Today marks one year since the e-book, Letters to Grief, was published.

If you don’t have a copy yet, you can grab one here for just $0.99. It’s a super short read — only twenty pages.

If you’ve read the book, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon by clicking here?

To celebrate the one-year anniversary, we’re having a special edition link-up.

You’re invited to write your own letter to grief and share it with us right here.

You could either type your letter into the comments section of this post, or publish it on your own blog and share the direct post to the Inlinkz link-up below.

For sample letters from a similar link-up last year, click here.

Thank you in advance for sharing! We look forward to reading your words.

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Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Dear Grief,

You are water.

You rain down in rhythmic drops, a constant tapping on the tin roof of my empty heart, and you refuse to be ignored. You’re a leaking faucet, a steady drip into an open wound.

Yet I need you to water my soul. To make me grow. To survive. You stretch me and draw me tall toward the sun; without you I would shrivel up and wither away.

Image by Katie Reid, katiemreid.com, Twitter: @Katie_M_Reid

Even in stages of evaporation, you don’t disappear entirely, but wait to be stored up in the clouds until a storm is ready to thunder and pelt you down in stinging drops. Sometimes you’re a pounding downpour, and I want to run from you — to escape to dry shelter and not be touched by you. Other times you’re the gentle patter that lulls me to sleep at night, soothing and almost unnoticed.

At times you stand still, a puddle at my feet — not threatening, but leaving me soggy and uncomfortable.

You’re the morning dew, sparkling in the dawn of a new day, the residue of last night’s tears.

Like the ocean, you pull in strong currents, and your depths are unknown. You come in waves, rising with lofty swells that crash down incessantly. I ride in your crest until you break and I wash onto the shore, empty and defeated.

In winter you form stoic icebergs that line the shore, masses of frozen mounds that keep well-intentioned visitors at bay, too fearful to set foot on your unpredictable foundation.

You’re a powerful waterfall, charging over the precipice and crashing loud into the abyss, leaving a cold mist to rise up in a foggy haze. The melted mountain snow run-off, trickling down the rivulets of rock, causing others to stop and look. You’re a flowing river, free to run its course in unchartered territory not designed by me.

I’m carried along by you, and I am undone.

But as your Master fixed limits for the sea which He created and “set its doors and bars in place,” so He limits you.⁠ As He says to the waters He formed, so it is with you: “This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt.”⁠

As much as you threaten to flood and drown, you will not overcome. For there is One who gives living water — “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”⁠ And you, Grief, will dry up and be gone forevermore.

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The holidays can be a particularly vulnerable time for people who are well acquainted with grief.

Do you know someone whose heart may be aching this season? Consider gifting them with a copy of this book.

Thanks for joining us today! Looking forward to reading your letters!

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