Courses › Carrying a loss
Grief and loss
Carrying a loss
Grief comes in waves and not in stages, and the tradition already gave you more room for it than you have been allowed.
Read this first. Some losses need a person and not a course. If you are thinking about ending your life, or about joining the person who died, tell somebody today and treat it as urgent. If the death was violent, sudden, by your own witnessing, or by suicide, or if images of it arrive without warning and will not stop, that goes to a clinician now rather than to a lesson, because this course does not do that work and will not attempt it. The same applies if you are not eating or sleeping, if you cannot keep yourself safe, or if you are drinking or using something to get through the day. This course is written for adults. A bereaved child needs different help, from someone who works with children.
What this course teaches
Continuing bonds and the dual process model
There are no stages and you are not behind. Grieving is described as moving back and forth between facing the loss and dealing with everything the loss changed, and the days you cannot face it are part of that movement rather than avoidance. The bond continues; it changes shape.
Why this one
The oscillation model is the mainstream account and it fits what bereaved people actually report better than stages ever did. General bereavement support produces very small and fading benefits, while treatment aimed at people who are genuinely stuck works, which is why this course offers a threshold rather than a service.
What this course will not do
Care for prolonged grief disorder. If it has been long and the yearning is still constant and your life has stopped, that is a recognised condition with a treatment, and this course points you to it.
Six short lessons for someone carrying a death. It describes what grief actually does, sets aside the five stages, and explains why a person can be steady on Tuesday and flattened on Wednesday without anything having gone wrong. It takes apart the idea that patience means dry eyes, using the Prophet's own tears, and gives back the words and the practices the tradition already provides. The last two lessons cover what makes grief harder and the smaller group for whom this has become something a course cannot hold.
Who this is for
Anyone who has lost someone and is being measured, by themselves or by other people, against a schedule that does not exist. Anyone who has been told that crying is a complaint against the decree. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This is not grief therapy and it does not try to be. It will never ask you to tell the story of the death, to write it out, to go back over the worst part, or to speak to the person who died as an exercise. Those are clinical techniques, some of them are part of a real treatment, and none of them belongs in a self guided course. It gives no timetable for clearing a room or visiting a grave. It gives no fatwa on mourning, burial or inheritance. It does not diagnose anything and it produces no score.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. What grief actually doesWhat it does to a body and a day, and the schedule you have been measuring yourself against that was never real.7 min
- Why it comes back in wavesFine on Tuesday, flattened on Wednesday. Here is the shape underneath that.7 min
- What sabr is, and what it is notThe Prophet wept at his son's death. That settles more than most of what you have been told.6 min
- Living alongside itThe other half of grieving, which nobody gives you permission for, and the words the tradition already gave you.6 min
- What makes it harderSudden loss, a difficult relationship, no funeral, and the things people say to you.6 min
- When grief has become something elsePlain markers, what the treatment actually is, and why it is not in this course.6 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:155 to 157, 2:234, 2:286, 3:185, 12:84, 12:86, 21:35, 93:1 to 8, 94:5 to 6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 3:185 and 21:35 are used sparingly and named as the verses most often used to close a grieving person down. 39:53 is not used, because it addresses despair of mercy rather than sorrow and it is commonly misapplied to the bereaved. 2:286 is presented as a statement about what a person carries and not as an instruction to cope.
- Bonanno GA (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20 to 28. Published with the author's own stated limitations on the same screen. The reanalysis figure sometimes quoted from this paper, that a share of people receiving grief treatment did worse than controls, is not printed here. It originates in a separate reanalysis, it has been contested since, and it is not a settled number.
- Stroebe M, Schut H (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197 to 224. Used as a description of how bereaved people cope. It is not delivered as a treatment protocol and no task schedule is derived from it. The Kubler-Ross stage model is named in lesson 1 and set aside; it was drawn from work with dying patients rather than bereaved people.
- Currier JM, Neimeyer RA, Berman JS (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons: a comprehensive quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 134(5), 648 to 661. Cited for the direction of its finding only. The full text was not read, so no effect size from it is published.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1248, 1283, 1294, 1303, 5334, 5641, 6424; Sahih Muslim 918, 2632. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each carries its grading and grader on its own entry. Bukhari 1303 and Bukhari 1294 are never presented apart, because 1294 read alone is used to prohibit ordinary tears. The widely circulated report about a miscarried child pleading for its parents is graded weak and is named as such rather than quoted. A second report on the same subject is graded differently by different graders and is held back pending a scholarly decision. The narration about the dead being punished by the weeping of the living is not cited, because no reference and grading were confirmed and its interpretation has been contested since the time of the Companions.
- Johannsen M, Damholdt MF, Zachariae R, Lundorff M, and others (2019). Psychological interventions for grief in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Affective Disorders, 253, 69 to 86. Identifier unverified, so none is published. Effect sizes are published with the authors' own stated weaknesses on the same screen.
- Al-Nawawi, Kitab al-Adhkar, chapters on the supplications at a death, a burial and a condolence. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Zad al-Ma'ad, sections on the Prophet's guidance regarding funerals and condolence. Outline of the fiqh of mourning as summarised by mathabah.org, fetched 4 September 2026. Named by work and chapter only. Edition, volume and page unverified, so none is published. The framing that the three day limit governs the formal state of mourning rather than the duration of sorrow is stated in the course as needing a scholar's confirmation and is not asserted as a ruling.
- Lundorff M, Holmgren H, Zachariae R, Farver-Vestergaard I, O'Connor M (2017). Prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in adult bereavement: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 212, 138 to 149. Cited as the standard prevalence source. The pooled percentage commonly quoted from it is not printed, because the citation was verified and the figure was not.
- Shear MK, Reynolds CF, Simon NM, and others (2016). Optimizing treatment of complicated grief: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(7), 685 to 694. Named in lesson 6 as the treatment that works for this group and as the reason none of it is delivered here. It is clinician led, protocol driven, and contains exposure based components.
- Prolonged grief disorder as classified in ICD-11 and in DSM-5-TR. No criteria and no duration thresholds are printed, because neither wording was verified against the printed source. The course states that the condition exists, that the two systems differ, and that a clinician applies it. Prigerson et al. 2009, the psychometric validation paper, is not cited, because its identifier was not confirmed.