When Regina Collier lost her partner, Dean, in July 2022 following complications from a double-lung transplant, she found that grief altered not only her own life but the behaviour of almost everyone around her. That experience forms the backbone of her new book, I Don't Have Leprosy, I'm Just Grieving: A Widow's Blunt Perspective on Society (ISBN: 978-1834385839), published through Tellwell Publishing and available from October 2026.
The title captures what Collier describes as one of the most disorienting effects of bereavement: the sense of becoming socially untouchable. People disappeared, she writes. Conversations changed. Others offered clichés, unsolicited advice or attempts to fix something that could not be fixed. Some simply withdrew when her grief grew too uncomfortable to witness. Collier began asking why the pain of bereaved people is so routinely avoided, managed or treated as a problem to be solved by those around them.
Rather than writing from the distance of hindsight, Collier narrates grief from inside it. She introduces the concept of "Grief Brain" — a disorienting mental and emotional state that accompanies profound loss — and allows her thoughts to be repetitive, contradictory, angry and at times darkly humorous, with little attempt at sanitising them for the reader. She also confronts specific behaviours she encountered: being told what Dean "would have wanted," having her loss compared to others', being assumed to have recovered because sufficient time had passed, or having her anger avoided.
Underlying the critique is a portrait of Dean as not only Collier's partner but her closest friend and the foundation of a shared future. His death, she writes, meant grieving their routines, plans, sense of security and the life they had expected to grow into together. Her four adult children, family dog Brutus and memories of that life serve as anchors throughout her account.
The book's central appeal to readers is straightforward: listen to grieving people rather than assuming what they need; allow them to speak about the person they lost; and do not disappear simply because their grief is uncomfortable. Collier does not offer a formula for resolving grief. For those who have experienced loss, she says the book is intended to offer recognition rather than instruction. For others, it offers an account of what life can look like after the funeral is over and the sympathy cards have stopped arriving.
I Don't Have Leprosy, I'm Just Grieving is available through Amazon and major online retailers. More information can be found at reginacollierauthor.com.
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