I’m Kirsten. I’m a mother, a writer, a grief advocate, and the person behind This Is Grief.
I didn’t set out to build any of this.
In April 2024, my daughter Kahlia died by suicide. She was 24.
There is the life I had before that sentence, and the life I have lived since.
In the beginning, I wrote because I didn’t know what else to do with everything I was carrying. I wrote about Kahlia, about grief, about anger and guilt, about the strange things loss does to your body and your brain, and about trying to keep living when the person you love is no longer here.
Somewhere along the way, that writing became This Is Grief.
Not because I had worked grief out.
Quite the opposite.
I created the kind of place I kept looking for, somewhere grief could be spoken about without being tidied up, softened, rushed, or turned into a lesson.
Why I Do This Work
I know what it is to need somewhere that doesn’t ask you to be okay.
To need information without being overwhelmed by it.
To want to understand what grief is doing to you without being told how to “move forward”.
To want someone to say the things other people seem frightened to say.
My background is in Educational Psychology, but much of what I know about grief came the hard way, by living it.
This Is Grief brings those two things together.
Lived experience and understanding.
The personal and the practical.
The things research can explain, and the things no textbook ever could.
I write, create resources, run courses and grief writing spaces, and speak about grief, suicide loss and what it means to support people when life has changed beyond recognition.
I’m not interested in teaching people how to grieve properly.
I’m interested in making it less frightening to be human when life has gone terribly wrong.
What I bring to this work
Lived experience matters here. So does understanding what grief can do to a person.
I have a degree in Educational Psychology, and I’ve spent much of my working life around people, systems and the complicated ways humans behave when life gets difficult.
But grief changed the way I understand all of it.
This Is Grief sits somewhere between lived experience and what we know about grief, the brain, the body and loss. I write, create resources, facilitate grief writing spaces and speak about grief and suicide loss.
I don’t believe grief needs to be fixed.
I believe it needs to be understood, spoken about, and given somewhere to exist.
Keep exploring
My work lives in different places, depending on what you need.
Read the blog for the things I’m still figuring out.
Find support for grief, in all its messy forms.
Explore my books for the longer stories.
Join a course if writing feels like somewhere to put what you’re carrying.
Grief-informed leadership for bringing this understanding into workplaces and organisations.
Blog · Support · Books · Courses · Grief-Informed Leadership
