Write What You Can

A grief journal that meets you where today is, for any adult who has lost someone they love.

A partner, a parent, a child, a brother or sister, a grandparent, a friend. Expected or sudden, last week or years ago. This book has no order and no stages. It opens at whatever today is like, asks for as little as one line, and never tells you how you should feel.

How it works

• Find your page. An index of situations, not chapters: you can't stop replaying the end, it's all "if only", you're angry, you want to talk to them, you can't sleep, someone said the wrong thing, a hard date is coming, you have to sort their things, you had a good day and feel guilty, everyone thinks you're fine now, it's complicated, you're afraid of forgetting them, faith helps, or it's shaken, you feel nothing at all. Each has a short page on what's going on and what tends to help, then prompts, then a page to write on or a tool to use.
• Every prompt comes in three sizes. One line, a few lines, or a page or more. You pick the size that fits today. A line is not a lesser answer.
• Six people's blue handwriting. Ruth, Marcus, Priya, Ellie, Dan and Grace are made up, but their journal pages run through the book to show what an answer can look like: a husband after 48 years, a mother with no warning, a best friend, a grandmother with dementia, a brother after addiction, a son at 19.
• The facts of grief, plainly and with sources. Why there are no stages to pass (and where the five stages really came from); back and forth between grieving and living, and why time off from grief is coping, not failure; the jar that life grows around; keeping a bond with the person instead of "letting go"; a tick-list of what grief does to a body and a mind; and an honest page on when to get more help, including what prolonged grief is and what the research actually says about whether writing helps.

What's inside (114 pages, US Letter)

• Start here: a page for the first days (which says you don't need this book yet), what the book is and isn't, how it works, one question answered three ways, the six people, Find your page, and a page for their name and a photograph.
• What grief is really like: six short pages, each with a source.
• About them: eleven pages for a portrait of the person while the details are sharp: their life in dates, their voice, the small things, their recipe the way they made it, the stories, what they gave you, their year, three photographs, and a page for collecting the memories other people hold.
• Open this when...: the fourteen situations, with tools: the story of the day they died, a then-and-now table for pulling hindsight apart, the unsendable letter, a letter and their reply, the 3am page, a card to hand to the people around you (tick what helps, tick what doesn't), a hard date planned with a Plan B and a way out, sorting a drawer into three piles, good moments to collect, two true things, an ordinary day with them, words that hold you, and today plainly.
• Day pages: fourteen undated pages for the date, a number for how heavy the day was, one line, and one small question that changes each time.
• Your waves: a page for each of the first twelve months with a strip for the month's numbers, and a year chart you fill in, so you can see your own waves rather than guess at them.
• Your people: who to call for what, the dates ahead in one place, and support numbers for the United States and the United Kingdom, each checked on the organisation's own website in October 2026.
• Four breathers: pages with nothing to do with grief at all.
• Looking back: for a year on, or whenever, or never.

What you download

• Write What You Can (114 pages, PDF, US Letter): the whole book, with a contents page, bookmarks and tappable page numbers.
• Refill Pages (33 pages, PDF, in US Letter and in A4): spare day pages, month pages, letter pages, the 3am page, the hard-date plan, the sorting page, good moments, the card for other people, and plain writing pages, to print as often as you need.

Good to know

• Works on paper (print the whole book or single pages) and on a tablet in any app that lets you write on a PDF.
• No religion built in, and room left for yours.
• It isn't a treatment or medical advice. It keeps you company, and it says plainly, with the numbers to call, when something needs more than a notebook.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.