Loss comes along. First it breaks your heart, then it stays.
How do you live with loss without losing yourself?
Called “heart-lifting” and “transformational” by readers, this field guide helps you 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 strategies, 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 sensory rituals and self-supporting practices to turn her two-year struggle with unrelenting sorrow after the death of her mother into a life of deeper meaning and joy. She also explores the realities of anticipatory grief as she helps her husband navigate advanced heart failure in the midst of a pandemic.
Loss rewrote your world—now you have to learn to live inside the story it left behind.
Kimberley offers the missing “how-to” instructions for integrating loss into a new season of life. You’ll find a fresh perspective that:
- Provides tools for working through the kaleidoscope of thoughts, emotions, and physical impacts that together form your experience of grief.
- Shows you ways to keep your loved one with you as a nurturing presence as you learn to live forward, peacefully and without regret.
- Explores grieving mindfully by leaning into the ordinary moments of your day and the natural world to unlock a deeper sense of aliveness.
- Unlocks the mind-opening reality that joy isn’t a destination after grief—joy is a path through grief and back into a life of well-being.
- Pushes back on societal biases that value some losses as more grief-worthy than others—no matter who you’ve lost, even a beloved animal, the grief is real.
Why trust this guide?
Author Kimberley Pittman-Schulz’s life has been shaped by loss—first losing two sisters in a house fire as a toddler, and later, the profoundly life-shifting death of her mother. Along the way she spent 25+ years guiding families through end-of-life and legacy planning.
Today she mentors and coaches people in the U.S. and abroad in reimagining life in the midst of loss and lingering trauma.
She writes with a poet’s sensibility and the empathetic wisdom of someone who’s walked this road—and helped others do the same.
Grieving Us is an upbeat field guide for living your one-and-only, heart-broken-and-still-beautiful life — if you’re ready to begin again, this is where you start.
Kimberley is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker on death & loss and changing the world, or some corner of it, through philanthropy. During 25+ years as a charitable and end-of-life planning advisor, Kimberley's worked with incredibly diverse people looking for meaning after the loss of a spouse, partner, child, sibling, parent, grandparent, or beloved animal to illness, accident, suicide, or traumatic death. Her dance with loss began as a toddler, surviving a house fire that took her two sisters, followed by a series of deaths that inevitably come with living on the planet awhile. A lover of all things wild or winged, she brings empathy and optimism to her relationships, work, and writing. She lives with her husband and two cats along Northern California's redwood coast, where she can be found hiking, sea kayaking, and trying to live mindfully and with joy every day. Her website is: PoetOwl.com.
