Grief Toolkit

What this is

About the workbook

Written for people whose grief has not arrived the way they were told it would. It was put together for three situations and the ways they tangle together: grief that keeps coming out as anger, grief held at arm's length because letting it in feels as though it would take the mourner under, and mourning rules — from family, faith, community, or the country a person now lives in — that do not fit the shape of what is being carried.

It works from waves rather than stages, and it is built around grieving in doses: a grief window opened and closed on purpose, a short drill for the waves that arrive without warning, pages for the anger and the if-onlys, and pages for mourning someone far from the place and the people the rituals were meant to need. Its own words are that it will never put a mourner on a schedule.

What is inside the pack

The pack runs to twenty-two pages. After the cover and a page called How to Use This Toolkit, four education pages come as a block: What Grief Actually Is, When Grief Comes Out as Anger, The Fear of Drowning, and Grief and Culture. The pack asks about fifteen minutes for the four of them and says the worksheets make more sense afterwards.

The written work follows in this order: Naming What Was Lost, The Anger Map, Letting Anger Move, The Unsent Letter, Grief in Doses: The Grief Window, Riding the Wave, Your Culture's Mourning Rules, Rituals Within Reach, Grieving Around Other People, The If-Onlys, Staying Connected, and When Grief Needs Company. The last stretch is a 14-Day Gentle Tracker, a Weekly Reflection page, and a sheet of six cut-out Pocket Grief Cards. Page twenty-two carries important information and crisis numbers.

The order it suggests

The How to Use page offers a path across four weeks, then says skipping around is also fine because this is a toolkit and not a curriculum. Week one is the four education pages and then Naming What Was Lost. Week two is The Anger Map and Letting Anger Move. Week three is Grief in Doses and Riding the Wave. Week four is the culture pages and Rituals Within Reach. The tracker and the Weekly Reflection run alongside from whenever they are started.

Of its five getting-started steps, the third is about how to stop. It gives the instruction in full — eyes open, both feet on the floor, name five things you can see, and put the page down — and adds that stopping is not failing, because the page will keep. The fourth is about pace: to go in doses, with nothing in the pack asking for everything to be opened at once. The fifth is to keep Riding the Wave within reach, that being the page built for the moments that arrive without warning. Every page is written to stand alone, so the whole pack or a single sheet can be printed.

Pages meant to be reprinted, and pages meant to be carried

Two pages carry a reprint instruction on their own face. The 14-Day Gentle Tracker takes one honest line a day across fourteen numbered rows, with columns for the biggest wave that day on a one-to-ten scale or none, where the anger pointed if it came, one kind thing done for oneself, and one contact — a person, a ritual, or a memory — and it says to print a fresh copy whenever the fourteen days run out. The Weekly Reflection asks for ten minutes once a week across six prompts, and says to print a fresh copy each week and date the corner.

Riding the Wave carries an evidence log with a row per wave: date, what set it off, size from one to ten, how long it really lasted, and what helped. The Unsent Letter is written to be continued on any paper and across many sittings, with a note that the page is just the door and another letter can be written next month. The six Pocket Grief Cards on page twenty-one are cut along dashed lines and kept somewhere within reach of the moments the larger pages are not — a wallet, a phone case, a car visor, a desk drawer, a coat pocket.

What it is built on

The final page describes the toolkit as drawing on widely used grief-support ideas and practices — wave and dose-based approaches to mourning, expressive writing, and ritual- and values-based ways of staying connected to the person who died. The organising idea is set out on page three under the heading Waves, not stages. A second subheading on the same page, The stages myth, states that the five stages began as observations of people facing their own dying and were later stretched into a schedule for the bereaved, and the pack declines to hand out a timeline of its own in their place.

The If-Onlys page works on guilt and hindsight. It does not adjudicate the facts of any particular death; it sets the question as one of hindsight — what was known then against what is known now. What it asks for is the loudest if-only written out in full, what was actually known at the time as distinct from what is known now, what the writer would say to a closest friend carrying that exact sentence about their person, and a truer sentence to carry instead. Where guilt holds something real, the page says the aim is proportion, honest repair where repair exists, and company, rather than a life sentence. Staying Connected takes the same line on letting go: it puts the work as carrying the person differently rather than detaching.

What the pack says about itself

The final page states that the toolkit is an educational self-help resource, that it is not psychotherapy, counselling, medical care, or mental health treatment, that it cannot diagnose or treat any condition, and that using it does not create a therapist-client or any other professional relationship with its creator. It adds a note on pace and safety, saying plainly that grief is heavy material and that several pages go near its deepest parts — anger, guilt, and the moments around the death itself.

The safety architecture repeats rather than sitting in one place at the back. The deeper pages — The Anger Map, The Unsent Letter, The If-Onlys — each open with a ground rule and the same stopping instruction, and The Unsent Letter adds that it should be picked up with some quiet on the far side of it rather than in the ten minutes before work. Crisis numbers appear on the pages themselves, not only on the last one: call or text 988, free and confidential, twenty-four hours a day, in Canada and the United States. Page twenty-two adds 911 or the nearest emergency department in immediate danger, Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741 in the United States, and, for young people in Canada, Kids Help Phone on 1-800-668-6868 or by texting CONNECT to 686868. A full page, When Grief Needs Company, sets out the other kinds of help — a grief group, grief-specific therapy, one's own people given jobs, and a doctor — alongside a list of signs that point toward professional support.

This workbook is educational. It is not therapy, not an assessment, and nothing in it is a diagnosis. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. In Canada, the Suicide Crisis Helpline can be reached by calling or texting 988, at any hour.

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If you want to go further

Working on this with someone

A workbook can take you a surprising distance on its own. If you would rather not do it alone, TEO offers virtual therapy in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador — evenings and weekends, with a free 15–20 minute consultation first and no obligation afterward.

Related: Grief counselling.

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