Opportunity

Funding supports: Development and production of the book, and resources for leaders and groups

Goal: $8,500

The first-draft manuscript and illustrations are complete and awaiting next steps. Supporting the publication and distribution of this combined volume creates a transformative resource for individuals and communities. The book will reach grief-havers, grief counselors, spiritual directors, social justice educators, healthcare workers, and anyone seeking a more whole-hearted engagement with life’s blows and blessings. Your support helps ensure this wisdom—born from Hanna’s lived experience and continued creative work even as ALS progresses—reaches the people who need it most.

Description

In 2021, facing personal loss, Hanna du Plessis embarked on a forty-day grief practice—twenty minutes of daily writing, some shared publicly. What emerged was a radical challenge to a culture that teaches us to “look away to be okay.” After completing her grief essays, she felt “anemic” and began a second forty-day practice focused on gratitude. Midway through this gratitude practice, in March 2023, Hanna was diagnosed with ALS. She continued writing until the work grew to over 40,000 words.

These essays—intimate, illustrated, unflinching—document one woman’s journey through personal and collective grief toward gratitude, even while living with a terminal diagnosis. They bridge the unbearable and the exquisitely alive.

Impact

These essays offer readers permission to feel what our culture asks us to suppress. They model a practice of turning toward rather than away from pain, and of finding gratitude not despite suffering but alongside it. For those navigating loss, chronic illness, or systemic grief, Hanna’s voice offers companionship and a roadmap. For those learning to grieve collectively—for instance, white readers grappling with historical harms—the essays provide tools for metabolizing trauma without numbing or spiritual bypassing. This is essential reading for a world that urgently needs to learn how to grieve and how to practice stubborn gladness in the face of devastation.