No one hands you a manual when grief arrives. But this one comes close. When Kirsten C. Lee was widowed at 35, she was left with three sons ages 2, 3, and 5 after her husband, Dr. Rudell Lee III, lost a sudden battle with liver disease. What followed were seven years of grief - raw anger, deep depression, paralyzing fear, and suicidal thoughts she kept largely to herself. She did not simply pass through widowhood. She lived every stage of it.

Now a Licensed Professional Counselor and Certified Grief Professional, Kirsten brings clinical knowledge together with her own unflinching testimony in The Widow's Guide But Not For Widows Only - chapter by honest chapter - so that you don't have to navigate your grief alone. Organized around the full arc of loss, each chapter names exactly what you are experiencing and then offers something to hold on to: a clinical framework, a biblical story, a reflection from someone who has been exactly where you are. Topics include the five stages of grief, anger and bitterness, clinical depression during bereavement, complicated grief or Prolonged Grief Disorder, insomnia and fear, contentment as a practice, and how to find purpose in a life you didn't choose. This is not a book about getting over grief. It is a book about getting through it - honestly, faithfully, and with your sanity intact. The Widow's Guide is for widows and widowers, bereaved parents, grieving siblings and children, therapists, counselors, chaplains, pastors, and anyone who has loved deeply and lost. It is equally a resource for the people around the bereaved - the friends who don't know what to say, the congregations who want to do more, the families watching someone they love disappear into grief. Grief does not ask permission.

But it can be survived. It can even, eventually, be redeemed.