The LCBO is one of Canada's largest retailers and wholesalers, with more than 8,000 employees working at their retail stores, distribution centres, and offices across Ontario. Given that over a third of working-age adults are grieving a recent loss at any given time, the LCBO’s leadership team recognized that they had thousands of grieving employees, who were all at increased risk for anxiety, depression, illness, substance use, workplace accidents, and lost work.

While bereavement leave may end after a few days or weeks, LCBO’s team knew that grief can last a long time. They also knew that many of their grieving employees weren't receiving support outside of work due to barriers like cost, language, stigma, and availability.

For Lilian Riad-Allen, the LCBO's Senior Director for Workplace Health, Safety & Wellness, the problem was personal. When her mom died in 2021, she knew she needed help but quickly discovered that grief support is hard to find. Luckily she discovered and signed up for grief support from Help Texts, a company offering tailored, gentle bereavement care via text. Lilian found the personalized messages genuinely helpful.

Help Texts gave me practical ways to ground back into myself and process my loss in a supportive and loving way.

— Lilian Riad-Allen, Senior Director, Workplace Health, Safety & Wellness

When Lilian started sharing her experience with grief openly at work, colleagues started sharing too, and she realized how many people around her were quietly managing loss. She began advocating for grief support for every LCBO employee.

The solution

In 2023, the LCBO started working with Help Texts to offer a full year of personalized grief support to all 8,000 of their employees. Messages are expert-written and tailored to each person's loss, including their relationship, cause of death, age, and time since loss, and support is available in English, French, and dozens of other languages.

Better yet, when grieving employees sign up for text support, they can also invite their colleagues, friends, and family members to receive tips and date reminders to help them know what to say and how to help. Kayla Smith, who worked alongside Lilian to launch the program, had used the supporter texts herself:

It can be difficult knowing what the 'right' thing is to say or how to show up. To say that I learned a lot from Help Texts would be an understatement. I was given so many new tools and new language to help me be there for my friend.

— Kayla Smith, Senior Manager, Health, Safety & Wellness Programs

The results

Three years of steady enrollment, with no signs of slowing.

Since launching in 2023, employee enrollment has grown consistently every year. Enrollment climbs steadily as new losses happen and awareness of the benefit spreads across the organization.

On average employees stay subscribed for more than 6 months.

Enrolled employees receive support for more than 6 months, a sign that the messages keep earning their place on people’s phones long after the first weeks of loss.

Here's what one LCBO employee said about receiving text support

When my father passed unexpectedly it was the hardest experience I had ever encountered. I personally didn't feel grief counseling or therapy was helpful to me, but when I was made aware of Help Texts I said yes to signing up and have been finding it very helpful. Twice a week I get messages that resonate with how I feel with losing someone so close to me and I look forward to each new message. Help Texts is a tool I highly recommend for anyone who has lost someone close to them.

— Thomas Georgakopoulos, Director of Retail Strategy and Analytics

Why it works

The science behind text-based grief support

Help Texts is built on a simple insight: grief support works best when it's easy to receive. For employees already managing the weight of loss alongside shifts, deadlines, and daily life, low friction is everything.

Our published research shows a 95% satisfaction rate, with even higher ratings among men and people over 65, two populations historically less likely to seek out traditional grief support.

For the LCBO, Help Texts delivers consistent, personalized support to grieving employees wherever they work, without adding administrative load for the wellness team. It's a model other Canadian employers are starting to notice.

Empathia, Inc. has partnered with Help Texts to further expand the support options available to its members. Help Texts is a secure, private, and easy way to get meaningful grief support when dealing with a loss.

In this interview with Sohil Parekh, Help Texts' CEO Emma Payne says that bereavement is a public health experience - something that affects us all. Bereavement care should be a public health intervention. What if Medicare or Medicaid were to fund bereavement care for ALL hospice families? Everyone would get the required 13 months of grief support in a MUCH more efficient way. We’ve already done this in the UK, where we are actually being made available free of charge to every UK citizen. I’m excited about the much bigger public health type models that we can get going in the US as well.

Losing a loved one to suicide is a heart-wrenching experience. It can also be confusing, and it usually comes with a lot of mixed-up feelings, including anger and guilt. What are some things that family members would like other people to know about losing a loved one to suicide?

Grief Coach founder & CEO, Emma Payne, chats with host Melissa Pierce in this 40-minute podcast about grief, widowhood, and what can help.

Professional and community support during bereavement is in short supply and can be difficult to access. Only a minority of grievers are extremely satisfied with the support they receive. Researchers and bereavement professionals are seeking innovative low-cost, high-reach forms of support to meet grievers’ needs. This presentation will report on the acceptability and helpfulness of Grief Coach, an ongoing, expert, text-based grief support service, among bereaved family members who accessed the service as a hospice benefit. The findings, based on survey data, inbound texts, and one-on-one interviews, suggest that hospice-bereaved family members appreciate the service and find it helpful.

Hospices are facing significant staff shortages and worker fatigue, both of which may impact quality of care. Staff shortages are especially problematic in the delivery of bereavement support. Hospice providers have been calling for innovative approaches to meet the demands for bereavement services. This session will describe a text-based program for delivering ongoing expert bereavement support that can minimize staff burden and transform care. We will provide an overview of the program, data on program helpfulness and retention, and implementation strategies.

A confluence of mental health and grief expert contributors, including therapists, nurses, doctors, authors, researchers and end-of-life professionals, have launched a text-based tool that they say can help address clinician burnout and fatigue.

Grief Coach founder, Emma Payne, contributed to this New York Times article about grandparents & grief. The writer says "grief isn’t too strong a word for those grandparents who have yearned all year for a small hand in theirs, for a hug without fear."

That said, losing a mom comes with some extra layers worth acknowledging.

What makes losing a mom different

When your mom dies, you lose more than her. You may lose:

• A link to your past — the person who remembers the stories, the recipes, the traditions, the family wisdom
• Your nurturer, your best friend, your confidante, your mentor
• A piece of your identity — you are now someone without a mom, which is a real shift, even in adulthood
• Your role in the family — when a parent dies, family dynamics often change, and so does where you fit in them

You may feel aimless. You may feel orphaned. That word can feel strange to use as a grown adult, but it is a word a lot of people reach for after a parent dies.

Even though grieving a mom can feel really lonely, it's important to know that you are not alone in this. If you are a daughter who has lost her mom, there is a community of women going through it too — Motherless Daughters has chapters and groups across the country. If you are a son who has lost your mom, there are groups for you as well. If you want something more private to start, Healing the Adult Child's Grieving Heart by Alan Wolfelt is a short, practical read. You can always text us asking for more resources too! We are here to help.

Ways to stay connected to your mom

Here are some intentional ways to keep your connection present with your mom:

• Meditation
• Talking to her, in your head or out loud
• Writing to her
• Singing her favorite songs
• Making her favorite recipes
• Keeping her traditions, or starting new ones in her honor
• Doing something in her name
• Looking at photos, listening to voicemails, watching videos, rereading texts
• Naming people, places, or things after her
• Planting a garden, flowers, or a tree
• Learning more about her childhood and young adult life
• Carrying a life lesson she taught you with you each day
• Volunteering or activism in her memory

These are all options that can help you feel connected to your mom. You might even have some of your own special ways to stay bonded that aren't on this list. There is no right or wrong way to keep her memory alive.

The hard dates

There are some days you can count on being hard. Mother's Day. Her birthday. Your birthday. The anniversary of her death. The big family holidays.

One these days, it can help to have a plan for them rather than trying to power through the day. You have permission to skip these days if you need to. You have permission to mark them however you want. Some people find rituals that help. Things like wearing her favorite color, eating her favorite treat, toasting to her, doing a random act of kindness in her name. The rituals you can create and take part of are endless and they only need to feel meaningful to you.

Losing a mom at any age is hard. The way you miss her, honor her, and build rituals that include her is how she gets to stay present with you.

If you know someone who’s grieving, consider inviting them to learn more about Help Texts’ Grief Support or share this article with them.

Grief is hard. 💔 We can help. 🩵

Sources

1. Kim, K., Stokes, J. E., Zarit, S. H., & Fingerman, K. L. (2019). Middle-aged adults' bereavement response to parent death: The role of pre-loss relationship quality — Oxford Academic / Innovation in Aging

2. Chan, W. C. H. et al. (2025). Grieving the loss of parents: A qualitative study of bereaved adult children who received professional support — Death Studies, Taylor & Francis

3. Systematic review: Informal social support and psychological wellbeing in people bereaved by sudden or violent causes of death — PMC / National Institutes of Healt

But for so many people who have lost a spouse or partner, the mornings and evenings can catch you off guard in their own particular way.

The light changes. The house is quiet. The chair across from you is empty. And you find yourself in the part of the day that the two of you used to fill, but now you're alone.

If those hours feel heavier than the rest, you are not imagining it. There is a reason these moments hit so hard, and there are small, gentle things that can help.

Why mornings and evenings can feel the heaviest

Marriage and partnership are built largely out of small things. The first coffee. The way they slept. The sound of them moving around the kitchen. The drowsy morning greetings. The end-of-day download about the day. Who owns the remote. The footsteps or shuffling of their movements.

Your brain spent years memorizing exactly where they would be at this hour. When they are suddenly not there, your mind keeps reaching for them anyway. Their absence is now very loud and very, very specific.

Sleep can become harder, too. Research on bereavement and sleep has found that losing a loved one is often linked to difficulty falling asleep, waking too early, and having restless nights. Your body is trying to adjust to the missing half of its routine. Mornings and evenings, the parts of the day most tied to your shared rhythms, are often where the loss feels most present.

Small ways to soften the mornings and the evenings

You do not need to fix the quiet. You do not need to fill it. But there are gentle things you can do that may make these hours a little more bearable.

Give the day a small new anchor

A simple ritual can ease the transition into the part of the day that feels hardest. It does not need to be deep or meaningful. It just needs to belong to you now.

A few examples:

• A cup of tea on the porch when you first wake up
• A walk around the block before or after dinner
• Reading a few pages of a book each night
• Turning lights or the tv or radio on as the light fades

The point is not the activity. The point is the small message it sends your body: this hour is mine now, and I am moving through it.

Reach out, even briefly

A quick call or text to a friend. A voice memo you might not even send. You do not have to talk about your grief but you can. But you can also just talk about the show you watched, the book you're reading, the town gossip, or your favorite sports team. Just one small thread of contact, especially in the lonely hours, can ease the weight of grief and the deep loneliness that can come with loss.

Gently refresh your space

Sometimes the home itself is part of what makes mornings and evenings hard — the same chair, the same view, the same shape of the room you used to share.

You do not need to overhaul anything. But small changes can shift the feeling of a room in ways that surprise you. A few things other widowed people have tried:

• Moving furniture, even just a chair or a lamp
• Sleeping in a different room for a while or the couch
• Painting one wall a color you like
• Leaving soft music or a podcast on for background sound
• A new candle, a new fragrance, a new soap
• Keeping a beloved t-shirt or sweater of theirs out where you can see it

You get to decide what feels right. There is no wrong choice. Some changes may feel comforting. Some may feel like too much, too soon. Both responses are okay.

Try a worry window

Many widowed people find that worries get louder at night. One small practice that can help: open a notebook and give yourself ten or fifteen minutes to write down what is on your mind — fears, questions, what-ifs, really anything that is worrying you.

Then, before you close the notebook, write down one thing you are grateful for from the day. Or one thing that held meaning, even something small. The point is not to make the worry disappear. The point is to give it a container, so it does not follow you to bed.

Be patient with yourself

The hardest hours change over time. They do not always go away, but they do soften. If you want to understand more about what grief is doing to you in the meantime, our post on What Is Grief? is a gentle place to start.

Remember you are doing one of the hardest things a person has to do which is to learn how to live in a home and navigate routines without the person who you shared this life with.

This takes time and you are allowed to do it slowly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do mornings and evenings feel so much harder than the middle of the day? These are the parts of the day most tied to your routine together — the morning greetings, the end-of-day rituals. Your brain spent years expecting their presence at these hours. It will take the brain a while to rewire and predict not having them present for these moments.

Is it normal to dread going to bed? Yes. So normal. Bedtime can be one of the most painful parts of grief after a partner loss. A small ritual — a podcast, a chapter of a book, a light left on — can help, so can sleeping in a different room for a while.

Should I keep things the same or change them? Both are okay. Some widowed people find comfort in keeping things exactly as they were. Others find that small changes help them breathe. There is no right answer, and what feels right may change over time.

How long until the mornings and evenings feel easier? For most people, the heaviness softens over several months up to through the first year. Easier just means more familiar.

If you know someone who’s grieving, consider inviting them to learn more about Help Texts’ Grief Support or share this article with them.

Grief is hard. 💔 We can help. 🩵

Source

1. Lancel, M., Stroebe, M., & Eisma, M. C. (2020). Sleep disturbances in bereavement: A systematic review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 53, 101331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2020.101331

That said, losing a wife or life partner comes with its own layers.

What makes this loss different

Losing the person you built a life with is not only about grieving her, but you also grieve the day-to-day that evolved around her and the future the two of you had planned. In losing her, you may also feeling these other losses too:

• Your primary companion — the person who knew where things were, and who you were on an ordinary Tuesday
• Your shared future — the trips, the retirement, the milestones, the plan
• Your domestic rhythm — meals, errands, the small routines that held the house together
• Your identity — the version of you that existed inside the relationship
• Your support person — the one person you told the hard stuff to

Research shows that men tend to experience deeper loneliness after losing a partner than nearly any other bereavement group, and many men are less likely to reach out for support. Isolation can also affect your health — sleep, blood pressure, cardiovascular strain, and mood are all worth paying attention to right now.

Emotions that may surprise you

Grief does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like:

• Anxiety — feeling overwhelmed by little things all the time
• Widower's fog — trouble concentrating, forgetting things, feeling half a step behind. Grief brain is real. (The Grieving Brain is a must read)
• Depression — flatness, exhaustion, no interest in what used to matter
• Anger — at her, at yourself, at friends who disappeared, at a world that keeps going
• Restlessness — an urge to fix, do, move, decide, sometimes before you are ready

This is all normal for the first year of grief. But normal and unbearable are too different things. If at any point things feel unbearable and it is impacting your ability to function, consider reaching out to your doctor or a mental health provider. As Dr. BJ Miller states, "While grief is mandatory, suffering is optional."

A few experiences that widowers may struggle with

Widowers often carry some of these stigmatized experiences quietly but know that they are normal:

• Widower's fire. A surge in sexual or romantic longing after your partner's death is common, and can feel confusing or even shameful. It does not mean you did not love her. Grief shows up in the body too and those urges are normal and it is okay to attend to them.
• New relationships. There is no right timeline. Some men date within months. Some never date again. Both are okay. A new relationship does not replace her, and it does not have to. You can still honor your wife while also continuing to form new connections and relationships - in fact- it is very important to form new relationships- and these don't always need to be romantic, they can be platonic.
• Holding on and moving forward. Living with both can feel impossible to do. Honoring her memory and building something new are not opposing directions. They live side by side. It is called duality of grief- our ability to hold to seemingly opposing things at the same time.

Ways to stay connected to her

Some ways to keep your wife's or partner's memory close:

• Talking to her, in your head or out loud
• Wearing something of hers, or something she gave you
• Making her favorite meal
• Continuing traditions you shared
• Visiting places that mattered to you both
• Looking at photos, watching old videos, rereading texts
• Getting a memorial tattoo
• Naming something after her
• Volunteering or giving to a cause she cared about
• Carrying a small object of hers with you

The hard dates

Her birthday. Your anniversary. The anniversary of her death. The holidays.

Plan for them rather than trying to power through them. You have permission to skip them if you need to or to mark them however feels right. What you do for each of these dates may change over time and that's okay.

Where to find other men who get it

For many widowers, other widowers are the ones who understand best.

• The National Widowers' Organization is a men's grief network offering a virtual toolkit of free resources, stories from other widowers, and support specifically for men who have lost a loved one.
• Camp Widow by Soaring Spirits is an in-person community event held around the country for widowed people. Many men attend and find it changes how they carry their loss.

Losing a spouse or life partner is so hard. Some days your grief will feel too heavy to carry while other days you'll experience small glimmers of hope that let you know that you'll be okay. Make room for both - the hope and the grief.

If you know someone who’s grieving, consider inviting them to learn more about Help Texts’ Grief Support or share this article with them.

Grief is hard. 💔 We can help. 🩵

Resources

Niino, K., Patapoff, M. A., Mausbach, B. T., Liu, H., Moore, A. A., Han, B. H., Palmer, B. W., & Jester, D. J. (2025). Development of loneliness and social isolation after spousal loss: A systematic review of longitudinal studies on widowhood. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 73(1), 253–265. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.19156

As always, I want to start with a few of the messages our subscribers sent us this month. Their words remind me, every single time, that this work reaches people exactly where they are:

I have found the texts very helpful and really timed well. A lot have been spot on for the moments I needed them. I've cried with the texts. I've felt connected to my child with the texts. I've found different ideas to honour my sweet boy. Remembering it's OK to grieve how I am and everyone is different. My boy deserves to be remembered. Forever my son. Forever his mum.

Somehow they seem to come at the right time. When I'm feeling sad or overwhelmed. It is just nice to read words that others don't speak during grief.

Can you please keep sending me these Help Texts? It helps to read them. Thank you.

This is exactly what I needed today.

We recently looked at how our subscribers are engaging with Help Texts, and discovered something really meaningful. In addition to the tips and support they receive each week via text, 94% of our subscribers are being connected to well-timed resources, hand-picked by our clinical team, based on their situation. Our platform does an amazing job curating and selecting well-timed texts and resources based on each person's grief journey, but it's thanks to my team of proactive, thoughtful, human beings (!) that we're also exceptionally good at sharing additional, vetted, and often local resources, based on their unique experience and loss. We wrote more about what this means and how it works on our blog.

This month, we launched curated resource libraries for Help Texts' subscribers grieving a loss. I love the way these private portals match resources to each person's situation and needs.

Now, when someone signs up for Help Texts, they have a personal support library stored right inside their account, sitting alongside their daily texts and available any time, day or night.

This is great news for subscribers, and also a meaningful step forward for our customers - hospices, employers, EAPs, grief organizations, and more. Organizations can now include their own trusted resources and benefits directly within the Help Texts service our subscribers have come to trust. That means your local grief groups, chaplain's contact, upcoming bereavement events, and favorite grief guides can all live somewhere the grieving people in your care will easily find and use them.

We are so glad to announce that Help Texts has partnered with "Love, Baxter" to bring dedicated pet loss support to our subscribers. The loss of a beloved animal companion is real grief, and for a long time it has been one of the most overlooked kinds. Love, Baxter understands that deeply, and together we're building something that meets people exactly where they are. You can follow along with our collaboration over on Instagram.

Last but not least, we have a new face at Help Texts. Javier has joined us as our Content Marketing Specialist, and we couldn't be more glad to have him. 4 of our 5 Vancouver team members went out to dinner to welcome him IRL which was a real treat, and now I have a serious bee in my bonnet about finding a way for the whole Help Texts team to get together this year.

July holds a lot. Whether this season feels bright, heavy, or somewhere in between, we're glad you're here.

With gratitude,

Emma Payne

CEO, Help Texts

If you know someone who might appreciate our monthly dose of good news, please invite them to subscribe. And as always, remember that you can visit our website to buy gift subscriptions.

Finding the right resources when you are grieving is hard

Grief brain is real. When someone is newly bereaved, they are often too overwhelmed to sift through search results or evaluate credibility. And with AI-generated summaries now shaping most Google searches, the "top" resources served to a griever may not be what a clinician would recommend at all.

That gap costs people time and energy. Often it also makes it hard for grieving people to trust in the idea that meaningful support exists for them.

The myth we hear from almost every newly bereaved person

"There is nothing out there for me."

We hear this constantly. In reality, there is no shortage of grief resources. There are books, podcasts, support groups, workbooks, community organizations, self-help, articles, blogs, research, checklists, texting programs, and much more. Locating the right one for the right person at the right moment is the real challenge.

That is where matching comes in.

How Help Texts matches subscribers to resources

Every resource we recommend is vetted by our clinical team, each of whom is a thanatologist with many years’ of experience supporting grieving people through every kind of loss. They know what is credible. More importantly, they’re incredibly good at knowing what resources to recommend, when to recommend them, and for whom they’re most likely to resonate.

Many of these resources come directly from Help Texts’ network of expert contributors — world-leading voices on grief and loss whose work spans blogs, books, podcasts, support groups, retreats, conferences, and online communities. Others are nationally recognized resources that thanatologists trust and recommend.

When it comes to resources, some grievers want edgy and irreverent. Others want tender and reflective. Some want checklists. Some want a memoir. Some need a community. Some need a private self-help or text-based option. Grief resources are not one-size-fits-all, and matching honors that.

With Help Texts, some resources arrive via text. Others live in the subscriber's portal, hand-selected for them by our clinical team.

The research is on our side

Proactive human-led resource navigation — connecting people directly to services rather than expecting them to find their own way — is one of the most effective ways to link individuals to the care they need. Research shows that having a human-led resource navigator to a person's care improved satisfaction and increased access to services across a wide range of settings.¹

That is exactly what Help Texts does proactively and at scale.

Why this matters for your organization

For employers and EAPs the ability to drive benefit utilization is a real differentiator. For hospices and healthcare providers, being able to direct people to appropriate resources that they’ll actually use is a game changer. It shows the people you serve that someone thought about them specifically, and that the support they receive was hand-picked with their unique loss in mind. That is a powerful outcome and for many organizations, it is what turns a benefit or service into something people actually use, remember, and recommend.

Contact us to learn more about how Help Texts can serve the people you serve.

Source

1. Parish, W., Beil, H., He, F., D'Arcangelo, N., Romaire, M., Rojas-Smith, L., & Haber, S. G. (2023). Health Care Impacts Of Resource Navigation For Health-Related Social Needs In The Accountable Health Communities Model. Health affairs (Project Hope), 42(6), 822–831. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.01502

This kind of loss has its own weight. This heaviness that you might be experiencing doesn't mean that anything is wrong with you. You are grieving someone you loved, in a world that does not always make space for this kind of grief.

Whoever you lost — a parent, a child, a sibling, a partner, a friend — know that you're not alone in this.

The big, raw emotions that come with this loss

Substance-related loss often brings a particular mix of feelings. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes in waves.

• Guilt and self-blame. "I should have known." "I should have said more." "I should have said less." "I should have answered the phone."
• Shame. About what others might think. Or for the times you felt angry with them while they were alive. Or for the relief that crept in when the worry finally ended.
• Anger. At them. At the system. At a dealer or prescriber. At a doctor. At the friends who used with them. At yourself.
• Shock. Even if you saw the path they were on, the death itself often still lands like an unexpected blow to your body.
• Embarrassment. Around extended family. Around coworkers. Around the people you have to tell.

Research on people bereaved by overdose has found that guilt, shame, and blame are some of the most commonly reported emotions among survivors. They are common companions of this kind of loss.

You are not alone in feeling any of this.

The stigma you do not deserve

Grief after a substance-related death carries a type of grief called "disenfranchised grief" — the kind of grief that society does not openly acknowledge or fully accept. Some people may avoid the topic. Some may slip into judgment about your loved one or about you. Some may not say "I am sorry for your loss" the way they would for other deaths. When grief is disenfranchised it can feel heavier to carry and more isolating.

A 2023 study of people bereaved by drug-related deaths found that survivors experienced stigma across many parts of life — with law enforcement, with friends and family, with people who blamed the death on individual choice. That stigma compounds and often complicates the grief process.

A helpful reframe for stigma is: reminding yourself that the stigma is not yours. Even when it lands at your feet, it does not belong to you. Your love for them is bigger than how anyone else chooses to talk about their death.

The "what ifs" that may follow you

You may find yourself replaying everything. The last conversation. The last text. The night they did not come home. The choices they made. The choices you made.

"Did I do enough?" is one of the most common questions survivors carry. So is "Could anyone have stopped this?"

Here is what is true: addiction is shaped by biology, mental health, trauma, environment, access, and a long chain of events, most of which were never yours to control. You loved them. You tried. The death is not a verdict on the love.

These "what if" questions may soften over time. They may not fully disappear. The main goal here is to not let these unanswered questions take up the majority of your thoughts forever.

When the legal system is involved

Some substance-related deaths involve the justice system — an investigation, charges against someone else, a trial that may take months or years. The legal process can delay your grief in ways that are hard to describe. The world does not let you fully grieve while you are still answering questions, sitting in courtrooms, or waiting for a decision.

An outcome may bring some peace. Or it may not. Some survivors feel settled when a case closes. Others feel deeply unsettled — like the system did not understand the person who died. Both responses are normal.

You may not get the resolution you hoped for. But you can still hold your own truth about who your person was, no matter what any case decides.

Five things that can help

1. Honor the parts of their life you were proud of

Your person was so much more than how they died. Their humor. Their gentleness. Their creativity. The way they showed up for you when you needed them.

Some substance-related deaths come after years of struggle. Some come from one-time use. You may find yourself wanting to add context when you talk about them — wanting to make sure no one thinks they were a "bad person" or "deserving" of this. It is okay to remind people of the good part of who they were. In fact, it can be the most healing part.

One script that has helped many people:

"Branden died from an overdose. I want you to know that he was so much more than how he died. It is important to me for you to understand that. He was ....."

You get to introduce the person you loved to the world, even now.

2. Release yourself from someone else's addiction

You did not cause this. You could not have controlled this. You did try.

Take a quiet moment and let yourself remember the ways you showed up — the conversations, the rides, the rehab calls, the late-night talks, the love you gave. That was your role, and you played it.

Their addiction was not yours. Their death is not yours. Their life — the parts you loved, the parts you fought for — is something you get to carry forward without carrying the weight of how they died.

3. Get comfortable telling the truth

When you are ready, telling the truth about how your loved one died can be one of the most freeing things you do.

"They died from substance use." "They died from an overdose." "They died from a fentanyl overdose." "They died from alcohol use."

It may be hard the first few times. Over time, it often becomes easier and sometimes even empowering. You may discover that more people than you knew have lost someone this way. You may get to gently educate someone about substance use, grief, or where to find help. You may make space for someone else who has not yet said it out loud.

A quick side note: It is also important to tell children the truth. They can handle direct, bite-sized accurate information. The National Alliance for Children's Grief has a great toolkit that explains more.

4. Find your people, and set limits with the rest

Not everyone in your life will know how to support you through this. That is so common.

Your people are the ones who can sit with you without judgment. Who say their name. Who do not try to explain or rationalize the death. Keep them close.

It is also okay to set limits with people whose words or silences are making your grief harder. You can love someone and still need distance from them right now.

If you do not yet have people who get it, you can find them. GASP (Grief After Substance Passing) runs peer support groups across the country, specifically for people grieving a substance-related death. Talking with people who have walked this road can change everything.

5. Get extra support if you need it

If you are carrying vivid memories that feel unbearable — finding them, the moments before, scenes you cannot stop replaying — please know you do not have to carry those alone.

A therapist trained in grief and trauma can help. You can also sometimes find specialized programs through community mental health centers.

You loved them, and you are still here

You did not deserve this loss. You did not cause it. You loved a person who was, in every way that mattered, as a whole human being.

If you want to understand more about what grief is doing to you, our post on What Is Grief? is a gentle place to start.

What you are doing now in choosing to keep living, to keep loving them, and to find your way through this takes a lot of willpower and strength, and you will be forever changed because of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal to feel guilty about things I did or did not do? Yes. So normal. Guilt is one of the most common feelings after a substance-related death. It is also rarely accurate. Addiction has many causes, and no single action of yours could have controlled them all.

How do I respond when someone asks how my loved one died? You decide. "They died from substance use" or "They died from an overdose" is enough. So is "I would rather not talk about that." You do not owe anyone the story.

Is it okay to feel relief alongside the grief? Yes. Many survivors feel a quiet relief that the worry, the late-night calls, the fear of "the call," has ended. That does not mean you did not love them. It often means you loved them through something exhausting.

What if the death is still being investigated or in court? This is one of the hardest forms of this loss. You may not be able to fully grieve until the legal process ends. Lean on small daily anchors, your people, and a counselor if you can. The grief will still be there when the case ends, and that is okay.

Where can I find peer support? GASP (Grief After Substance Passing) runs free groups across the U.S. Many cities also have local substance loss bereavement groups. Therapists with addiction-loss or trauma expertise can help when peer support is not enough.

If you or someone in your family is struggling with substance use, the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) offers free, confidential support 24/7.

Sources

1. Stout, J. H., & Fleury-Steiner, B. (2023). Stigmatized bereavement: A qualitative study on the impacts of stigma for those bereaved by a drug-related death. OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228231203355
2. Bottomley, J. S., Campbell, K. W., Titlestad, K. B., Feigelman, W., & Rheingold, A. A. (2023). Predictors of stigma, guilt, and shame among adults bereaved by fatal overdose. OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228231194208
3. National Alliance for Children's Grief. https://nacg.org/
4. GASP (Grief After Substance Passing). https://grasphelp.org/

Oceanside Hospice Society serves families spread across Vancouver Island, a geography that makes in-person bereavement support difficult to deliver consistently. With families often dispersed across remote communities, the team needed something that could travel with families, rather than requiring families to travel to receive support.

In addition to geography challenges, Oceanside Hospice Society relies on a small part-time team available to care for bereaved families and caregivers across all of Oceanside. They found it hard to deliver In-person check-ins, phone follow-ups, and printed mailers to all the families looking for support. Like many other hospice teams, Oceanside staff recognized that grief doesn’t wait for business hours, and doesn’t care how far someone lives from the nearest support group. Recognizing that they couldn’t deliver care manually to all the families in their community, Executive Director, Mandy Levesque, began looking for ways her small team could deliver more care, without sacrificing quality or human connection.

The solution

In July 2025, Oceanside Hospice Society launched bereavement support through Help Texts, an expert-written text messaging service that delivers expert, clinically sound grief support, personalized to each family’s loss type, relationship, cause of death, and time since loss.

Mandy said:

Help Texts stood out as a natural fit for Oceanside. We love that their tool is built specifically for grief support, is accessible by text message from anywhere, and includes built in tips and date reminders for friends and family who want to support their grieving loved ones. While some of our other programs and services are delivered over a shorter timeframe, the ability to offer Help Texts support for 12 months is a significant benefit to our clients and our organization.

The results

Strong retention and accelerating growth.

Since launching in July 2025, Oceanside Hospice has seen consistent month-over-month enrollment growth, with a 94.6% active rate.

Here's what a few of Oceanside's grieving family members said about receiving text support

100% of respondents found Help Texts’ content helpful.

Just what I need to hear. Plus I love that they are personalized. It’s nice to see my name and my husband’s name.

— Melanie, Grieving widow

I found the positive reinforcement about knowing what I’m going through is all very ‘normal’ in the grieving process.

— Cindy, Grieving sister

They have helped me understand more about my grieving process and what to expect as time goes by. Most importantly it’s taught me what I was never taught as a child — that it’s okay to talk about it. Thank you very much for the text messages.

— Kenn, Grieving widower

It has helped me deal with the overwhelming pain that I didn’t want to face. It reminds me to do healing work which is very much needed. I know if I stuff it down and avoid it that it hits me like a freight train.

— Janet, Grieving mother

It’s nice to feel supported randomly and unexpectedly — and I forward them to another family member.

— Margot, Grieving mother-in-law

Why it works

The science behind text-based grief support

Help Texts is built on a simple insight: grief support works best when it’s easy to receive. For families already managing the weight of loss, low friction is everything.

Our published hospice research shows a 95% satisfaction rate, with even higher ratings among men and people over 65, two populations historically underserved by traditional bereavement programs. 86% of subscribers continue receiving texts for a full year, indicating not just initial uptake but sustained engagement over time.

Help Texts helps Oceanside deliver consistent outreach to bereaved families, while meaningfully lightening the administrative load for their team.

Grief is one of the most universal human experiences — and yet it can feel completely isolating, as though no one else could possibly understand what you are going through. What you are feeling right now is grief, and we are here to help you better understand what that actually means.

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is the natural, necessary response to love and loss — and it looks different for every person who lives through it.

What is grief? Understanding the definition

Grief is what we experience following a significant loss. Most commonly, we associate grief with the death of someone we love. But grief can arise from any meaningful loss: the end of a relationship, a health diagnosis, a miscarriage, the loss of a job, a home, or even a future we had imagined for ourselves.

A more complete grief definition: Grief is the multidimensional response to loss that affects a person emotionally, physically, cognitively, behaviorally, socially, and spiritually. It is not linear, it has no fixed timeline, and there is no single correct way to move through it.

Why does grief feel like this? The grieving brain

One of the most validating things you can understand about grief is this: it is rooted in biology. Your brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do when someone it relied on is suddenly gone.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, describes grief as a learning process. Our brains are wired to predict where the people we love will be — at the dinner table, on the other end of a phone call, in the house when we come home. When a loss occurs, the brain is essentially confronted with a prediction it keeps making that can no longer come true. The disorientation, the reaching for the phone to call someone who is gone, the wave of grief that hits in an ordinary moment — these are the brain trying to update a map it spent years building.

This means that grief takes time, not because we are weak, but because the brain literally needs time to learn a new reality. It is neurological. It is not something you can will or rush yourself through.

Your brain spent years learning where your person would be. Grief is the time it takes to learn a world without them. Be patient with yourself.

Grief is multidimensional: It touches every part of you

One reason grief can feel so overwhelming is that it does not stay in one lane. It does not only show up as sadness, though sadness is certainly part of it. Grief is multidimensional, meaning it affects you across your whole self.

If you see yourself in several of these categories at once, that is completely normal. Grief can feel like too many things happening in too many places at the same time. Naming what you are experiencing can sometimes make it feel slightly more manageable — not smaller, but less like it is consuming everything.

Grief is not linear

You may have heard of the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — a model introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969. While this framework has offered many people a language for what they are experiencing, it is important to understand that the stages were never meant to be a checklist or a roadmap.

Grief does not move in a straight line from pain to peace. Most people move back and forth between states. You might feel acceptance one morning and be devastated by lunchtime. You might feel numb for weeks and then find the heaviness of grief arriving unexpectedly months later.

This is grief. There is no finish line, and reaching for one may make the journey harder.

In the early days, you only have to survive

In the acute early period of grief, the goal is not healing. The goal is not productivity, growth, or making sense of anything. The goal is simply to get through each day.

When everything feels impossible, it helps to embrace the concept of the "minimum viable day" — the idea that in grief, doing a handful of fundamental things for your body and your nervous system is genuinely enough. More than enough.

Print this out. Put it on your fridge. On the hardest days, if you can check even two or three of these boxes, you have done what your body needs. You are surviving grief. That is the whole job right now.

Coping with grief

Grief is not something to be fixed — it is something to be lived alongside. Over time, most people do not heal grief so much as they build a life that can hold it. The loss does not disappear; it simply becomes something you learn to carry differently.

Coping with grief does not require a rigid plan, and it certainly does not look the same for everyone. The most important thing is finding what helps you stay connected to the world without requiring you to suppress or perform. Some things that might help:

What matters most is that you reach toward something, even when everything in you wants to close down. Connection — in whatever form feels manageable — is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself in grief.

You are not doing grief wrong

There is no correct way to grieve. There is no timeline you are supposed to be following and no emotion you are supposed to be feeling on any given day. You are allowed to laugh. You are allowed to feel nothing. You are allowed to feel everything all at once.

What is grief? It is love with nowhere to go. And over time — with support, with patience, and with small daily acts of survival — that love finds new ways to live in you.

You do not have to figure all of this out today. You only have to get through today.

I cannot count the number of times I heard comments like, “She was an addict. She deserved it.” or “What did she think would happen?” After her death, I often felt not only grief, but also the heavy burden of stigma. When people learned how she died, I was met with pity or probing questions about how hard it must have been to grow up with addicted parents.

It was hard, yes, but what most people missed is that my mom was so much more than her addiction.

She was a mother. A wife. She kept a house so clean you could literally eat off the floors. She was a gifted cook who could prepare meals better than most chefs in fine restaurants, seemingly without effort. She was hilarious. She loved deeply. She laughed often. Her life cannot and should not be reduced to the way it ended. Addiction was a disease she lived with, not her identity.

When she died, most people around me did not know what to say. Some said hurtful things. Others said nothing at all. And that silence can cut just as deeply as the stigma.

What to Say to Someone Grieving an Overdose

• Acknowledge the loss without judgment. Say, “I am sad to hear about your stepmom. She mattered, and I know you miss her.” Simple, honest words are better than silence.

• Use their loved one’s name. Names bring humanity back into the conversation. “What do you miss most about Sherry?” is often more comforting than broad sympathy.

• Validate the complexity. You might say, “I imagine this is a complicated kind of grief. I am here to listen if you want to share.” This recognizes that overdose grief can carry layers of stigma, anger, and love all at once.

• Remember their person beyond their death. Ask about their loved one’s hobbies, quirks, or traditions. Help keep their memory alive in ways not defined by addiction.

What Not to Say

• “They did this to themselves.” Addiction is not a moral failure. It is a disease. Comments like this dehumanize the person who died and wound those who grieve them.

• “You must be relieved.” Even if addiction strained relationships, assuming relief is deeply invalidating.

• “I know how you feel.” Unless you have also lost someone to overdose, avoid comparisons. Each grief experience is unique.

• Avoid silence. Grievers notice when their loved one’s name is never spoken again.

How to Show Up

Supporting someone grieving an overdose means holding space for both love and pain. It means remembering their person not only for how they died, but also for how they lived. It means recognizing addiction as an illness, not a moral flaw.

On this Overdose Awareness Day, I remember my stepmother for her laughter, her thoughtfulness, her love. And I invite you to do the same for those in your life who have been lost. Speak their names, honor their lives, and support their loved ones with compassion.

If you or someone you love is grieving an overdose, or if you want to know how to support someone who is, Help Texts can walk alongside you. We offer ongoing grief support by text message that includes gentle reminders, coping tips, and supportive guidance for both grievers and supporters. Subscriptions start at just $9.99: helptexts.com/get-help-texts/grief

About Help Texts

Help Texts is the world's leading clinically sound, scalable, bereavement intervention. We deliver affordable, multilingual support globally via text message for all of life's toughest moments. With extraordinary acceptability (95%) and 6-month retention (90%) rates, Help Texts' light-weight solution makes it easy for employers, providers, payers, and others to improve health and community outcomes, while also realizing significant cost savings for those in their care.

Life can be hard. Getting support shouldn't have to be. 💙 Help Texts is proud to be delivering personalized, expert grief and mental health support in 59 countries and 28 languages. All year long.

Some of that rhythm is easy to predict. You know the birthday is coming. You know the anniversary of the death is coming. You can see the holidays sitting on the calendar months in advance, and you can brace yourself accordingly, or at least try to. Grief researchers sometimes call these "anniversary reactions," and they're common enough that most grief literature treats them as a given.

But the predictable dates aren't the whole story.

The dates you didn't see coming

Some grief has an obvious calendar, tethered to a death and a birth. But grief keeps other calendars too, ones nobody warns you about.

Maybe the person you lost loved baseball, and now the first warm evening of the season, the smell of fresh-cut grass, or just the sound of a stadium organ on TV catches you completely off guard. Maybe they had a favorite season entirely — the first person to point out that fall had arrived, the one who always wanted the windows open the second it hit sixty degrees — and now autumn itself feels like a room they used to be in. Maybe it's not a date at all. Maybe it's a smell, a specific stretch of highway, the first day the pool opens, back-to-school displays in Target.

These are harder to prepare for because nobody labeled them in advance. Nobody put them on a card in the grief pamphlet. You don't get to brace for the day you walk past a rack of Halloween costumes and suddenly can't breathe, because it never occurred to you that costumes were tangled up in your grief until they were.

Why the unlabeled dates hit differently

This is one of the more disorienting parts of grief: your loss keeps its own private calendar, one that doesn't match anyone else's, and nobody could have marked it on a calendar in advance. Unlabeled dates don't come with any built-in warning. You can be showing up to work, sleeping through the night, laughing at dinner, nothing anyone watching would flag, and then some unremarkable Monday in July flattens you, because it happens to be the exact kind of hot, still afternoon they used to complain about. The first time, you're on your own with it.

But once you know these difficult moments are coming, you can tell someone in advance: this week's going to be hard, and here's why. You can give a friend a heads-up that you might need a little extra support that week. These dates don't have to stay invisible to the people who love and want to support you.

Learning your own grief rhythm

If you notice this happening to you, you're not grieving wrong or sliding backward. You loved someone specific enough that an entire season, a smell, a sport, a stretch of highway, got wired into your memory of them. It means they mattered enough to leave a mark on all of it.

Over time, you start to learn your own grief rhythm. Some people keep a running list of the dates and seasons that tend to hit hard, official and unofficial both, the same way you'd learn any other pattern about yourself. That doesn't make the feeling go away when it comes, but it does mean you get to meet it with a little more readiness than you had the last time.

Grief doesn't hand you a printed schedule. You build your own, season by season, and every year you know a little more of what's written on it than you did the year before.

If you know someone who’s grieving, consider inviting them to learn more about Help Texts’ Grief Support or share this article with them.

Grief is hard. 💔 We can help. 🩵