Grieflandia is a character-based world designed to help people understand and process grief.

Through a collection of illustrated characters, Grieflandia represents the many thoughts, feelings, and experiences that can appear after the loss of a loved one. By giving people a way to recognize and name what they’re feeling, Grieflandia offers a more immediate and accessible approach to understanding grief.

The Grieflandia card deck is the first product within this world, offering a simple, flexible tool for reflection, conversation, and support.

Grieflandia was created by Jennifer A. O’Brien, MSOD, a healthcare leader with decades of experience and a death-literacy advocate who focuses on family caregiving, end-of-life preparation, and grief.

Jennifer is grief experienced, having lost her sibling, both parents, and her husband, who was a hospice physician. Through both her personal and professional experiences, she recognized how difficult it can be for people to understand and describe grief as it unfolds.

She created Grieflandia as a way to make the many experiences of grief easier to recognize, name, and talk about.

Jennifer A. O’Brien is grief experienced. In 1983, when she was 18, her only sibling, David, died at age 13 following a motor vehicle accident. Nearly 20 years later, her mother, Victoria, died of pancreatic cancer. In 2017, her husband, Bob, a hospice and palliative care physician, died of cancer. And in 2022, her father, James, died from congestive heart failure and lung disease.

She can tell you that the grief following the loss of her brother was different from the grief she experienced after the deaths of her parents, and the loss of her husband brought yet another kind of grief. Through these losses, she came to understand that not only is every person’s grief experience different, but each loss can create a different grief experience within the same person.

When Jennifer allowed the art journal, she created while caring for and grieving her late husband to be published as the book, The Hospice Doctor’s Widow: An Art Journal of Caregiving and Grief, she found herself in the death and grief space in a very public way.

Grief is powerful. It has altered the course of history, started wars, ended lives, inspired great works of art, and even built the Taj Mahal. It can fracture families, deepen love, reshape identity, and alter the course of an individual life forever.

And yet, for all the advances of modern times, we have become a grief-illiterate society and remained one for far too long. While the death of a loved one is among the most consequential experiences of a person’s life, few people are taught much about grief or prepare for it in any meaningful way.

With this realization, Jennifer set out to make grief more compelling, approachable, and understandable by creating endearing characters that represent the many elements of grief and the certainties of time, change, and death. Along the way, she realized something was missing: support. Additional characters representing helpful and soothing practices soon followed. And thus, the Griefies, Certainties, and Helpies were born, forming the foundation of Grieflandia and its central idea: grief has many faces. With 51 Griefies alone, the number of possible combinations exceeds 2.25 quadrillion, reflecting the reality that grief is never just one thing and rarely stays the same.

She created the characters and experiences within Grieflandia not to simplify grief, but to reflect its variable and shifting nature. Her hope is that they help people recognize what they are feeling, find language for experiences that can be difficult to describe, and realize they are not alone in them.

Jennifer holds degrees from Boston University and Loyola University Chicago and is the author of The Hospice Doctor’s Widow and Care Boss.