Pre-Orders for Synchronicity in Grief Open at Most Retailers Now, on Routledge’s Website on 9/15/26
A favorite bird flies in a church, on the morning of a funeral.
A song on the radio at a moment too apt to explain away.
A clock that stopped every day at a specific moment coinciding with a significant other’s time of death.
People who participate in my research have shared stories like these for years.
Yet, it can be hard to talk about sometimes, in a global society that struggles to offer coherent frameworks for meaningful experiences not easily explained via causality. Often, when people do talk about these experiences, it is almost always hedged. People have said to me, “I know how this sounds.” Or, they might preempt any materialistic dismissal of their experience by discounting it in advance, by saying things like, “I am not saying it means anything,” or “You probably think I am being silly, or this is just a confirmation bias or something.”
The reluctance people feel about sharing what this is like for people is much of what this book is about, as I focused the main organization of the book around the concept of Doka’s (2002) disenfranchised grief. When people are afraid to talk about non-ordinary experiences in bereavement, that can create a disenfranchising force that can limit their ability to make meaning from it and grow from their grief.
What the book is about
Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss is not a book that tells bereaved people what their experiences mean. I would not trust a book that did, and I would not have wanted to write one. What interested me was something more modest and, I think, more useful: what these moments actually do. How a person uses one to rebuild a sense of meaning that a death took apart. What it costs them when the people around them will not let the moment be what it is for them: deeply meaningful.
Because that is the pattern that repeated throughout 15 years of several rounds of data collection. Not doubt from the bereaved — the bereaved are usually quite careful, quite measured, quite aware of how it sounds. The doubt comes from everyone else. And the person learns, quickly, to stop mentioning it, sometimes even to close friends, spouses, and family members. These experiences can be disenfranchised, and when that disenfranchisement is intersectional with other aspects of disenfranchised grief more generally, a person can struggle to integrate the loss and its meaning.
The book grew out of a study I published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2025, and out of years of listening. It braids four bodies of theory: meaning reconstruction, continuing bonds, terror management, the shattered assumptive world — around something clinicians hear constantly and the literature has been slow to take seriously.
The book tries to hold the position that grieving people, and those helping them, do not have to decide what a coincidence was in order to take seriously what it did. Sometimes, non-ordinary and nonrational things take place that open us up to healing and growth — see Helen Marlo’s articles and Bernard Beitman’s work on synchronicity-informed psychotherapy — and not everything has to have a causal explanation. Meaning is enough.
A book made of other people’s moments
I want to be careful about how I frame this book and its content, because although I wrote it, it is not solely my own because it is based on the stories shared with me over the course of 15 years of existential-phenomenological qualitative research with bereaved people who generously talked with me about what it is like to experience synchronicity in grief. This book is the product of many people’s experiences, thoughts, concepts, and ideas, and a team of other people who are involved in the publication process.
Bereaved people trusted me with experiences they had been talked out of before, some of them more than once. Scholars I have never met built the frameworks I used to make sense of what I was hearing. A publisher’s team — a commissioning editor, a copy editor, a typesetter, a production controller, an indexer’s guidelines, and a proofing system I had to learn — turned a manuscript into a physical object with a spine. I wrote it. But I did not make it alone.
It takes a village to raise a book. I am one small part of mine.
Checking it was really there
A few weeks ago I typed the book’s ISBN into a search bar, to see whether anything would come back. It felt like checking that something was really there. So I was delighted to find that the book was already live online, on Routledge’s website, and on most major retailers’ pages for pre-order now.
What I keep thinking about, as the book becomes a reality that anyone can read, is the gap between how quietly these moments get told by those who experience them, and how much weight they carry. A woman lowers her voice to tell me about a bird. She has been carrying it for eleven years. She has only ever told two other people. And now her story is in the world, to help others feel validated in theirs.
If the book does one useful thing, I would like it to be this: that a clinician who reads it does not explain these experiences away. We may not ever be able to explain how or why they happen, but when they do, their meaning is transformative.
Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss is out with Routledge on October 19, 2026. Pre-orders open today — the link is on my book page, and on Routledge’s site.
It is a strange thing to hand it all over and to be finished with these long writing stretches. Mostly I feel quiet about it, and grateful to the people whose moments are inside.
— Jennifer
The patience of publishing.
I write about the making of this book, and about grief and meaning, in my newsletter The Meaning We Make. You are welcome to follow along.