James Joseph

About

I work with people who are carrying a death and finding that the ordinary machinery of a week no longer runs as it used to. My clients are usually holding down jobs and households and quietly astonished at how much that now costs them. Mourning is unglamorous and largely invisible. It shows up as forgetting where you parked, as reading the same paragraph four times, as an inability to decide what to eat, and almost none of that resembles the version people expect. We work with what it actually looks like rather than the version in films. Naming the mundane symptoms is often the first relief anybody gets. I have been doing this long enough to have heard several hundred versions and I have yet to encounter one that struck me as excessive. If your week has stopped running properly, that is the ordinary shape of this.