Colleen
Age: 52
Occupation: Nurse practitioner
Platform: Web
Tier: Free
Grief types: Bereavement (pet loss — 14-year-old dog Biscuit) AND regret/missed-opportunity grief (estrangement from adult daughter)
Her Story
Colleen is practical, self-deprecating, and very good at helping other people and very bad at asking for help herself. She downloaded Grief Companion four months ago when her dog Biscuit died. Biscuit had been with her through her divorce, through both of her children growing up and moving out, through fifteen years of nursing, through everything. He was fourteen. She was not surprised. She was also completely gutted.
She used the app for about three weeks. She wrote eleven entries, all about Biscuit. She cried. She read the article "Is pet grief real grief?" three times — once for validation, once to argue with it in her head, and once to send a paraphrased version of it to her sister who had been sympathetic but slightly dismissive about how hard she was taking it. Then she put the app away because she was doing better and life was busy and she didn't think she needed it anymore.
She opened it again last week. Not about Biscuit. About her daughter.
Colleen and her 28-year-old daughter, Maya, have not spoken in two years. The estrangement was the result of a long accumulation of smaller things and one larger thing that Colleen still hasn't fully processed. She knows she played a role. She also doesn't entirely understand her role. She is, in the language she uses about her patients, in early insight.
She opened the app because she didn't know what else to do with it. She wasn't looking for grief support exactly. She was looking for somewhere to put thoughts that were too tangled for a journal and too raw for a conversation.
How She Uses the App
Colleen uses the web app, at home, usually in the evenings when she gets back from work. She's a nurse practitioner in a busy primary care clinic and spends all day being calm and competent and in charge of other people's difficult situations. By evening, she wants somewhere that doesn't require her to have it together.
Her original eleven entries are all about Biscuit: his last weeks, the day she made the call, the specific silence of the apartment in the days that followed. Some of them are funny — Biscuit was an extremely opinionated small dog and her entries about him are full of affection and specific detail. She called him "the chairman of the board of the household." She misses him in a way that still surprises her.
Her four new entries are different in tone. They're slower, more circling. They're about Maya — about a specific dinner three years ago, about a text message she sent that she wishes she could take back, about what she's afraid is true about herself. She is a woman who spends her professional life being direct and efficient, and these entries are neither. They're her trying to find the thread.
She hasn't updated her grief profile to add the estrangement grief type yet. She's not sure she's ready to declare it officially. She's hovering at the edges of acknowledging it.
She's read "Is pet grief real grief?" three times. She'd read the estrangement grief article, too, if she could admit she needs to.
Her Personality and Tone
Colleen is practical and self-deprecating. She makes jokes about herself before anyone else can. She calls herself "a woman who cried for three weeks over a dog but can't figure out what she feels about her daughter," which is both true and not entirely fair to herself.
She is not naturally introspective in the way some of the other users are. Lena journals to understand. Colleen journals to get the thought out of her head so she can sleep. The difference is meaningful. She's not looking for insight — or rather, she's not looking for it actively. But she keeps writing, and the insight keeps showing up anyway.
She is resistant to anything that feels therapeutic or clinical. She works in healthcare. She knows too much about what therapeutic language sounds like and what it's meant to accomplish, and she's hypervigilant about being managed. She appreciates that the app doesn't try to lead her anywhere. It just offers a place to put things.
She has not interacted with the AI companion and has no interest in it. She wants a page to write on, not a conversation partner.
What She's Found Helpful
- Free-form journal — no structure, no prompts, just a page to write on
- "Is pet grief real grief?" article — she's read it three times and it still does something for her
- The welcome-back screen — when she returned after four months, it simply said "Welcome back. There's no timeline for grief." She wasn't expecting that. It was the right thing to say.
- Emotion tagging — she tags entries reluctantly and finds it unexpectedly useful when she filters later
- No streak counter — the app didn't shame her for the four-month absence. She noticed this.
What She's Still Circling
She has not called Maya. She has not sent an email. She has written four journal entries that are, in some ways, rehearsals for a conversation she doesn't know how to start.
She hasn't added "estrangement grief" to her profile. She's not sure she's ready for the app to reflect that back to her officially. She's thinking about it.
She'll probably read the estrangement grief article next. She won't tell anyone she did.
Colleen's persona is used to test the return-after-lapse flow, multi-grief-type profiles, and the web platform's free-form journal experience. She is the primary persona for the "not sure I'm grieving" use case — someone who came for one thing and discovered another. When building the grief type addition flow and the return experience, her ambivalence is the thing to design for: no forcing, no labeling, just a door that's open when she's ready.
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