Non-Fiction · Digital book

Tethered

By Sikho

In 2026, grief has a new set of tools: AI companions built from a dead person's voicemails, text messages, and old letters that can hold something resembling a real-time conversation with the person you lost. A University of Colorado Boulder study documented a 32-year-old woman describing a chatbot built from her late grandmother's messages as 'visceral.' Grief-tech products like HereAfter AI, Seance AI, Project December, StoryFile, and You, Only Virtual are no longer a curiosity — they're an established, fast-growing industry, and grief researchers, ethicists, and hospice providers are only now catching up to what they actually do to the grieving process. Tethered is the evidence-based guide to grieving well in this new landscape, grounded in the real psychology of healthy mourning: Dennis Klass's continuing bonds theory, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut's Dual Process Model of oscillating coping, and Robert Neimeyer's meaning reconstruction framework. The book follows three real-feeling case studies through a full year of grief: Corinne Ashby, a widow whose nightly calls to her late husband's voice-bot tip from comfort into dependency before she finds her way back to a bounded, chosen ritual; Marcus Ferreira, a father who has to decide what a voice-bot built from his late wife's recordings should and shouldn't be allowed to mean to their nine-year-old daughter; and Simone Achebe, estranged from her father for six years before his sudden death, who tries to 'argue it out' with a simulated version of him before finding something more honest in the real, unfinished letters he

276 minutes estimated reading

Access, enrollment and any payment are managed by Sikho. Check the current price and availability there. This title is not included in NyzaStore membership.