October prepares us for the ways grief shows up in our lives throughout the holidays, All Saints Day, Día de los Muertos, and more. So, it’s an honor to share a book that guides us through seasons of grief this month in Timoth Sylvia’s Grieving Differently: Queering the Stages of Grief.
Belief Behind the Book is a feature that gives readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the beliefs, or what I call “the WHY,” behind books written by progressive spiritual leaders. Inspired by the Ministry from the Margins Books program, Belief Behind the Book spotlights why authors write the books they write, offering practical tips readers can apply to their own belief systems.
Grief follows no rules and honors no timeline. So why do we keep pretending it does?
When Timoth Sylvia’s husband, Peter, died suddenly, the grief that followed didn’t look like anything he had been taught to expect. His grief was heavier and lonelier than any framework allowed.
It was also, he came to realize, queerer, shaped by an identity and a love the usual map had never been drawn for. Grieving Differently is what came of that realization.
Part memoir, part reimagining of the stages of grief, it follows Sylvia through the disorienting first year and a half after Peter’s death and asks what the stages reveal when we stop treating them as a checklist and start grieving honestly, from the inside.
Grieving Differently meets you in the moments other books skip past:
- The fog that blurs the hours you most need to remember;
- The pressure to grieve quietly, quickly, and on someone else’s timeline;
- The exhaustion of explaining your loss again and again; and,
- The slow, disorienting work of becoming someone new in the wake of who you’ve lost.
Drawing on the hard-won wisdom of the queer community—a community that knows what it means to tell a difficult truth, again and again, and to survive it—Sylvia offers a way of grieving that refuses rigid timelines and makes room for the fullness of loss.
Along the way, he names a stage you won’t find in any textbook: Coming Out, the ongoing, sacred act of speaking your changed self aloud to a world that assumes otherwise. It is an insight born from queer experience and offered freely to everyone who grieves.
This is a book for anyone learning to live with loss, whether you are grieving a spouse, a child, a friend, a relationship, or a version of life that is gone. It is for the bereaved who have been told they are doing it wrong, and for the pastors, chaplains, coaches and friends who walk beside them.
Timoth Sylvia (he/him) is a queer author, professional grief coach, and ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ. Trained under David Kessler, he has spent decades accompanying individuals and communities through grief. A father of three teenage boys, Timoth writes from lived experience following the death of his husband, inviting readers to reimagine grief with honesty, community and courage.
When asked why Sylvia wrote this book, he responded, “The grief that came after my husband died poured out of me in words. And when brought together, they fill a void. There is little to nothing out there helping people navigate the uniqueness of queer grief. Because it didn’t exist, I had to write the book.”
What makes his book so revolutionary is that, while it offers unique tools for queer grievers, the particularity of queer grief offers prophetic strategies applicable to all those who are grieving. He continues with a practical takeaway for readers, saying, “No matter what it is that you are grieving, no matter what your grief looks like, you’re not doing it wrong. Grief follows no rules or timelines. And your grief needs not be fashioned to make other people comfortable. Let it be real, and messy, and beautifully human.”
No matter what, how, and when you’re grieving, Grieving Differently serves as both a permission slip and a companion to queer the stages of grief in a way that honors your specific journey.
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Award-winning author of ten books, including The Authorpreneur Handbook. Founder and CEO of Tehom Center Publishing, a nonprofit press publishing feminist and queer authors, with a commitment to elevate BIPOC writers. Rev. Dr. Yarber’s work has been featured in Forbes, HuffPo, NPR, The Advocate, Ms. Magazine, the television show Tiny House Nation, and more. She travels the world speaking, preaching, publishing, and writing, but she can always be found at www.tehomcenter.org