If you sit with people on the worst day

Something to hand them tonight.

You are in the room at the moment this book is about. The week after the funeral. The afternoon the papers get signed. The third night in a row somebody can't sleep.

And a lot of you have told me some version of the same thing: there is nothing good to hand them. The pamphlets are useless and the books are either too religious or not religious enough, and mostly they are written by somebody who has clearly never been in the hole.

So here is what I have. It's a book for people over fifty who drifted away from a spiritual life and have quietly decided that door closed behind them. It doesn't ask anybody to join anything, attend anything, or believe anything by a certain date. There's no church at the end of it.

The whole thing is free to read online right now. No email, no sign-up, nothing to buy, no sample that stops at the good part. If somebody is sitting across from you this week, you can give them the address before they leave.

The whole book, free Nineteen chapters, an introduction and an appendix. The address is short enough to write on the back of a card: bringthebaggage.com. Read chapter four yourself first if you want to know what you'd be handing somebody. It stands on its own and it takes about seven minutes. steve@bringthebaggage.com Printed copies don't exist yet. Write to me anyway. Tell me who you sit with, roughly how many you'd use, and where to mail them, and I'll send them when there are copies to send. That's the whole process. There is no form and nobody is going to follow up with an offer.

If the person in front of you is having one of the hard nights, this page asks nothing of them at all. No navigation, nothing to read but a few true things.

Who this is for

Counselors and therapists. Hospital and hospice chaplains. Funeral directors. Divorce attorneys. Recovery sponsors and group leaders. Men's group and grief group leaders. Anybody whose work puts them next to a person on the day it comes apart.

Including at churches I would not attend myself. That is not a dig. It's just true, and it doesn't change anything about whether the book is useful to somebody in your chair.