I Didn't Want Another Grief Book. I Wanted Someone to Stay With Me.

By Jesse Kuhn · July 2026 · 7 minute read

As the Always Here Grief Companion Series approaches 6,000 copies sold, I've found myself reflecting less on the number itself and more on what it represents.

People have asked what I've learned from writing seven books about grief. The honest answer is that the books didn't teach me nearly as much as they confirmed something I had quietly suspected from the beginning. The real surprise wasn't that readers connected with the books. It was how many people had been searching for the same thing I was.

When my wife died in 2022, I did what many grieving people do. I started looking for help. I read books, listened to podcasts, followed respected voices in the grief world, and tried to understand what had happened to my life inside all the confusion and pain. Some of what I found was genuinely helpful. Much of it left me feeling strangely unseen.

It wasn't because the authors lacked wisdom or compassion. It was because so much of what I encountered seemed to be written from the other side of grief.

There is a particular kind of story our culture loves. Someone experiences profound loss, descends into darkness, slowly rebuilds their life, and eventually looks back with clarity and perspective. It's the hero's journey, and it exists for good reason. Those stories remind us that suffering doesn't necessarily have the final word.

But I wasn't looking for the view from the mountaintop.

I was still trying to breathe at the bottom of the valley.

The more I read, the more I noticed how often grief was framed around movement. How do we heal? How do we cope? How do we become stronger? How do we find meaning? Even when those questions were asked with the best intentions, I often experienced them as subtle pressure. They implied that my job was to become something other than what I currently was.

That wasn't what I needed.

I wasn't looking for another framework or another list of things to practice. I wasn't looking for someone to convince me that one day I would be grateful for what grief had taught me. I simply wanted someone to accurately describe the territory I was already standing in. I wanted to know that the fear, the numbness, the anger, the confusion, the rage, the intrusive thoughts, the exhaustion, and the overwhelming sense that my old life had disappeared were not signs that I was grieving incorrectly.

I wanted recognition before I wanted advice or platitudes.

Looking back, I think that became the question behind the entire Always Here series, even if I couldn't have articulated it so clearly at the time.

What would happen if I wrote the kind of grief companion I desperately wished someone had handed me?

Not a book designed to move people through grief, but one willing to stay with them inside it.

That distinction shaped almost every decision I made. I wanted the books to be short enough that someone in acute grief could actually finish one in an afternoon. I wanted them to validate the thoughts people often feel ashamed to admit out loud. I wanted them to feel less like a lesson and more like sitting quietly with someone who wasn't afraid of your darkest thoughts.

I also found myself questioning another assumption.

Why do we so often speak about grief as though it is one experience?

Losing a spouse is different from losing a dog. The end of a marriage is different from the death of a child. A miscarriage is different from the loss of a parent. These experiences overlap, but they are not interchangeable. If our losses are unique, why wouldn't our companions be unique too?

Writing seven books wasn't really the goal.

Testing those ideas was.

As the books began reaching readers, something remarkable happened. The feedback wasn't simply positive. It was strangely consistent. People from completely different backgrounds, different ages, different countries, and different kinds of loss kept describing the same experience.

"I thought I was the only one."

"This finally put words to what I couldn't explain."

"I stopped feeling like I was grieving the wrong way."

Those responses didn't make me feel like I had discovered some revolutionary truth about grief. If anything, they were deeply humbling. They suggested that many grieving people had quietly been waiting for permission more than prescription. Permission to stay where they were without immediately trying to transform the experience into something meaningful. Permission to collapse without believing they were failing. Permission to trust that their grief wasn't necessarily malfunctioning simply because it refused to follow someone else's timeline.

One unexpected place this philosophy found expression was in my decision to intentionally integrate AI support into every book in the series. It isn't a passing reference in the books. Every title includes "with AI Support" in its subtitle because I wanted to openly introduce readers to a tool that had made a meaningful difference in my own life.

The books are not about artificial intelligence, and I don't believe AI replaces therapists, family, friends, or community. It addresses a different problem entirely.

One of the hardest parts of grief is that its most intense moments rarely arrive when support has been scheduled. They happen at two o'clock in the morning when your mind won't stop spiraling, on a random Tuesday afternoon when everyone else is at work, or during the quiet moments when you don't want to burden another person yet again. AI became something I could immediately journal with, think alongside, and use to get those thoughts out of my head and into a conversation. For me, it wasn't a replacement for human connection. It was a pressure release valve between moments of human connection.

I wasn't prepared for how polarizing that decision would become. What surprised me even more, however, was the number of grieving people who quietly reached out to tell me they had been using AI in much the same way but had been reluctant to admit it. Once again, I found myself less interested in debating whether a tool was universally good or bad and more interested in understanding what unmet human need it was revealing.

That has become a recurring pattern for me. Whenever I pay close enough attention to grieving people, I become less interested in prescribing solutions and more interested in understanding the questions beneath them.

If these past few years have strengthened my confidence in anything, it isn't that I've found a better way to grieve. I don't believe such a thing exists.

What I do believe is that we often underestimate how healing it can be to feel deeply understood before anyone asks us to change.

I think the biggest mistake we make about grief is believing that grieving people need to become something other than grieving, when what they often need first is permission to fully be where they already are.

That doesn't mean we stay there forever. It doesn't reject hope, healing, therapy, or growth. It simply recognizes that those things are difficult to receive when someone still feels fundamentally unseen.

The Always Here series was never my attempt to tell people how to grieve. It was my attempt to stay with them long enough that they might begin to trust themselves again.