Grieving Us

A Field Guide for Living with Loss Without Losing Yourself

By: Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

Narrated by: Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

What happens to you when someone you love dies? Who was that person or animal companion in your life?

Loss comes along. First it breaks your heart, then it stays.

How do you live with loss without losing yourself?

While loss comes along with you for life, grief doesn’t have to be forever. This book is about learning to live with loss and with joy every day.

Through storytelling and simple practices, 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 offers a fresh perspective that:

• explores grieving mindfully, including concepts based on experience & science,
• pushes back on societal biases that value some losses as more grief-worthy than others,
• encourages curiosity and reconnecting to what she calls “your animal body” to cultivate well-being,
• offers the missing “how-to” instructions for navigating a new world in which you get to go on living but have to do it without the person or animal companion that you love.

Her life shaped by loss, beginning with the death of her two sisters in a house fire as a toddler, Kimberley went on to spend 25+ years as a philanthropic and end-of-life planning advisor. She’s worked with incredibly diverse people seeking meaning after the loss of a spouse, partner, child, parent, sibling, or beloved animal to illness, accident, suicide, or traumatic death.

Written during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic while helping her husband live with advanced heart failure, this book feels more like a conversation.

Grieving Us is an upbeat field guide for living your one-and-only, heart-broken-and-still-beautiful life.

©2021 Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (P)2021 Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

I got triggered - be warned before reading this!!!

I was hoping this book would help me with my ever evolving grief. I am 15 years into my grief journey and have been working with a therapist. I lost my mother at a young age. My mother’s two sisters both fell ill this year with similar diagnoses to my mother so I was starting to feel heavy grief again. I turned to this book that was recommended to me. The author’s personal story in the beginning had me so triggered I still cannot look at this book without the overwhelming feeling of sadness that the story brought on. There was a mild warning from the author but I do not feel this story was needed nor warranted in a book about grief. It’s been a few months since this happened and I just came across the book in my audible account. I’m finally able to write this review and delete the book from my library. Just be very careful if you are grieving a loss and read this book.

A great book, worth listening.

I have just lost my younger brother and was looking for an audiobook that would bring me some peace. This book was definitively very helpful as the author displays a solid understanding of grief and loss and offers feasible ways of dealing with the pain of loss. She keeps the listener engaged through her very interesting view of the world around her as well as the metaphors she uses to explain her point of view. It seems like she has a thing for birds and science which makes the reading even more interesting; I definitively learned new things. This book is worth listening.