MORTAL basics

MORTAL is a guide to grief, built from what people across the world have always known about loss.

We will lose everything we love, and most of us arrive at that moment with nothing to reach for. The wisdom exists. It is in cultures that still grieve together, in hospice workers who have sat with hundreds of people as they died, in writers, psychologists, monks and people who have lived through loss. Most of us never encounter it until it is too late to look.

MORTAL is the reading done for you. It brings that wisdom together, credits where it came from, and puts it where you can reach it.

No. Nobody grieves badly. That is not what the line says.

It says the culture around grief can do better. Right now grief is treated as weather. It happens to you, privately, until you are acceptable company again. Nobody is shown what death looks like. Nobody is given the words. That silence is not kindness, it is a culture with nothing to offer.

Grieve better is addressed to that culture, not to anyone in the middle of a loss.

Everything MORTAL does sits in three parts.

Acknowledge. Recognising that something was here and now it is not. So much loss goes unrecognised: a pet, a child leaving home, a version of yourself that has gone. MORTAL starts by acknowledging what happened, without ranking it or deciding how much it should matter.

Talk. Finding the words. We do not need to invent them. They already exist, in a hospice nurse's plain speech or in a tradition entirely different from your own. The aim is more language than silence.

Act. Grief has never only been an intellectual experience. For thousands of years people have responded to loss with sound, breath, movement, gathering, making and ritual. Modern grief has lost much of that. MORTAL wants to give you something to do with grief when thinking about it is not enough.

In James's words: MORTAL will sit with you. It will listen. It will give you words and ideas and actions if you need them.

The Guide is the first thing MORTAL is building. A conversation you can have at 3am when there is nobody else awake.

It begins with Mapping. Significant loss rarely arrives alone. A loss today connects to things that happened years ago, to people, places and versions of yourself that have gone. Mapping gives those losses a shape, so the Guide meets you where you are now. How is your grief today. Not how it was when the person died, not how it should be by now. Today.

From there the Guide draws on the Lexicon, MORTAL's library of named people and traditions, and offers a perspective, some language or something to do. Where you need more than a perspective, it will point you towards a human being who can help.

Not from us. MORTAL does not invent a theory of grief and does not claim one.

Everything in MORTAL comes from a named person, tradition or culture, and is credited to them. We call them Guides. A Guide is anyone whose work, practice or lived experience offers real understanding of an aspect of being human. MORTAL does not absorb their authority. It introduces you to them and makes the path back to their own work clear.

Where a practice belongs to a culture, it stays in that culture. MORTAL describes it, credits it, and does not perform it.

I trained as a grief educator with David Kessler, who co wrote On Grief and Grieving with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and has spent his career correcting how the five stages are misused. The stages were never consecutive stations.

The Lexicon currently holds twenty two Guides, among them the palliative care doctor Kathryn Mannix, the psychotherapist Julia Samuel, the Zen teacher Joan Halifax, the poet John O'Donohue, Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastics of Plum Village, the ritual leader Francis Weller, the Dagara teacher Sobonfu Somé, the artists Taryn Simon and Ai Weiwei, and the Uppsala researchers behind Alba, a grief app for bereaved adolescents. It also holds reports on Irish, Japanese and communal vocal mourning traditions, and on music as a form grief takes.

It grows every week.

Honest answer: MORTAL is not built on a clinical evidence base, and we will not pretend it is.

It is built on attributed human wisdom and lived practice, gathered across cultures and centuries, and on saying plainly where the research is thin. Where a Guide's work has been studied, we say so. Where it has not, we say that too.

The nearest research to what we are building is the Alba trial at Uppsala University, a randomised trial of a grief app with bereaved adolescents. It found no measurable benefit at two months or six, and a significant one at twelve. Grief support that works is slow.

Our own evidence will come from putting the prototype in front of people who are grieving and finding out what helps, what does not, and what should change.

A prototype of the Guide exists. A first group of people is testing it now, and what they tell us will shape what MORTAL becomes next.

What does not exist yet: a product you can download. We would rather learn from a small number of people who are actually grieving than launch something to everyone and find out later.

Two people. James Sowden, who spent twenty years in brand and strategy and trained as a grief educator after his father died. Ronnie Moth, who builds the technology. We founded MORTAL together and we are building it in the open.

Three ways.

Join the waitlist below and we will invite you in when there is something real to show you.

If you are grieving and would be willing to test the prototype and tell us the truth about it, say so when you join.

If you have expertise, experience or ideas that could shape MORTAL, email james@wearemortal.com.