before you read on

Read this first. Some losses need a person and not a course. If you are thinking about ending your life, or about joining the person who died, tell somebody today and treat it as urgent. If the death was violent, sudden, by your own witnessing, or by suicide, or if images of it arrive without warning and will not stop, that goes to a clinician now rather than to a lesson, because this course does not do that work and will not attempt it. The same applies if you are not eating or sleeping, if you cannot keep yourself safe, or if you are drinking or using something to get through the day. This course is written for adults. A bereaved child needs different help, from someone who works with children.

Lesson 5 of 6

Sudden, unexplained, or unseen

Not all losses sit the same weight, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

A death with no warning gives you no time to arrange yourself around it, so the first months carry a shock that a long illness does not. A death far away, where you could not travel, leaves you without the thing that funerals are for. A missing body, a burial you were not at, a janazah watched on a phone. People carry those differently and they say so quietly, if at all.

If the death was violent, or sudden in that way, or by suicide, or you saw it happen, that belongs with a clinician and not with a course. That is in the note at the top of this course and it is repeated here on purpose.