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Curating Grief: A Creative Guide to Choosing What to Keep After a Loved One Dies
How do we decide what to keep after a loved one dies? This new book from certified grief coach and curator Charlene Lam offers an innovative way of seeing meaningful objects, the physical stuff, and our relationships with the dead, the living, and ourselves.We’re all curators after a loved one dies. No gallery or artistic ability needed.
When someone important to us is gone, we face difficult choices—what to keep, who gets what, how to go on. The Curating Grief® framework offers a compassionate, empowering way to navigate these difficult decisions.
In these pages, you’ll discover that a purely clinical approach often isn’t enough for healing after major loss. We need a blend of the practical and poetic, grit and grace.
This book will help
Embrace the role of curator—no artistic ability or fancy collection required.Build a continuing bond with your loved one, whether your loss is recent or decades ago. *Handle physical belongings in compassionate, accessible ways.Navigate complex feelings, including guilt and regret, around relationships with both the living and the dead.Make space for your grief and what is truly important to you.Whether you’re grappling with piles of stuff or piles of grief (or both), discover a creative, gentle path forward—without losing yourself or needing to leave your loved one behind.
"Charlene Lam is a deeply wise mentor whose creativity, intuition, and experience come together brilliantly in her new book, Curating Grief. She brings hope and vision to those who are grieving a searing loss, offering the reader a pioneering process for healing that can quietly transform their whole life."
— Kristine Carlson, New York Times bestselling author and co-creator of the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series
When someone important to us is gone, we face difficult choices—what to keep, who gets what, how to go on. The Curating Grief® framework offers a compassionate, empowering way to navigate these difficult decisions.
In these pages, you’ll discover that a purely clinical approach often isn’t enough for healing after major loss. We need a blend of the practical and poetic, grit and grace.
This book will help
Embrace the role of curator—no artistic ability or fancy collection required.Build a continuing bond with your loved one, whether your loss is recent or decades ago. *Handle physical belongings in compassionate, accessible ways.Navigate complex feelings, including guilt and regret, around relationships with both the living and the dead.Make space for your grief and what is truly important to you.Whether you’re grappling with piles of stuff or piles of grief (or both), discover a creative, gentle path forward—without losing yourself or needing to leave your loved one behind.
"Charlene Lam is a deeply wise mentor whose creativity, intuition, and experience come together brilliantly in her new book, Curating Grief. She brings hope and vision to those who are grieving a searing loss, offering the reader a pioneering process for healing that can quietly transform their whole life."
— Kristine Carlson, New York Times bestselling author and co-creator of the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series
360 pages, Paperback
Published December 3, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 29, 2026
Sometimes the right book finds you even when you think you already know the territory. ❤️
Ten years into my own journey with grief, this book gave me a completely new way to understand something I had instinctively done myself.
Lam’s beautiful, compassionate book asks us to reconsider what we do with all the “stuff” our people leave behind—not simply as things to keep or throw away, but as objects we can **collect, curate, and create with** as we continue our relationships with the people we’ve lost. Continuing bonds, she calls them, and they are very real. It’s not an “imaginative exercise.”
And somewhere along the way, I realized, my own book, In the Garden Behind the Moon, is a Grief Gallery. I just never knew to call it that. I only bring it up at all—because this is a full-throated endorsement of Lam’s book, not my own—because I think it means that Lam has articulated something here (a process, a ritual, a reframing) that grieving people may *instinctively* need to do, even before anyone gives them language for it.
I am ten years into my own grief journey and even having accidentally, and instinctively, done almost all of the things Lam encourages grievers to do in this book, I still got so much love, introspection, and companionship from its pages.
Something I especially loved about the book is the way Lam leads the explorations with bits of anecdotal memoir about her mom, her mom’s death, their relationship when she was living, Lam’s struggles as an only child with her mom’s estate after she died. Lam has taken high-level psychological principles around grief and made them so rich, immediate, warm, and personal. Not to mention the charming watercolor illustrations of objects people (her mom and others) have left behind: purse contents, a pen collection, unfinished craft projects, etc. But reader, it begins with an ordinary soy sauce bottle. On a white museum plinth. 🖤 That drew me right in
If you’re grieving, or facing the belongings someone you love left behind, I hope you’ll discover *Curating Grief*. It’s practical, wise, deeply validating, and extraordinarily kind.
Grief needs a witness, as they say, and this book knows how to be one.
Ten years into my own journey with grief, this book gave me a completely new way to understand something I had instinctively done myself.
Lam’s beautiful, compassionate book asks us to reconsider what we do with all the “stuff” our people leave behind—not simply as things to keep or throw away, but as objects we can **collect, curate, and create with** as we continue our relationships with the people we’ve lost. Continuing bonds, she calls them, and they are very real. It’s not an “imaginative exercise.”
And somewhere along the way, I realized, my own book, In the Garden Behind the Moon, is a Grief Gallery. I just never knew to call it that. I only bring it up at all—because this is a full-throated endorsement of Lam’s book, not my own—because I think it means that Lam has articulated something here (a process, a ritual, a reframing) that grieving people may *instinctively* need to do, even before anyone gives them language for it.
I am ten years into my own grief journey and even having accidentally, and instinctively, done almost all of the things Lam encourages grievers to do in this book, I still got so much love, introspection, and companionship from its pages.
Something I especially loved about the book is the way Lam leads the explorations with bits of anecdotal memoir about her mom, her mom’s death, their relationship when she was living, Lam’s struggles as an only child with her mom’s estate after she died. Lam has taken high-level psychological principles around grief and made them so rich, immediate, warm, and personal. Not to mention the charming watercolor illustrations of objects people (her mom and others) have left behind: purse contents, a pen collection, unfinished craft projects, etc. But reader, it begins with an ordinary soy sauce bottle. On a white museum plinth. 🖤 That drew me right in
If you’re grieving, or facing the belongings someone you love left behind, I hope you’ll discover *Curating Grief*. It’s practical, wise, deeply validating, and extraordinarily kind.
Grief needs a witness, as they say, and this book knows how to be one.
May 15, 2025
When Charlene abruptly lost her vivacious mom, Marilyn, to a stroke in 2013, she initially didn’t know how to interpret and express her grief. Using the tools she had cultivated as a museum curator, she reflected on the things her mom left behind, investigating each piece and what it represented, creating an art installation celebrating Marilyn’s life and sharing the woman she knew with the world. Over the next decade, she would go on to use her experience as a guide to build a grief support framework to help others through their devastating losses.
The quality of the pages and artwork are truly stunning, to behold the items you are becoming intimately acquainted with is a treasure. The format is laid out in small sections and each is further broken down with varied content, making a painful and complicated topic highly palatable without overwhelming.
The interwoven personal stories of Charlene and those she has collected from others, along with grief education, self-reflection questions, and practical tips, make this read relatable and actionable, in a process that often feels isolating and helpless.
I’m not just saying this because I’ve utilized Charlene as a grief coach, or because my stories are highlighted in the book, but rather because she has a unique ability to create a calm and healing environment for all who encounter her and I think this book is a valuable tool for every griever.
The quality of the pages and artwork are truly stunning, to behold the items you are becoming intimately acquainted with is a treasure. The format is laid out in small sections and each is further broken down with varied content, making a painful and complicated topic highly palatable without overwhelming.
The interwoven personal stories of Charlene and those she has collected from others, along with grief education, self-reflection questions, and practical tips, make this read relatable and actionable, in a process that often feels isolating and helpless.
I’m not just saying this because I’ve utilized Charlene as a grief coach, or because my stories are highlighted in the book, but rather because she has a unique ability to create a calm and healing environment for all who encounter her and I think this book is a valuable tool for every griever.
June 19, 2025
As a social worker who supports grieving people, I can tell you that this book is such a helpful guide for the many, many grievers who struggle with what to do with their loved one's belongings. Charlene's guidance will help grievers make sense of what is not only a practical task, but a deeply emotional one. My clients have expressed how her "curating grief" framework has turned what could be a monumentally hard task into one full of meaning and even some joy.
Also, who doesn't love a book about grief that also mentions the 90's classic O.P.P.? Charlene's book is full of humor and real talk - which is a balm for grievers. At the same time, I was struck by how Charlene shares her personal journey while never forgetting that no one's grief story is the same. I believe whatever your story of loss, you will feel seen and understood in the pages of this book.
Also, who doesn't love a book about grief that also mentions the 90's classic O.P.P.? Charlene's book is full of humor and real talk - which is a balm for grievers. At the same time, I was struck by how Charlene shares her personal journey while never forgetting that no one's grief story is the same. I believe whatever your story of loss, you will feel seen and understood in the pages of this book.
June 30, 2025
Grief is something we can experience even without loosing a loved one. I picked up this book because I needed to work on several life experiences I needed to grieve and come to term with. I’m a creative person and I thought curating my emotions (and objects attached to them) through art would be a soothing way to go through such painful task. Charlene’s prompts and questions helped me look at other aspects I had never thought of. Throughout the book she holds your hand soothingly, patiently and in a light way (if grieving could be made light, Charlene is your person) that it feels as she’s there with you like a good old friend.
August 24, 2025
This is a hefty and creative guide on what on earth to do with the physical “stuff” of grief. Chock full of stories, reframes, exercises, and examples, Charlene guides you through the process of choosing what to keep after a loved one dies. She’s also with you in the weeds of hard topics like “I didn’t like how they were memorialized,” “I carry guilt about the loss,” and “I don’t have objects to remember them by.” This is truly a unique perspective on coping with grief from a masterful artists and curator!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews