The purpose of this place is to share a bit if context that might be useful to you as you dive into understanding, trusting and using this guide.
When I started the resource guide, the summer of 2024 was sweltering and void, my mum had been dead for 1.5 years, grief was omnipresent; I was looking at my experience through the magnifying glass — fed by great books along the way —, founded the Young Grief and Life Hangout in Vienna, and felt excited to share a bit of my mental grief map with the people around me. And so I kept adding to “Grief Resources for Fellow Grievers”: a word, an image, an understanding as it can only mature with depth or time. I did so as a griever who was caught up in all the pieces of the present moment when a future didn’t yet exist; and also as a curious learner, a passionate communicator, a trained coach. These days, my focus is elsewhere.
However, I’ll keep growing the guide, here and there, in a labor of love and an echo of my continued journey of grief nestled into the atrocity and beauty of this world. The truth is, I need this place myself and there’s a lot to be found in here.
Adriana x
Stay curious AND critical. | Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash
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DISCLAIMER
This resource guide is independent from any institution, social group or model. It will mostly appeal to those approaching grief with emotional presence, conceptual understanding and attention to language; no belief systems are being examined in it. While being non-religious, science-based, and committed to accuracy it is also true that it’s written by a white, female-bodied human born in 1997 in Europe and thus may be a particularly good fit for a similar target group. The guide has no intention of covering all griefs or speaking to everyone’s experience; it remains a product of personal exploration.
For transparency, key bodies of work and overarching perspectives that have influenced this guide include the following: the coaching mindset (more about coaching here, with a focus on trauma-informed life coaching) incl. a few coaching questions woven into these pages; best-practices in therapy, coaching and counseling — based on research, coaching expertise and experiences on the receiving end; the role and necessity of literary art or the art of finding accurate, universal words for deep human experiences; love for the visual arts; always: empathy and common sense ;)
Thus, the guide draws on expertise of human service practitioners — along with grievers, writers, artists etc. Here neuroscience coexists along with memoir-writing, and no discipline is any more crucial to understanding grief than the other. On a topic so existential and universal to the human condition, lived experience remains my most treasured source of insight, expression and fuel for societal change — featuring key messages from stories of surviving and integrating grief, with its social and psychological and practical aspects.
All original texts are written by the author (Adriana Bascone, 2024-2026). All content included from other sources is dutifully quoted either with quotation marks and a link in case of online-resources, or with a book title and author’s name for books. I don’t own the rights to any of the sources in here, and only brief excerpts are stated. See more under the previous question on the topic of sharing this resource.
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