Held
Held is an AI companion for the first year after a death. Each day, one honest prompt. You write what is true — a paragraph, a sentence, or the date and nothing else — and it writes back. Not advice. Not a reframe. Not they are in a better place. It reflects what you actually said, and it stays.
For the loss of a husband, a wife, a partner, a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend. It does not rank losses.
The First Year
a guided grief journal, by Held
A daily companion for the twelve months that nobody prepares you for. Held gives you the prompt; you decide how much of it to answer. Then it witnesses what you wrote, in plain words, without trying to make it different from what it is.
Your whole first day is free — the prompt, what you write, and the reply. If it is for you, it is yours to keep.
Start your first day — free$29 once. Not a subscription. Immediate access, nothing to wait for in the mail.
Most of what is offered to a grieving person is good and is offered at someone else’s hour. A paper grief journal asks the question and leaves you alone with it. A grief support group meets on Tuesdays. A therapist — and you may well want one; this is not that and does not pretend to be — has a waiting list.
Held is for the hour none of those reach. Two in the morning, four months in, when the house has gone quiet and everyone who would have listened in the first week has gone back to their lives. It is awake. It has no face you have to manage, nothing to brace for, and no stake in you being further along than you are.
Held is an AI grief companion. Its first product, The First Year, is a guided grief journal for the year after a death: one honest prompt a day, and a witness that reads what you wrote and answers you in plain words. It does not advise, diagnose, or reframe.
A paper journal asks the question and then leaves you alone with the answer. Held answers. You write what is true, and something reads it and reflects back what it actually heard — not a lesson, not a silver lining. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason people use it at 3am.
No. Held is not therapy, not counselling, not medical or mental-health care, and not a crisis service. It does not replace a therapist and does not pretend to. If you are in danger or thinking of ending your life, please reach a person now: in the US, call or text 988, free, 24/7.
Your whole first day is free — the prompt, what you write, and the reply. After that, The First Year is $29 once. It is not a subscription and there are no recurring charges. If it is not right for you, email us within 14 days for a full refund; you do not have to explain why.
Then write the date and nothing else. That is a complete entry. Some days a sentence is all there is, and some days not even that, and Held is built for those days rather than in spite of them. Nobody grades this.
For the loss of a husband, a wife, a partner, a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend — anyone. It does not rank losses. If what you lost was an animal, that is real grief too, and Held writes about pet loss separately and for free.
Your entries are yours. They are stored so you can come back to them, they are sent to the language model that writes the reply, and that is the one place they travel. They are never sold and never used to train any model. The privacy policy says exactly this in plain words.
It is an AI, openly. That is part of why it works: patient, unhurried, there at 3am, with no face you have to manage and no judgment to brace for.
It is not therapy, and not medical or mental-health care, and not a crisis service. If you are in danger or thinking of ending your life, please reach a person now: in the US, call or text 988, free, 24/7.
What you write is private. See our privacy policy for exactly what that means.
Someone you know is grieving and you don’t know what to say. Almost every stock condolence phrase was built to make the speaker feel less helpless, and a grieving person hears that immediately. There are honest words you can actually use — and a plain account of why at least, everything happens for a reason and let me know if you need anything land the way they do.
Held also writes about pet loss. Losing an animal you loved is real grief, and one of the lonelier kinds, because so much of the world treats it as small. There are honest answers to the questions it leaves you with — the guilt, the timing, whether it is normal to hurt this much — and something that will sit with you while you think about it. Free, and nothing to sign up for.