MORTAL. Grieve better.

MORTAL is a guide to grief, built from what people across the world have always known about loss. It's early days. Join the waitlist and we'll invite you in to help us build it.

One email when there's something real to say. No spam.

Why MORTAL exists

When my father was dying, I discovered I knew nothing about death.

The people who helped me most weren't the people with the highest status in the room. They were the night sitters, women who spent night after night sitting beside people who were dying. They knew how to be there. They could explain what was happening without making it frightening. They could speak when words were useful, and stay quiet when they weren't.

At the same time, I was surrounded by extraordinary pain and a culture that seemed incapable of looking directly at it. The cards arrived: lavender, flowers, polite words, deepest sympathies. Everything had been softened at exactly the moment nothing felt soft.

Then a friend sent a message that occupied the same reality I did:

"This is going to be shit."

It didn't explain, offer meaning, or make the situation smaller so either of us could feel more comfortable. It acknowledged the truth.

MORTAL is my attempt to give everyone what the night sitters and that friend gave me.

James Sowden, cofounder

We've built a culture around gain, and lost our fluency with loss.

Modern life is fluent in wanting and getting: more money, more status, more youth. It is increasingly avoidant of decline, endings and loss. At the same time, the structures that once helped us face mortality have weakened. Death has moved out of ordinary life. Families no longer learn what it looks like from one another. First, we whitewashed death. Then, we individualised grief.

Once
Grief was expressed.
Now
Grief should be swallowed.
Once
Grief was witnessed by a community.
Now
Grief is your private responsibility.
Once
Grief had physical forms.
Now
Grief is an intellectual, diagnosable problem.

The past wasn't better. But those cultures understood something we've misplaced.

The wisdom already exists. MORTAL's job is to bring it back.

We spent a year looking for it. In hospices and monasteries, in psychology and philosophy, in art, and in the ways people grieve from Ireland to Japan, Ghana to New Orleans. We've barely scratched the surface. We're always looking for more, and for people who know more than we do.

MORTAL draws on the work of twenty Guides, among them Thich Nhat Hanh, Kathryn Mannix, Viktor Frankl and Sobonfu Somé, and on grieving rituals from more than a dozen countries. They don't agree with each other, and we don't ask them to.

We believe a broad perspective serves people better than a single answer. Every faith, culture and philosophy has found its own road to death. A myriad roads lead to the same destination, and none of them changes the destination.

MORTAL lays out the wisdom that exists, in the hope that it might help you on the path that you are on.

Acknowledge. Talk. Act.

Everything MORTAL does sits in three parts.

Acknowledge

Recognising that something was here, and now it isn't.

So much loss goes unrecognised. The death of a pet can be devastating while the culture around a person quietly decides it doesn't really count. A child leaving home is one of the hardest losses to cope with, and one of the most dismissed: "Finally you have the place to yourself again!"

There are losses we have no ceremony for, and sometimes barely any language for. MORTAL begins by acknowledging what happened, without deciding how important it should have been or ranking one grief against another.

Talk

Finding the words.

We don't need to invent the words. They already exist. One person might find something in a hospice nurse's words. Another in a tradition entirely different from their own.

Whichever it is, the aim is the same: more language than silence.

Act

Grief has never only been an intellectual experience.

For thousands of years, humans have responded to loss physically, through sound, breath, movement, gathering, making, marking, ritual. Modern grief has lost much of that.

MORTAL wants to bring action back, as a way of expressing grief. Something to do with it when thinking isn't enough.

Write to us.

MORTAL is being built in the open, with anyone who can help. We'd like to hear from:

People who work with grief. Hospice nurses, grief educators, night sitters, anyone who has sat with the dying.

Philanthropists who think the world should be better at loss, and want to help make it so.

People who work in AI and care how it behaves when someone is grieving.

People who have grieved and want to test early versions of the Guide.

Anyone else who thinks this should exist.

Tell us who you are and what you'd bring. Book a call if you'd rather talk it through, or write to us at the addresses at the bottom of the page.

Book a call

Thirty minutes, whenever suits you.

Join the waitlist.

One email when there's something real to say. No spam.