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I Don't Know What to Say
Paperback
Publisher Price: $59.99
ISBN13: 9785431435171
Publisher: Tobias Renwick
Published: Sep 2 2026
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.42
Height: 0.29 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Somebody you care about has just lost someone. You have been staring at your phone for ten minutes and everything you type sounds wrong.
So you decide to leave it until you can think of something better.
That is how it happens. A day becomes a week, a week becomes too long to say nothing about, and then saying anything at all would need an apology - so nothing gets said. Not because you did not care. Because you were frightened of getting it wrong.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY is a short, practical book for the friend, the sibling, the neighbour, the colleague and the manager. Fifty-two two-page sections. Nothing to interpret. Written to be usable in a car park before you go in.
THE THREE RULES IT COMES DOWN TO:
1. Send something now, badly. Two clumsy lines today beat a perfect letter in a month.
2. Offer a thing, not help. Never let me know if you need anything - that hands the whole job to the person least able to do it. A named task, at a named time, with a one-word way out.
3. Write the dates down. Six weeks. Six months. The anniversary. Everybody is there for the first fortnight. Almost nobody is there afterwards.
WHAT IS INSIDE:
Part One - The First Days: what to put in the first message, whether to go round, what to do when you get there, what to bring, what to say at the funeral
Part Two - What to Say: why at least always fails, what to ask instead of how are you, what to say if you never met them, what to say months later, what to do when you have said the wrong thing
Part Three - What to Actually Do: food that gets eaten, the admin nobody offers to help with, driving, being in the house without talking, the questions never to ask
Part Four - The Long Part: the week everybody leaves, the anniversary, the birthdays, why the second year is often harder, and how to keep asking after being told no
Part Five - Harder Situations: work, being a manager, grieving the same person, complicated relationships, the deaths people find hardest to talk about, and when they push you away
Part Six - Looking After Yourself: what this costs you, when their grief opens yours, and why you must not be the only one
AND THE LISTS AT THE BACK, EACH ON ONE PAGE SO YOU CAN PHOTOGRAPH THEM:
- What not to say
- What to say
- Specific things to offer, with the exact wording
- A calendar of what to do and when, from today to the second anniversary
- What to write in a card
- When they need more than you can give, and where to point them
WHAT THIS BOOK DOES NOT DO:
It does not tell the grieving person how to grieve, how long it should take, or what stage they are in. There are no stages here, no statistics, no case histories. It makes no assumption about who died or what anybody believes.
It contains no legal, financial or medical advice, and it says plainly which questions are none of your business.
The author is not a therapist, a counsellor, a doctor or a grief coach, and says so on the way in. This is a book written from where you are standing: next to somebody else's loss, without training, trying not to make it worse.
You do not have to be good at this. You have to be present at it, repeatedly, for longer than feels necessary.
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