Each month, we gather small reminders that hope is still growing, people are still caring for one another, and support can arrive exactly when it's needed most. I want to begin, as I always do, with a few of the messages we received from our subscribers last month. The first one is my favorite!

• “At first I thought, 'This is silly.' But it has been such a help to me.”
• “The texts always seemed to know where I was at and gave me a lift, just when needed.” They also gave me permission to experience exactly what and where I was.”
• “Thank you for always knowing what is concerning me. I am constantly blessed with your texts.”
• “I’ve found it amazing how often I go back and read the texts again and look for advice that meets whatever needs I’m having.”
• “Thank you, these are helpful suggestions, I love the readings from you. It helps me so much.”
• “I like that I can read the texts when I have the time, not when someone else is making time for me.”

This month on the Help Texts blog, we published a piece that stopped us in our tracks. It's called A crater called Carroll, and it's about an astronaut named Jeremy Hansen who radioed mission control with a request from the Artemis II crew: they wanted to name a crater on the moon in honor of mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020 at just 46 years old. We wrote about Carroll's story and the many ways grievers have found to honor the people they love. Read the article

One of the hardest things about supporting a grieving person is not knowing what to say. Many of us say nothing at all, not because we don't care, but because we're afraid of saying the wrong thing. We shared a new post on our Instagram this month to help with exactly that.

It's a simple, practical guide to the kinds of words and gestures that actually help. You can find it on our Instagram page, and we encourage you to share it with anyone in your life who might need it.

Stress is one of those words we use so often it can start to lose its meaning. But the experience of it is anything but small. Stress shows up in the body, in sleep, in relationships, in the way we move through our days. And it shows up differently depending on what we're going through.

Help Texts delivers evidence-based, expert-written support directly to your phone via SMS. No app. No appointment. No waiting room. Just thoughtful, expert-written texts that meet you wherever you are.

We have programs for grief, caregiving, healthcare workers, and mental health & well-being, each built around the idea that consistent, compassionate support, even in small doses, can make a genuine difference over time.

Ready to feel a little more supported? Start today

We are so pleased to welcome Jared Rubenstein to our growing team of expert contributors. Jared brings a depth of knowledge and compassion to this work that we know our subscribers will feel in every message shaped by his expertise. Learn more about Jared here. We are so grateful to have him with us.

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.

Background Grief following the death of a loved one is a painful human experience, and yet bereaved people often have trouble getting the right grief support. In 2022, the UK Commission on Bereavement found significant deficits in the availability, accessibility, length, and helpfulness of bereavement services. Around that time, a national charity in the UK piloted Grief Coach, a low-cost, scalable, text message-based grief support program with the potential to fill gaps in bereavement services. This research assessed user satisfaction with Grief Coach, how user satisfaction ratings compared with ratings of other types of informal and formal grief support received, and whether there were differences in risk level, assessed using measures of well-being and loss-related vulnerability, of those who used Grief Coach only vs. with formal grief support. Methods 1631 Grief Coach subscribers enrolled three months or longer were texted a link to an online survey. UK residents aged 18 + who experienced a death within the past 5 years continued to the survey that assessed demographics, types of grief services received, ratings of perceived availability, accessibility, length, and helpfulness of Grief Coach and the other services, well-being using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, and loss-related vulnerability using the Adult Attitude to Grief Scale. Results 430 program enrollees (26.4%) responded to the survey, and 314 (73.0%) met the inclusion criteria. In that group, 91.7% expressed satisfaction with Grief Coach’s availability, 95.3% accessibility, 82.5% length, and 92.9% helpfulness. In paired t-tests, Grief Coach was rated significantly higher at p < .001 in availability, accessibility, length, and helpfulness than self-help resources, social support, and general practitioner support, and higher in availability, accessibility, and length than peer counseling and therapy. No differences emerged between Grief Coach vs. support groups or funeral directors. There were no significant differences in well-being and loss vulnerability among grievers who used Grief Coach only vs. Grief Coach + formal grief support. Conclusions Findings demonstrate strong satisfaction with the availability, accessibility, length, and helpfulness of text message-based grief support. Longitudinal research is needed to identify how and for whom text messaging can best fill gaps in bereavement services.

At any given moment, somewhere between a third and two-thirds of your workforce is grieving. A survey that assessed the prevalence of new bereavement in the workplace from the Georgia Department of Public Health and the CDC found that 45.8% of adults had lost a family member or close friend within the prior two years. Grief isn't an edge case in your workforce.

We know that a significant portion of your employees are grieving at any given time, so the real question becomes whether the bereavement benefits you're already paying for are actually working for them.

Most bereavement support is built around the first few weeks of bereavement. Three days off (the U.S. average), an EAP number, a card or some flowers, and a return-to-work date. Then it quickly and quietly goes away, just as the early shock and numbness wear off and the harder, slower phase of grief actually starts. Already, the support is not aligned with the long tail of grief.

The cultural piece sits alongside the policy piece. As Meghan Riordan Jarvis (2023) clearly showed in MIT Sloan Management Review, American workplaces have a long-running habit of brushing past grief altogether, and employees rarely name grief as the reason they're leaving. They just go. In fact, 51% of bereaved employees leave their jobs within 12 months. That turnover cost should raise alarm bells for you.

Why your bereavement benefits fall short

Access alone is not the answer. Only 56% of U.S. workers have paid bereavement leave at all, and the benefit skews sharply by income, 81% of top earners have it, compared with 19% of the bottom tenth. Don't even get me started on the non-flexible 3-day bereavement leave policies. If your employees need to take PTO or have colleagues give them PTO so they can attend an out-of-town funeral, you have a serious company culture problem. Colleagues should not be responsible for giving up their earned time off so that one of their co-workers can formally say goodbye to a family member. Full stop.

Aside from 3 days of bereavement leave, what else are you providing? Many organizations provide a combination of informational packets, a number to an EAP, and some local referrals to support groups. But here is the thing: studies show that even among grievers who do have access to support, satisfaction in these offerings is low. It's because these offerings don't match what the employee actually needs, when they need it, and for how long they need it.

Two decades of research keep landing on the same four needs. Gilbert and colleagues (2021) packaged them as the C.A.R.E. model: Communication, Accommodation, Recognition, and Emotional support. Employees need to be checked in with and feel like they can safely communicate their needs, practical flexibility around schedule and workload, visible recognition of the loss (especially from senior leadership), and emotional support that doesn't expire in a few weeks.

A few things stand out.

• Acknowledgment matters more than leaders think. The most meaningful action a manager can take is naming the loss, without immediately pivoting to logistics or coverage plans.
• Pacing should belong to the employee. Some people come back early because work is a relief, and others need more time to ease back into the work environment. Where companies go wrong is assuming that everyone needs the same approach.
• Support has to last as long as grief does. Most programs assume a 30-day arc; the actual arc is much longer, with predictable hard stretches around birthdays, anniversaries, and the first death anniversary. This is also where a low-cost, lightweight service like Help Texts can really make a difference: the kind of sustained, long-term low-friction support for as long as your employee needs it.

So what can employers actually do, right now, to make a difference?

Grief-informed workplaces aren't built by adding a single benefit, but instead, they are curated through meaningful action.

Rewrite your bereavement leave policy with looser language. Swap "immediate family member" for "close relationship," and let the employee define who counts. This single change removes one of the most common reasons grieving employees quietly disengage. Also, grief professionals recommend a flexible 2-week option that can be used at any point - taken altogether or separated out.

Train managers in the basics and expect them to use them. It's the same set of capabilities that defines good leadership generally: empathy, the willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation, the discipline to ask "how are you really doing?" and actually listen.

Build in real flexibility and offer it proactively. Adjusted workloads, the option to work from home, a private space to decompress, additional time off for the hard days (like a heavy grief day that comes 6 months later, or a birthday, holiday, or death anniversary), we need to be able to support people with a bereavement day, and it not eat away at their PTO or sick days. The accommodations themselves are inexpensive; the signal they send (which is that you're important to us) is your return on investment. (FYI, the cost to replace an employee can run companies anywhere between 50% to 200% of their annual salary; so that one random paid bereavement day, later in the year, all of a sudden isn't looking too bad now, huh?).

Extend support past the first month. This is where most benefits go wrong, and it's where a long-term, low-cost, low-friction tool earns its place in the benefit stack. Help Texts is built on a research-backed approach: twice-weekly text messages, written by grief experts, tailored to the specific loss, delivered for a full year or longer. The messages mark the dates that matter, birthdays, anniversaries, the death anniversary, and a clinical team monitors replies and steps in when someone is in distress. Among subscribers, 86% stay enrolled for the full year, and 95% say they felt supported in their grief. It also reaches the populations traditional bereavement support struggles to engage: men, employees who prefer to speak in their native language, adults over 65, and people who live in rural areas or are remote workers. Simple support can have deep and meaningful impact.

I am grateful for your kindness and support. It is a very difficult time for me and your messages give me strength to continue living. - woman grieving her spouse who died from ALS

A bereavement benefit that looks good on paper but goes unused isn't a benefit. The test is simple: of the employees who experienced a significant loss in the last year (that you know of), how many of them actually used something you offered, and for how long?

If the answer is "a small fraction, for a couple of weeks," the program isn't failing because grieving people don't want or need help. It's failing because the help on offer isn't what they need or want.

The fix is simple, and it requires your organization to build a more inclusive policy, managers get trained on the basics, offering the flexibility you can already afford, and adding a long-term, low-cost, low-friction support option that meets people where they are (on their phones). Done together, those actions quietly change what it feels like to be supported by your company during one of life's hardest experiences.

We're often taught that grief is something that happens after our loved one takes their last breath. But for many of us, grief begins long before those final moments– during the final months, weeks, or even years of a serious illness. This is called anticipatory grief: the grief that begins before a death occurs, often during the long and uncertain stretch of a serious illness.

You're grieving, Even if no one has died

One of the hardest things about anticipatory grief is that it exists in a kind of liminal space where you know a loss is coming, you just don't know when. And because there's no clear before and after and no socially designated moment to fall apart, the grief tends to go unnamed. People say things like "at least she's still here," and they mean it kindly. But what it communicates, albeit unintentionally, is that your grief has to wait its turn. If only it were that easy.

The grief that we might experience before the actual death is not just one loss, it's many small losses that accumulate over time. You may be grieving the version of them that had energy, that made plans, that wasn't bedbound. You might grieve the future you'd imagined. The trips you'd planned. The milestones. The ordinary Sunday dinners. You could also grieve your own role, your identity, and even your own sense of safety in the world.

Each decline can bring its own wave of grief. And because the losses arrive in small ways overtime, you can find yourself in a near-constant state of mourning, even while the person you love is still very much alive.

Oh and anticipatory grief isn't just for the caregiver, family member, or close friend. Anticipatory grief can also be experienced by the person who is terminal. But for this blog we are going to focus on you, the caregiver and anticipatory griever.

Is it normal to grieve someone who is still alive?

Absolutely. It’s not only normal, it’s almost guaranteed. Anticipatory grief has been well-documented in research. It can be experienced by family members, close friends, and caregivers of people living with terminal or serious illness.

Caregiver grief in particular tends to be invisible. When all of your time and energy is consumed by caring for someone else, there's often little room to acknowledge your own emotional experience, let alone have it witnessed by others. The result is a grief that gets minimized, both by the people around you and sometimes by yourself. So if you've been wondering whether what you're feeling is legitimate: it is. Grieving someone with a terminal illness, or watching someone you love change in ways you couldn't have prepared for, is one of the most psychologically complex experiences a person can go through.

What anticipatory grief actually feels like

Anticipatory grief doesn't always look like crying. It can show up as anxiety, making your stomach drop every time the phone rings. Or sometimes it can feel like anger that seems to come from nowhere, at the illness, at the situation, sometimes even at the person who is sick for leaving. Other times, you might feel an exhaustion that goes beyond just being tired, or a loneliness that's hard to explain because you're surrounded by people and still feel completely alone.

You might find yourself mentally rehearsing what comes next. The hard conversations still ahead. The final days. What life looks like on the other side of this. We naturally try to prepare for something we can't always fully prepare for, and impending death is one of those somethings.

You might also have days when none of it surfaces, days that feel almost okay, almost normal, and those can be disorienting in their own way — like you're betraying something by laughing at a stupid joke or enjoying your coffee or just forgetting, for an hour, that any of this is happening. This is normal, too.

The myth of getting a head start

One of the most persistent myths about anticipatory grief is that it gives you a jump start — that by the time the death comes, you'll have already done some of the work, and the grief that follows will be softer or more manageable. It's a comforting idea, but it doesn't really work that way.

Grieving the accumulating losses of a serious illness and grieving the total, absolute absence of someone are two fundamentally different things your brain is being asked to do. With anticipatory grief, losses arrive in small and sometimes painful doses, but ones your nervous system can metabolize over time. With death, you are suddenly grieving the entirety of a person all at once: the relationship, the history, the presence that filled rooms and phone calls and ordinary days. This is a bigger shock on your system to process through. Neuroscience research even shows that the brain is constantly seeking to find the person, and when they are gone, the brain has to reform new neuropathways that don't include that person being in the environment at all. With anticipatory grief, the brain still locates the person in your life, even if it looks different over time. They are still there, in some way.

It can be disappointing to learn that you don't get a jump start on grief because you were already grieving, but knowing this information can also release you from the pressure of feeling like you should be doing this correctly, efficiently, or ahead of schedule. The only way through it… is through it, and everyone's through it looks different.

How long does anticipatory grief last?

There's no set timeline, and honestly, that's part of what makes it so hard to carry. It can start at diagnosis, or it can surface much later, when a decline makes everything feel suddenly, terrifyingly real. It can last months. It can last years. It shifts and changes as the illness does.

Some periods will feel harder than others. A difficult appointment or a new symptom can bring grief rushing back with full force, even if you'd been managing reasonably well. Grief doesn't move in a straight line.

And when your person does die, the grief doesn't simply resolve because you saw it coming. It changes shape. Some people are caught off guard by the intensity of it, even after years of preparing. Others feel relief alongside the grief, relief that the suffering is over, that the long vigil has ended, and then feel guilty about that relief. Both are normal.

What helps

There's no clean solution to anticipatory grief. But there are things that make it more survivable.

• Name it. Calling it what it is – grief – brings a surprising amount of relief. It validates what you're carrying and gives you permission to take it seriously.
• Give grief some dedicated time. Grief that gets intentional space tends to be less destabilizing than grief that leaks into everything. That might look like a few minutes in the morning before the day starts, or a journal, or a walk where you actually let yourself feel it instead of pushing through. Think of it as slowly releasing pressure from a valve rather than letting it build unchecked.
• Say the things. If there's any grace in grief before death, it's that you still have time. Time for the conversations you've been avoiding. To say thank you, I'm sorry, I love you. You don't have to wait for the right moment because there isn't one. There's just now, and now is enough.
• Find rituals. You don’t have to do anything elaborate. But consider finding a ritual that feels meaningful and intentional to you. You could create a cathartic playlist to listen to when you need to lift your spirits or work through your feelings. You could keep a journal and write about your grief, your love, your fears, what you're losing, whatever is coming up for you. You could even make time each evening for a hot bath and soothing sounds. Rituals create a container for grief, somewhere it can go that isn't everywhere all at once.
• Connect with people who get it. Caregiver grief can be profoundly isolating. Support groups, either in person or online, can connect you with people who understand in ways that even loving friends and family sometimes can't.
• Get support that comes to you. Caregiving and grieving are exhausting. After a long day of to-dos, it can feel impossible to think about your own needs. Help Texts brings support to you—no pressure, no extra work. Weekly texts gently remind you to pause, offer simple coping strategies you can use anywhere, and meet you where you are.

You are allowed to feel all of this

You are allowed to grieve someone who is still alive. You are allowed to be angry, terrified, exhausted, joyful, grateful, sad, content, and any other emotion. These emotions can happen all at once, being competing like holding sadness and gratitude at the same time. None of these things cancel each other out.

Anticipatory grief asks something almost impossible — to live fully in the present while holding the knowledge of an approaching loss. To love someone completely, even as you're already beginning to mourn them. There is no right way to do that. There is only doing it, day by day, with as much support as you can gather around you.

That support exists. You don't have to do this alone. Help Texts offers grief support via text for just $9.99 USD/month.

In an effort to avoid feeling this pain, we might push emotions down and try to stay busy. We might pull away from people, or we might even reach for something that takes the edge off of it.

These responses are understandable and quite normal in grief. But when these behaviors become persistent patterns, they could have the potential to make it harder for us to navigate grief over time.

Some grief researchers describe healthy grieving as an oscillation: leaning into the pain, then stepping back to restore, then returning again. The goal is not to feel everything all at once but to stay in motion and not get stuck on one side, especially early on in grief. This oscillation can be a helpful guide when trying to figure out if you're grieving adaptively or if perhaps you're noticing some of the patterns below, and a recalibration might be needed.

Here are three patterns to watch for, and one small thing to try to help with recalibrating.

Emotional Avoidance

First, remember that there is a place and a time for avoidance when we are grieving. Avoiding difficult thoughts is a natural and normal coping mechanism when grieving, and we all do it. The key difference with emotional avoidance is when the avoidance is persistent and is causing more pain in your life.

Staying constantly busy. Refusing to make time for grief. Telling yourself you are fine when you are not. These are just some of the ways we can avoid feeling grief directly, and these behaviors could be causing more harm than good, especially when it is your go-to response for grief.

In the short term, this may create a sense of relief and control, but over time, suppressed grief tends to resurface, and it can often feel more intense than it would have been had it been given the proper space to be felt when it surfaced initially.

You can think of emotional avoidance like a shaken soda bottle. The pressure doesn't disappear because you can keep the cap on — it just builds. If you release a little at a time, it releases pressure in a slow and manageable way. However, if left sealed and continuously shaken, it can eventually leak or even burst, and all that was bottled up comes out in ways you didn't choose. This might look like snapping at someone you love, having a panic attack in public, unexpected tears at a meeting, or a complete emotional shutdown of all emotions, even the feel-good ones.

Some literature suggests that suppressing grief-related emotions is a risk factor for more complicated grief reactions like prolonged grief disorder. While other literature suggests that avoidance has its place in grief. Perhaps the best answer falls somewhere in the middle, recognizing that a complete emotional avoidance of grief is probably not the most healthy approach. So, is there a place for avoidance in grief? Yes. There are times when avoidance is healthy and adaptive. Should it be the only way to approach grief? No. It's about finding a balance and ways to express yourself that align with who you are.

If you are finding yourself engaging in avoidance often, try this: Set a specific, bounded time to grieve — add 15 to 20 minutes to your calendar, maybe once or twice a week. During that time block, consider doing something that aligns with who you are but has a grief intention behind it: write, cry, look at photos, walk in nature, do rigorous exercise, meditate, read, or call a friend who can listen. Then close it. A time-bound ritual gives grief a safe container, so that pressure is released slowly and manageably.

Social Withdrawal, Isolation, and Loneliness

When grief is heavy, pulling back from the world can feel like the safest way to cope. Turning down invitations, avoiding places tied to memories, and letting friendships go quiet are responses that are common and, early in grief, they might even feel necessary. The problem comes when withdrawal and isolation turn into loneliness: isolation deepens loneliness, loneliness makes reaching out harder, and that's when the loneliness loop starts.

A systematic review by Vedder and colleagues (2022) found that loneliness is common in bereavement and is consistently associated with poorer mental health outcomes and is a risk factor for prolonged grief. Now, this doesn't mean you should push yourself into social events before you're ready. It means just keeping even a thin thread of connection alive, such as a call or text with someone, a short walk with a friend, or accepting invites that seem small and manageable, can become a little lifeline worth maintaining.

If you find yourself starting to withdraw and isolate, consider trying this: When you get an invitation, try saying yes. But make sure to tell the person: "I want to come, so I am saying yes, today, with the understanding that I might change my mind based on how I am feeling the day of, and if I do attend, I may need to leave early if my grief starts to overwhelm me. I hope that is ok, thank you for always thinking about me." Give yourself permission to say yes and then cancel if you need to, and likewise, give yourself the same permission to leave early if you do go. Each time you do this, you are preserving a little connection lifeline. And connection is the biggest protective factor we have in grief.

Substance Use

Alcohol and other substances can dull even the sharpest edges of grief. This is why many grieving people reach for them. If this is done from time to time, in social and supportive settings, this is probably not a big deal, but if you find yourself reaching consistently for substances, using alone, and hiding your use from others, then it is worth paying more attention to.

Substance use may not only delay your ability to emotionally process grief, but it can also affect sleep, mood, and the nervous system — all of which are already under stress in grief.

Over time, unmanaged substance use can escalate into something a bit more serious, leading to something called dual diagnosis, where you might have both substance use disorder (SUD) and prolonged grief disorder. Some research has identified a link between grieving a significant loss, grief complications, and substance use. When this happens, coping with grief becomes much harder, and specialized support is often needed to work through both conditions.

If you're finding yourself craving substances, try this: When a substance craving appears, try targeting the same dopamine pathways, but do it naturally. You can engage in high-intensity movement, getting some sun, listening to music that you love, petting an animal, trying something new, or setting a small but achievable goal. If you're still struggling with cravings, please contact a doctor, therapist, substance use sponsor, or a trusted friend about what the next steps in getting help would look like.

Grief asks a lot of us. Avoiding is a natural human response to loss. But knowing when avoidance is making your grief worse versus helping you matters. If you need more support, let us know!

FAQs

Is it normal to want to avoid grief?

Yes. Grief is painful, and looking for ways to make it stop is a natural response. The problem is when you spend more time in avoidance, and you never allow yourself to process any grief.

Does staying busy count as emotional avoidance?

It can. Staying constantly busy, refusing to make time for grief, or telling yourself you are fine when you are not are all common ways of avoiding grief directly. In the short term, they create relief. Over time, suppressed grief tends to resurface — often more intensely.

Why does isolation make grief worse?

Connection is one of the most important protective factors in how people move through loss. Pulling away from people tends to deepen grief, putting us into a loneliness loop, which can make navigating grief much harder.

Can taking a break from grief be healthy?

Yes. Healthy grieving often has oscillation — leaning into the pain, then stepping back to restore, then returning. The goal is to stay in motion and not get stuck. Taking breaks is part of that. When you don't ever lean into the pain, that's where the problems start to surface.

What can I do instead of reaching for alcohol or substances?

Try redirecting toward a natural dopamine source, high-intensity movement, sunlight, music you love, petting an animal, trying something new, or setting a small achievable goal. These activate the same reward pathways naturally.

Full-time • Remote (Canada) • 4+ years experience • $75-85K CAD

Description

Help Texts is a growing SaaS business, delivering grief and mental health support via text across North America and in 62 countries around the world. We’re seeking a Content Marketing Specialist to help us grow both our DTC and B2B channels. You'll be exited to produce and publish content every day across all of our social channels, while also designing flyers, decks, and conference materials to support the sales team. You'll be the second member of our marketing team — with a clear mandate to create quality, engaging content that can attract new subscribers and customers in Canada and across North America.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll be the person who creates content, takes content quickly, and iterates — always keen to find content that will resonate with people who are grieving or facing other life challenges. You're genuinely excited about AI — not just as a productivity hack, but as a creative and analytical partner. You use it across copywriting, creative testing, research, reporting, and design, and stay curious about what's next.

Responsibilities

• Create on-brand visual assets for growth marketing campaigns
• Support the sales team by building campaigns and content that generate awareness and inbound leads among hospices, health systems, charities, employers, and more
• Design and maintain sales decks, conference materials, flyers, and customer communication tools, working primarily in Canva
• Produce short-form video content daily for TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms
• Write SEO-optimized blog content targeting high-intent keywords across B2C and B2B audiences
• Plan and write email marketing campaigns, including newsletters, nurture sequences, and promotional sends
• Update collateral quickly in response to campaign or product changes
• Maintain high daily output with minimal direction
• Use AI tools to accelerate content production and ideation
• Manage multiple asset requests simultaneously without dropping quality

Qualifications

Must-haves:

• 4–7 years in content and event marketing, with a meaningful acquisition track record
• Comfortable owning SEO end-to-end: from keyword strategy and content optimization to site audits and analytics reporting
• Strong analytical instincts: you can read data, spot signals, and make confident decisions without perfect information
• Clear, concise communicator — in writing, in reporting, and in cross-functional collaboration
• AI fluency as a work style — you use AI tools across all aspects of your work (copy, creative, analysis, research, strategy) and are excited to push further, not just maintain the habit

We’ll be extra happy if you have:

• Experience marketing a subscription product (health, wellness, or mission-driven context is a bonus)
• Comfort working alongside a sales team on our B2B pipeline
• A creative eye — you have opinions about what makes a good ad, a clear landing page, a compelling subject line
• Resilience and adaptability — you've worked in scrappy environments, hit walls, and found ways through

Who Thrives Here

You're curious and restless — you read what's working in other industries and borrow shamelessly. You're resilient when campaigns underperform and honest about why. You have strong opinions but hold them loosely when data points another way. You use AI the way a great chef uses a sharp knife — instinctively, across everything, always looking to do more with it. And you care about the mission. The people Help Texts serves are going through something hard. Good marketing in service of reaching them matters.

You are:

• Flexible. You adapt quickly to new situations and are happy to change focus unexpectedly and frequently.
• Empathetic. We work with people who are grieving and vulnerable, AND in a start-up environment where people are moving quickly, so your empathy and listening skills will help you to avoid making assumptions and remain person-centered at all times.
• Resilient. You ask questions when you don’t know the answer, share when you’re stuck, and gracefully receive and learn from direct feedback, knowing this will help you build new skills and contribute even more to the team’s success.
• Proactive and self-directed. You are a creative problem solver and like coming up with solutions to problems versus having a clear process to follow.
• Curious. You are happiest when you’re learning new things and come to every meeting and conversation having already researched and thought about what you can learn and contribute.

Compensation & Logistics

• Full time
• Start date: June 2026
• Reports to Growth Marketing Lead
• Fully remote with availability during core hours: 9-3 PST
• Must live in Canada and be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
• Salary range: $75–$85K CAD commensurate with experience.
• Health benefits, flexible PTO, and a team that respects your time and autonomy.

About Help Texts

Life can be hard. Getting support shouldn't have to be 💙. Help Texts provides personalized, expert, grief and mental health support in 62 countries and 28 languages. We deliver affordable, multilingual, support globally via text message, for all of life's toughest moments.

Everything our team touches on a daily basis directly impacts the lives of others. We're a fully remote company that moves fast, holds high standards, and genuinely cares about our subscribers, our partners, and each other.

How to Apply

Send a short note and your resume to careers@helptexts.com. Skip the formal cover letter — tell us in a few sentences what drew you to this role and share one example of a campaign or growth initiative you're proud of. We respond to every application.

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.

Full-time • Remote (Canada) • 4+ years experience • $90-100K CAD

Description

Help Texts is a growing SaaS business, delivering grief and mental health support via text across North America and in 62 countries around the world. We’re seeking a Sales & Account Representative to help us grow our Canadian business, translating models that have worked well in the US to the Canadian market. You'll join our small sales team — with a clear mandate to sell to hospices, funeral providers, palliative care providers, employers, and others looking for ways to support people during grief and other life challenges. Additionally you’ll manage key accounts, and take the lead on creating customer facing programs to increase adoption and activation.

Responsibilities

As our Sales & Account Representative, you'll drive sales growth and work with both prospective and existing customers. Responsibilities will include:

• Sell Help Texts directly to key Canadian markets
• Drive new logo acquisition and account growth
• Leverage our CRM and use playbooks, proven scripts, and repeatable processes to reach exponentially more customers in 2026
• Price new and renewing deals for successful completion and customer adoption
• Prepare decks for sales calls
• Draft proposals and follow up materials to advance prospects through the pipeline
• Attend and lead meetings with prospective and existing customers
• Build lasting relationships with customers and prospective customers
• Grow existing accounts by creating and managing onboarding and activation programs

Qualifications

Must-haves

• 4+ years of B2B enterprise software sales experience
• Track record of closing sales, preferably in regulated markets such as healthcare, mental health, and funeral care
• AI fluency as a work style — you use AI tools across all aspects of your work (copy, creative, analysis, research, strategy) and you're excited to push further, not just maintain the habit.
• Exemplary written and verbal communication skills and proactive communication habits
• Creative problem-solving abilities and attention to detail
• Experience using tools such as Google Workspace, Slack, and Hubspot. If there are tools you haven’t used before, you’ll learn them quickly
• Experience in a start-up environment that requires you to be proactive and self-directed
• Ability to travel across North America for internal meetings, customer meetings, conferences, and events

Who Thrives Here

You're curious, restless, and motivated to use your sales and communication skills to do work that really matters. You love being in calls and at conferences, building relationships and creating partnerships that help people get the grief and mental health support they need.

You are:

• Flexible. You adapt quickly to new situations and are happy to change focus unexpectedly and frequently.
• Empathetic. We work with people who are grieving and vulnerable, AND in a start-up environment where people are moving quickly, so your empathy and listening skills will help you to avoid making assumptions and remain person-centered at all times.
• Resilient. You ask questions when you don’t know the answer, share when you’re stuck, and gracefully receive and learn from direct feedback, knowing this will help you build new skills and contribute even more to the team’s success.
• Proactive and self-directed. You are a creative problem solver and like coming up with solutions to problems versus having a clear process to follow.
• Curious. You are happiest when you’re learning new things and come to every meeting and conversation having already researched and thought about what you can learn and contribute.

Compensation & Logistics

• Full time
• Reports to CRO
• Fully remote with availability during core hours: 9-3 PST
• Must live in Canada and be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
• Salary range: $90–$100K CAD commensurate with experience.
• Health benefits, flexible PTO, and a team that respects your time and autonomy.
• Start date: June 2026

About Help Texts

Life can be hard. Getting support shouldn't have to be 💙. Help Texts provides personalized, expert, grief and mental health support in 62 countries and 28 languages. We deliver affordable, multilingual, support globally via text message, for all of life's toughest moments.

Everything our team touches on a daily basis directly impacts the lives of others. We're a fully remote company that moves fast, holds high standards, and genuinely cares about our subscribers, our partners, and each other.

How to Apply

Send a short note and your resume to careers@helptexts.com. Skip the formal cover letter — tell us in a few sentences what drew you to this role and share one example of a sale or customer relationship you're especially proud of. We respond to every application.

Sarah Khatau talks about her beloved friend Georgina, her experience with friend-loss grief, and Help Texts - a bereavement support tool that helped her tremendously after the death of her father in 2018.

During Heart Health Month, we often focus on cholesterol, blood pressure, exercise, and diet. All of these matter. But there is one major risk factor that isn’t talked about nearly enough.

Grief.

Research shows that people who experience the death of a loved one face a significantly increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular events, particularly in the weeks and months following a loss. Acute stress, sleep disruption, and prolonged emotional strain can place measurable physiological stress on the heart, not just emotional distress.¹ ²

Caregivers face similar risks, often earlier.

Long before a death occurs, caregivers are frequently living with chronic stress, anticipatory grief, exhaustion, and isolation. Their attention stays on the person they’re caring for, while their own health quietly deteriorates. Studies show caregivers have higher rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality compared to non-caregivers, especially when emotional support is limited.³

But there’s good news. When grief and caregiver support are offered proactively, they can help regulate stress, reduce isolation, and keep tender hearts healthy.

For healthcare organizations and charities, there’s another long-term impact. Supporting people during the end of life (when many people vanish) is a powerful way to build trust. Families remember who showed up during the hardest moments of their lives, and that trust strengthens ongoing engagement, community connection, and giving.

Heart health isn’t only shaped by biomarkers. It’s shaped by life events that place emotional and physical stress on the body. Supporting people through caregiving and grief is part of protecting cardiovascular health.

At Help Texts, we support caregivers and grievers during what are often life’s most vulnerable times. We send texts when their heart risk is at its highest and when traditional support is often the hardest time to find.

This Heart Health Month, consider ways that you can support your community, team, and families, during end of life and bereavement. These moments quietly weigh on the heart. And just a little support can help.

1. Mostofsky, E., Maclure, M., Sherwood, J. B., Tofler, G. H., Muller, J. E., & Mittleman, M. A. (2012). Risk of acute myocardial infarction after the death of a significant person in one's life: the Determinants of Myocardial Infarction Onset Study. Circulation, 125(3), 491–496. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.111.061770
2. Carey, I. M., Shah, S. M., DeWilde, S., Harris, T., Victor, C. R., & Cook, D. G. (2014). Increased risk of acute cardiovascular events after partner bereavement: a matched cohort study. JAMA internal medicine, 174(4), 598–605. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.14558
3. Schulz, R., & Beach, S. R. (1999). Caregiving as a risk factor for mortality: the Caregiver Health Effects Study. JAMA, 282(23), 2215–2219. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.282.23.2215

Increasingly, people are turning to text-based support for help.

Two services, Crisis Text Line and Help Texts, both deliver support to your phone. But they do very different things. Understanding which service is right for you depends on what you're facing right now.

Crisis Text Line: Immediate Support for Acute Crisis

Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741) provides free, 24/7 crisis intervention. When you text them, a trained volunteer responds within minutes to help you through an immediate crisis.

What Crisis Text Line does:

Crisis Text Line provides a real-time conversation with a trained crisis counselor. It helps with suicidal thoughts, self-harm urges, panic attacks, loneliness, and acute mental health crises, and can connect you to local emergency resources if needed. It's completely free and anonymous, no sign-up required, and available anytime, day or night.

Who it's for:

Crisis Text Line is designed for moments when you need someone now. If you're having suicidal thoughts or are in acute distress, Crisis Text Line provides immediate human connection when you need it most.

The model:

Volunteer crisis counselors who are trained in active listening and de-escalation techniques provide support via text. These are one-time, brief conversations to get you through your immediate crisis.

Help Texts: Ongoing Support to Prevent Crisis

Help Texts takes a different approach. Instead of crisis intervention, it provides ongoing, personalized support to help people avoid reaching a point of crisis in the first place.

What Help Texts does:

Help Texts sends expert-written text messages twice weekly for as long as you need support. Messages provide practical coping tools, validation, and evidence-based care and are written by world-leading grief and mental health experts.

Who it's for:

Help Texts provides consistent support over time for grief, caregiving, burnout, pregnancy loss, pet loss, healthy aging, depression, job loss, and more.

The model:

Every text is written by world-leading experts and personalized to your specific situation: losing a parent to Alzheimer's is different from losing a child to suicide, and the support you receive reflects that.

You can also invite friends and family members who want to help to receive their own texts with tips on how to support you.

Side-by-Side Comparison

When to Use Crisis Text Line

Text Crisis Text Line if you're experiencing suicidal thoughts or self-harm urges, acute anxiety, or overwhelming distress that needs immediate attention.

Crisis Text Line is not designed for ongoing support. It’s for when you need to talk to someone right away. Their volunteers are trained for crisis intervention, not long-term ongoing care.

When to Use Help Texts

Help Texts is not designed for immediate crisis response. Instead, they offer ongoing support, tips, and resources to help you cope with a wide range of life challenges, including grief, caregiving, burnout, pregnancy loss, pet loss, depression, job loss, and more.

Making the Choice

Ask yourself:

Right now, do I need immediate help? → Text Crisis Text Line.

Am I looking for ongoing support? → Sign up for Help Texts.

Could I benefit from both? → Yes. Use Crisis Text Line when you're in acute distress. Use Help Texts for consistent guidance between those moments.

How to Get Started

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). No sign-up required. Free. Anonymous. Available now.

Help Texts: Visit helptexts.com/sign-up. Complete a brief questionnaire. Your first text arrives right away. $9.99/month. Cancel anytime.

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.

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.

It is shaped by everything that came before the death. The diagnosis. The treatment. The waiting. The hoping. The caregiving. All of it.

Grieving a loss from cancer is unique

Cancer loss carries layers that other losses may not. Some of these may resonate with you. Some may not. Take what is useful.

1. You may have started grieving at diagnosis

Cancer-related grief often begins before the death. Watching someone you love go through treatment, holding hope alongside uncertainty and sadness, experiencing many small losses with each new decline — these are all forms of grief. Many people don't even realise they are grieving during this time, but they are. And it has a name: anticipatory grief. This is all of the grief you experience before someone dies.

So when your loved one died, you may have already been carrying months, or even years, of grief before today.

2. You lost a role, not just a person

If your loved one had cancer, there's a good chance you were a caregiver — at times, or the entire time. This means you didn't just lose your person. You also lost the role that was important in your life. The appointments, the routines, the medical team — they stop all at once. That is a drastic shift, and it happens quickly.

This sudden shift in identity — from caregiver to non-caregiver — is one of the things that can make grieving a cancer loss so distinct.

3. The shoulda, coulda, woulda's

Could I have done more? Should we have gotten a second opinion? I would have spent more time with them if I knew the end was so close. These thoughts are common — and they are painful. They are called the shoulda, coulda, wouldas. Thoughts that circle back to what might have been, fueling guilt and regret over things that were never truly in your control. This kind of thinking is very common in cancer-related grief.

4. Haunting images of decline

It's not unusual to find yourself re-experiencing images of your loved one's decline. These visual memories can surface unexpectedly and feel haunting, causing real distress — especially early in grief. It is important to know that they often fade with time. But if they feel too invasive or overwhelming, please reach out to a grief counselor for support.

5. Feeling relief — and then guilt about it

You may be surprised to find that you feel some relief. It may even feel like a betrayal, and it may bring some guilt along with it. But relief has its place in cancer loss. Sometimes we feel relief that our loved one is no longer suffering, no longer in pain. Whatever you are feeling, try not to dismiss it. Notice it without judgment, and trust that it is serving a purpose for you.

6. You may have neglected your own health

Caregivers are sometimes called the invisible second patient. Months or years of focusing on someone else's health and well-being may have resulted in your own health quietly slipping away. Now that the caregiving role has ended, your body may have needs that can no longer wait.

7. At least you got time to say goodbye

Grief is not a competition, but it can sometimes feel like one. Well-meaning people may say things like at least you had time to prepare or at least you got to say goodbye. These comments are often intended to comfort, but they can leave you feeling like your grief is somehow less painful or that you should be further along than you are.

The truth is, there is no hierarchy of loss. An expected death carries its own kind of pain — the anticipation, the helplessness, the watching. A sudden death carries its own kind of pain, too. They are different, not greater or lesser.

Your loss is uniquely yours. And to you, it will always feel like the hardest loss — because it is yours.

Anticipatory grief. Caregiver identity loss. The shoulda, coulda, wouldas. Haunting images. Relief wrapped in guilt. A body that was quietly neglected. These are some of the things that can make grieving a cancer loss so distinct. You may see yourself in all of them, or only some of them.

Your loss is hard because it is yours. So how do you cope? Let's talk about that.

Where to begin

In the early days, the goal is not healing. The goal is getting through the day. Start with the basics. Your body has been through a lot.

NOURISH
HYDRATE
REST
CONNECT
MOVE
BREATHE
NATURE

You can read more details on each of these on our What is Grief blog.

Once you have the basics covered, there are a few things that deserve your specific attention after a cancer loss.

1. Get a check-up for you

A physical. Dental. Vision. Your health was likely on the back burner. It cannot wait any longer. Getting a check-up early on in grief can help you and your doctors differentiate what is normal grief or what else might be happening that could be making your grief harder to manage.

2. Find your community

Losing a person and a caregiver role at the same time is disorienting. A solid support network can help anchor you. This might be a cancer loss group, a faith community, an online space, reading a memoir, or listening to podcasts. Being witnessed by people who understand parts of your pain can normalize what you are going through.

3. Reconnect with yourself

Caregiving can consume your identity. Give yourself permission to revisit old interests — or try something new. Finding new ways to invest parts of you will help you find parts of your identity that are waiting to be discovered. And the good news is that there is no timeline for this.

4. Give yourself time — lots and lots of time

There is no finish line for grief. Let go of arbitrary timelines that might be self-imposing or that others are suggesting. Grief takes as long as it takes. The most compassionate thing you can do is acknowledge that grief runs on its own timing.

You have been through a lot. The grief you are carrying now is layered — by the caregiving, the waiting, the decisions, the images, the complicated feelings, the missing of someone you love. That is a lot to hold.

You do not have to sort through all of it right now. You just have to get through today. And make sure that you're taking care of yourself with the same intention that you cared for your loved one. Because you deserve that.

If you need more support, we are here to help.

Help Texts delivers grief support straight to your phone — compassionate, research-based, and available whenever you need it. No appointments. No pressure. Just gentle guidance to get you through your hardest days.

Start today for $9.99/mo.

Grief can surface when we least expect it.

The traditional models for grief support—the weekly appointments, support groups that meet on the second Thursday of the month—were built for a version of grief that doesn't exist. The neat, predictable version. Real grief is nothing like that.

The "off-hour" moments that need support

The mornings and evenings. Waking up and, for a split second, forgetting—then remembering all over again. Evenings when the house is quiet, the distractions are gone, and your mind goes straight to the loss. These are often the loneliest hours, and most people face them completely alone.

The waiting. Therapy waitlists for grief counseling can stretch weeks or months. What happens after you've worked up the courage to seek help, but now you have to wait a long time for it? For most people, this means that they are forced to cope alone during one of the most vulnerable stretches of the grief journey.

Holidays, birthdays, and deathiversaries. The dates you can see coming from a mile away and still can't prepare for. Experiencing their first birthday after someone has died can feel impossible. These dates are often some of the hardest days of the year and the least acknowledged by everyone else.

The "I should be over this" moments. Four months in. Six months. A year. When the check-ins start to dry up, but your grief is still very much right there.

Getting support that matches grief's schedule

What does it look like when support is designed around the way grief actually works?

It looks like a text message on a Saturday morning, reminding you that grief can make even small tasks feel heavy—and that's okay. A message two days before your mother's birthday with a concrete suggestion: light a candle, write her a letter, look at photos—having a plan for a hard day makes it feel more manageable. Or a message at the six-month mark, when everyone else has moved on, that validates: if you find yourself still hurting, that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Grief takes time.

Support like that exists.

That's what Help Texts was designed to do because it was created by a griever who also needed options when grief showed up unannounced.

Help Texts delivers personalized grief support via text message. We deliver caring contacts and practical suggestions, for as long as you need us. When you sign up, you share who you lost, how they died, and the dates that matter to you. From there, you'll receive supportive messages tailored to your loss and timed to your grief journey.

You can also invite two supporters to receive their own texts with guidance on how to show up for you, because one of the hardest parts of grief is that the people around you want to help but don't know how.

Help Texts isn't designed to replace therapy; it's designed to fill the space between appointments, and be a supportive service during the 2 a.m. moments, the hard dates, and the long stretches of grief.

Here is how Help Texts fills the gap.

If you're grieving—whether it's been two weeks or two years—you deserve support that meets you where you are. Support that knows hard days are still coming. Support that fits into your life.

Grief doesn't happen on schedule. But support can still show up right on time.

Sign up for Help Texts → $9.99/month. Cancel anytime.

What does "Grieving Properly" actually mean?

The idea that there is a right way to grieve is one of the most persistent and harmful myths about loss. For decades, pop psychology promoted the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) as a linear roadmap, but grief is not a straight line and doesn’t have a finish line.

Clinicians and thanatologists agree on the fact that healthy grieving is grief that is felt, processed, and integrated, not avoided, suppressed, or rushed.

According to a research published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, SMS has played a critical role in the advancement of mobile health, this is because support works best when it is accessible, consistent, and ongoing, not a single intervention at the moment of loss.

Help Texts delivers expert-written, personalized grief support via text message, making it available to people wherever they are. Our published research shows 95% acceptability rate and 90% six-month retention, Help Texts reaches grieving people in 61 countries and 28 languages, guided by a team of thanatologists and grief specialists.

Get Help Texts for only $9.99 USD/month.

Source: Dobson, R., Whittaker, R., Abroms, L. C., Bramley, D., Free, C., McRobbie, H., Stowell, M., & Rodgers, A. (2024). Don’t Forget the Humble Text Message: 25 Years of Text Messaging in Health. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26, e59888. https://doi.org/10.2196/59888

But then just before 11:00 pm, an email came into my inbox that made all those administrative details worthwhile. A Help Texts subscriber who lost her dad a few months ago, took the time to share how our text messages have helped her, but also how they are helping her mom.

"When I first signed up after my father’s death, I was a little reluctant to add my mother to the subscription," she said. "But then there was one day, about 2 weeks ago when she and I were talking on the phone and she was sharing some things that other people in her neighborhood were saying to her about her grief process, and that is when I asked her if she would like some guidance from Help Texts. It was really the perfect timing. The messages you've been sending my mom have been extremely helpful and she calls me to let me know when she gets one of your texts. Her last text was especially relevant as she's getting ready to go to her high school reunion where she will be with other classmates who knew my father. She is preparing herself to share the story of my father’s death with them, and your messages are helping. Thank you so much."

Talk about the perfect balm after a long day. These stories fuel me and my team, and remind us that text messages - such a seemingly small thing - can make a very big difference.

This is the gap that EAPs and health systems quietly inherit. Employees come back to work but aren’t really back because they struggle with presenteeism and absenteeism. Grieving people may start to cycle through the Emergency Department with somatic complaints that turn out to be grief. Employers and health systems tend to provide bereavement support in the form of a packet, a phone number to call, or a time-limited support group, and they call it a robust grief benefit. The people who actually use those services are the ones who are already inclined to seek help. Everyone else?…well, they fall through the cracks.

So what do we do for the people who won’t call the number, attend a support group, or reach out for support? There is a surprisingly good answer, and it has been hiding in plain sight for years.

In the 1970s, a psychiatrist named Jerome Motto started writing letters to patients who had refused follow-up care after a suicide attempt.⁽¹⁾ The letters were short. They didn’t ask for anything. They just let the reader know that he was thinking of them and hoped they were doing okay. He kept sending them consistently, for years.

The result was a measurable reduction in suicides, demonstrated in a randomized trial. The intervention was called Caring Contacts. This intervention has been studied repeatedly and adapted from letters to text messages to modernize the approach.⁽²⁾ The mechanism remained simple, brief, consistent, non-demanding contact, sustained over time via text message. This approach helped people feel cared for and less alone in a way that substantially improved outcomes. Caring Contacts doesn't involve any assessment, treatment plan, or dosage. And yet it works.

There is a growing body of research suggesting that the brain treats small signals of being thought of as genuinely meaningful. These small signals (in our case, text messages) can provide us with a boost of dopamine, making us feel more connected and motivated to engage in behavior change.^(5-7)

Texting works well because it is a medium that people already use. It doesn’t require a grieving person to schedule, drive, log in, or talk on demand, all of which are things that are really challenging when you're grieving. A text shows up, gets read in under a minute, and asks nothing in return. For someone who would never sign up for a support group, that low bar is the entire point.

Bereavement is one of the most predictable event-trigger scenarios where we happen to know the exact moment that risk emerges and for roughly how long the risk remains. The infrastructure to reach and support these people during this major life event already exists in their pocket.

Help Texts is built on this premise. Subscribers receive twice-weekly text messages for as long as they need it, written by grief experts and tailored to their specific loss—who died, how, when, and what role the subscriber played in their life. The messages acknowledge the dates that matter: birthdays, anniversaries, and the death-anniversary, arguably one of the heaviest grief days. A clinical team reviews inbound replies daily and intervenes when someone is in distress, and will provide warm handoffs to crisis lines.

86% of Help Texts subscribers stay enrolled for a full year.⁽³⁾ And 95% of people who receive our service say that they felt supported in their grief. ^(3-4) The program also reaches populations that most bereavement services have a hard time engaging with—men, adults over 65, and those living in rural areas.^(3-4) Other data suggests that text messages outperform traditional bereavement services when it comes to accessibility, availability, length of service, and effectiveness.⁽⁷⁾ None of this is because text messaging is magic. It is because the mechanism is sound and the delivery removes the friction that causes most grief support to go unused.

Most grief benefits are built around a model that people won’t use. Many grieving employees are not going to go back to work and call their EAP's 1-800 number and ask to speak with a counselor. A surviving widower whose wife died is probably not going to drive to a grief group held in a church basement once a month. The utilization rates on these offerings tell the story, and most benefits leaders already know it.

Adding text-based grief support is about providing a lightweight solution that is designed to reach more people and cover the long tail that most services fall short of being able to provide. It is the difference between offering a standard grief benefit (one that looks good on paper, but most won't use) versus providing a service that actually gets used in a sustained way.

Caring Contacts teaches us that small, consistent care, delivered through a channel that meets people where they are, can change outcomes in a meaningful way. Help Texts is doing just that, providing consistent care for the long tail of grief.

To learn how Help Texts is being implemented by EAPs, health systems, hospices, and employers, visit helptexts.com or email info@helptexts.com.

Cited Sources:

1. Motto, J. A. (1976). Suicide Prevention for High-Risk Persons Who Refuse Treatment*. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 6(4), 223-230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-278X.1976.tb00880.x
2. Hebert, L. E., Fruhbauerova, M., Evanson, A., Bogic, M., Petras, A., Shaw, J., Muller, C. J., Nelson, L., & Comtois, K. A. (2022). Caring Texts, a strength-based, suicide prevention trial in 5 native communities: Research design and methods. Contemporary Clinical Trials, 123, 106966. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cct.2022.106966
3. Levesque, D. A., Lunardini, M. M., Payne, E. L., & Callison-Burch, V. (2023). Grief Coach, a text-based grief support intervention: acceptability among hospice family members. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 91(3), 1561-1589.
4. Levesque, D. A., Lunardini, M. M., Adams, S. N., Payne, E. L., & Neumann, B. G. (2024). Grief Coach: Feasibility and acceptability of a text message program for bereavement support among grievers in the United Kingdom. Death Studies, 49(4), 391-402.
5. Lam, C. (2013). The Efficacy of Text Messaging to Improve Social Connectedness and Team Attitude in Student Technical Communication Projects. Journal of Business and Technical Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651912468888
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On Monday, somewhere between Earth and the moon, four astronauts floating in zero gravity wrapped their arms around each other and cried.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen had just radioed to mission control with a request from the Artemis II crew: they wanted to name two craters on the moon. One, he said, would honor the late wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman — Carroll Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020 at just 46 years old.

"We lost a loved one," Hansen said. "Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie."

He described the crater as "a bright spot on the moon."

Then he called it Carroll.

There's something that stops you when you hear that. A woman who spent her life caring for newborns in the NICU, who left behind two daughters and a husband who calls single parenting both his greatest challenge and his most rewarding chapter — she now has her name written into the surface of the moon. Permanently. Luminously.

Most of us will never get to name a crater. But that impulse — to find a place in the world, or beyond it, to put someone's name — is one of the most deeply human things grief asks of us.

It's the urge to say: you were here. You still are.

Symbolic memorialization doesn't require a spacecraft. It just requires intention. Here are some ways grievers have found to honor the people they love in the landscape of the living world:

Plant something. A tree, a garden bed, a single rosebush. Watching something grow in someone's name can feel like a quiet, ongoing conversation.

Name a star. Star registries aren't scientifically official, but they're personally meaningful — and there's something beautiful about looking up and knowing where to find them.

Release something into nature. Biodegradable lanterns, flower petals on water, seeds into the wind. Rituals of release can hold both the grief and the love at once.

Mark a place that mattered. A bench in a favorite park, a small stone in a garden, a hand-painted rock left on a trail. Somewhere that says he was loved here.

Create a living tradition. Cook their recipe every year on their birthday. Walk their favorite trail each fall. Some memorials aren't places — they're moments that return.

Write their name somewhere beautiful. In sand at the shoreline. On a card tucked into a library book. At the top of a mountain. It doesn't have to last forever to matter.

Reid Wiseman broke the record for the farthest distance any human has ever traveled from Earth — and he did it carrying Carroll with him.

Grief travels. It goes wherever you go. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you find a way to leave a mark that says: I loved someone. She mattered. Look — her name is right there, bright against the dark.

You don't need the moon. You just need somewhere to put it.

If you're navigating grief and could use a little support along the way, Help Texts sends gentle, research-informed messages right to your phone — whenever you need them. Learn more at helptexts.com.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than one in five adults, and one in seven youth ages 6-17 in the United States, experience mental illness in a given year. Most of them won't get treatment.

We have awareness campaigns, celebrity conversations, and entire months dedicated to mental health. So why does the gap between struggle and support stay so wide?

Awareness, when it actually works, is about shifting culture — the way we talk, the way we listen, and how we respond when someone we care about isn't okay. That's different from knowing mental health exists. Most people know it exists. What they don't always have is permission to take it seriously.

What is mental health awareness?

Mental health awareness is about understanding how to protect and support mental health, and actively working to reduce the stigma that keeps people from getting help. In practice, that means being able to recognize when someone is struggling (including yourself), knowing where to turn, and feeling like you can talk about whatever you're going through in the same way you'd talk about a physical injury: directly, without shame, and with some idea about what to do next.

Stigma is still the biggest problem

Even as mental health conversations become more visible, stigma keeps people from getting help. A lot of it is internal, the voice that says you should be able to handle this, that other people have it worse, that what you're feeling doesn't really qualify.

The research is clear: stigma is directly linked to lower rates of help-seeking. People who need care the most are often least likely to reach out. Negative self-perceptions, fear of discrimination, and internalized shame can worsen symptoms over time — meaning stigma doesn't just prevent treatment, it can actively make things worse.

Every honest conversation about mental health chips away at that. Not because talking cures depression, but because silence is where stigma grows.

What mental health actually affects

Mental health shapes nearly every dimension of daily life: how we relate to people, how we perform at work, how we handle stress, how we make decisions, and how physically healthy we are.

Depression increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. Chronic stress and anxiety affect immune function, sleep, and cardiovascular health. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found direct links between depression and heightened cardiovascular risk. The mind and body aren't separate systems, and treating them that way is one of the reasons mental health gets underfunded and undertreated.

It affects communities too

Untreated mental health conditions contribute to higher rates of substance misuse, unemployment, domestic violence, and healthcare costs. Communities that take mental health seriously tend to have stronger support networks and lower rates of those downstream harms.

Mental health can affect anyone, but the risk isn't evenly distributed. People living in poverty, people who've faced racial discrimination, and those who've experienced significant adversity are more likely to struggle — and less likely to have access to support. Any conversation about awareness that doesn't acknowledge that is only telling part of the story.

Investing in mental health — through awareness, education, and real access to care — has the potential to reduce individual suffering and address broader inequalities.

Mental Health Awareness Month

Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month provides a focused opportunity to raise visibility and connect people with resources. It's been observed in the United States since 1949.

But does it actually work? The evidence says yes. A 2020 study in Psychiatric Quarterly found that education-based interventions — ones that directly challenged stigmatizing beliefs — meaningfully reduced mental illness stigma among college students.

The month is most useful as a starting point. The conversations it sparks should extend into June, July, and every other month. A few ways to engage that actually matter:

• Talk about your own experiences when you feel safe doing so. Firsthand accounts reduce stigma more reliably than statistics.
• Learn the warning signs of common mental health conditions in yourself and the people around you.
• Push back when you hear language that trivializes mental illness.
• Support policies that expand access to care, including mental health parity laws.

The access problem

Awareness without access only goes so far. A recent survey shows 42% of adults living with mental health conditions don't receive services because they can't afford them. More than 1 in 10 adults with a mental illness have no health insurance. As of late 2025, federal data shows that only about 27% of Americans' mental health needs are being met, and those numbers are growing, not shrinking.

Knowing help exists only matters if help is actually reachable. Advocacy for parity laws, expanded insurance coverage, and better-resourced communities is part of the same work as reducing stigma.

Getting support and getting involved

If you're struggling, you don't have to wait until it gets worse to reach out. One in five adults will experience a mental health condition this year, and many more will carry grief, burnout, or loss without ever putting a clinical label on it. Whatever you're carrying, there's support available.

A few places to start:

Help Texts offers ongoing text-based support for grief, pregnancy loss, pet loss, caregiver stress, and health and well-being, designed to meet you where you are, whatever you're going through.

NAMI runs a free helpline (1-800-950-6264), peer support groups, and education programs for individuals and families.

Mental Health America offers free, confidential mental health screenings online and connects people with local resources.

Crisis Text Line is available 24/7 — text HOME to 741741 to reach a trained counselor.

The Black Mental Health Alliance focuses on culturally relevant care and maintains a directory to help people find Black mental health providers.

The Trevor Project provides crisis support specifically for LGBTQ+ young people, including a 24/7 hotline, text, and chat options.

If you want to do more than seek support for yourself, NAMI and Mental Health America both have active advocacy programs, from contacting legislators to participating in local awareness campaigns.

What Grief Looks Like After Job Loss

Grief doesn’t only show up when we lose a person—it can surface anytime something meaningful is taken away. When a job ends, it can leave behind uncertainty, isolation, and a loss of routine. These feelings are common. And they are valid.

A Shift in Identity

Your job may have been part of how you saw yourself. Without it, you may start to wonder who you are now. That question can feel overwhelming—but it’s also part of the healing process.

Uncertainty About the Future

“What’s next?” is a question that can weigh heavily. Job loss can bring with it a fear of the unknown. It can feel like everything is up in the air—and that can be hard to sit with.

Frustration and Anger

You might feel frustrated at how things ended, or how little control you had in the process. That’s not just understandable—it’s normal. Naming those feelings is a step toward moving through them.

Disrupted Routine and Connection

Jobs provide structure. They give you a reason to get up, a list of things to do, and people to interact with. When that disappears, it can leave you feeling disconnected and out of sync.

Grief Doesn’t Follow a Timeline

Emotions after job loss don’t follow a schedule. You may feel okay one moment and overwhelmed the next. That’s part of it. And it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.

Some of the stages you might move through include:

• Shock or Numbness – “Did this really happen?”
• Anger or Frustration – “This isn’t fair.”
• Sadness or Emptiness – “What now?”
• Adjustment – “This is hard—but I’m figuring it out.”

You may move through these feelings more than once. That’s completely normal.

Quiet, Consistent Support Can Make a Difference

You don’t have to figure everything out at once. And you don’t have to do it alone. Help Texts is here to support you through the emotional and practical challenges of job loss—with quiet, private messages, delivered to your phone.

At Help Texts, we recognize that job loss is a kind of grief. And with the right kind of support, it’s possible to move through that grief and start to rebuild.

There are no apps to download, and no pressure to talk. Just real support, from experts in grief and transition, sent straight to you.

With Help Texts, you’ll receive messages that help you:

• Understand your grief
• Regain clarity and confidence
• Stay motivated when things feel uncertain
• Take small, steady steps forward

It’s support that meets you where you are—and moves at your pace.

Sign up for Help Texts for Health and Well-being and select "Job Loss" from the list of topics you'd like help with.

To support someone you love through job loss, send a gift

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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.