The Unburdening follows Diana, a hospice chaplain who loses her husband and finds a way to stop hurting. It works. That is the problem. A story about the one debt you cannot outsource.
Ebook available now · paperback and audiobook on the way. See formats and prices
Literary fiction · a novella
Everyone who has grieved has wished for one thing: to set it down for a while. Just to breathe. Just to function.
It is 3:12 AM. Diana Okafor is on her bathroom floor, six months after her husband Marcus died in his sleep. She has a funeral to officiate in six hours. She cannot stand up. The grief is physical, a grown man standing on her chest.
She has spent her whole career holding other people through the worst nights of their lives. She is the container. And tonight the container cracks.
So she does what the young nurses whispered about. She downloads an app that promises to take the weight. Not delete it. Store it. The memory stays yours. You just stop having to carry it.
Speak the memory that is too heavy to hold, and Vessel compresses it, files it, and lifts it out of your chest. The relief is instant. Diana sleeps. She stops crying. She doubles her caseload. She becomes the calmest person in every room full of dying.
The dashboard tells her she is optimized. Zero unprocessed events. It does not mention the account balance climbing quietly in the corner.
Hello, Diana. You are doing well today.
Timeline: 365 days post loss event. Current holdings:
Compression ratio 847 to 1. Decompressed payload 847 hours. Translation: she has compressed eight hundred and forty seven hours of grief into one hour of storage. The emotional payload has not decreased. It has been condensed.
You do not need to carry the weight of a memory to keep the love. The love is yours. The pain is data. Let Vessel carry the data.
She hadn't deleted her grief. She had turned it into a bomb.
The Unburdening is a Black Mirror premise written as literature: one familiar, reasonable choice, followed all the way to its physical conclusion. Vessel keeps its promise perfectly. That is what makes it terrifying.
The night the weight becomes unbearable, and the moment Diana presses the button for the first time.
Diana as the star of the hospice, efficient and untouched, walking through rooms of grief without flinching.
Her daughter Sophie sees what everyone else missed. The account balance is not zero. It never was.
The bill comes due all at once, in a parking lot, and Diana has to choose what kind of person walks back inside.
You have not outsourced time. You have outsourced mass.Vessel, to Diana
She was a billionaire of grief. And she had no idea how she was ever going to pay it back.Chapter Three
You are standing right here and you are gone.Sophie, to her mother
Being scared doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means you're human. And that's enough.Diana, at the bedside
For readers of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and for anyone who has ever wanted to fast forward through the worst of it. In the moral tradition of Black Mirror, told with the interior stillness of The Midnight Library.
Jeff Bullock earned a PharmD at Xavier University of Louisiana and spent eighteen years in healthcare, close to the rooms where families sit with the dying. He now writes fiction that runs a single human choice all the way to its edge, and founded PRISM AI Consultants, where he works with leaders on using technology without letting it use them.
He wrote The Unburdening because the promise Vessel makes is the promise every new tool now makes: hand us the hard part, and feel better right away. The book asks the quiet question underneath that offer. If a machine carries the pain of loss, what happens to the love it was attached to.
The ebook is available now. The paperback and audiobook are on the way. Prices below are the launch prices.
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Something quieter. There is one speculative element, an app called Vessel, and everything else is a real grief, a real mother and daughter, and a real hospice. It reads like literary fiction that happens to ask a Black Mirror question. If you loved Klara and the Sun or Exhalation, you are in the right place.
It is honest about loss, so it will likely bring things up. It is also, at its core, a story about coming back to yourself and to the people you love. It does not end in the dark. Many readers who are grieving find it more companion than trigger, but you know your own timing best.
It is a novella, built to be read in a single evening. Short enough to finish tonight, dense enough to sit with for a week. It is a strong book club pick for exactly that reason.
The ebook is available now at a launch price of $9.99. The paperback launches at $14.99, and an audiobook is in production. Buy the ebook through the book page on drjeffbullock.com, or find it on Amazon.
Dr. Jeff Bullock, PharmD. He spent eighteen years in healthcare, near the rooms where families sit with the dying, and now writes fiction that follows one human choice to its edge. The Unburdening is his novella about grief and the machines that promise to hold it for us.
It hurt. Thank God, it hurt.
Diana learns what it costs to feel nothing, and what it takes to come back. Read the book that has readers texting their mothers at midnight.
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