Grief deserves dignity. Etiquette is how we protect it.

We are taught manners for weddings, for business, for the dinner table. We are taught almost nothing about how to treat a person in the worst week of their life.

The result is familiar to anyone who has grieved: the well-meaning phrase that lands like a slap, the friend who disappears, the crowd at the funeral and the silence three weeks later.

Grief Etiquette turns to the social world that surrounds a loss. What to say. What to stop saying. How to make room for a pain that is not your own, and how to make room for your own.

Across twenty chapters, Tyra K. Little maps the many faces of grief. The grief that begins before the death. The grief no one will acknowledge. The grief we perform, the grief we police, and the grief we put on display. Grief does not begin and end with death. It comes from divorce, diagnosis, estrangement, lost jobs, lost health, and lost futures. It comes from the other side of a tragedy too, where the family of the person who caused the harm is grieving and almost no one serves them.

Little writes with hard-earned authority. She has outlived two of her three sons, both murdered, eleven years apart. She is a United States military veteran with nearly 21 years of combined Navy and Air Force service, a Certified Trauma-Informed Practitioner, an Everytown Survivor Fellow, and the founder of Both Sides of the Coin Initiative. She serves as a Richland County Councilwoman and writes from Columbia, South Carolina.

For the grieving, for the people who love them, and for the professionals who meet loss for a living: chaplains, funeral directors, first responders, clergy, counselors, and human resources.

Grief Etiquette: A Practical Guide for the Grieving, Their Supporters, and Professionals

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