Hold Fast is a book in two parts, built around four practices: Acceptance, Gratitude, Forgiveness, Service to Others. Part One follows Wendy Sarkissian through her husband Karl's death, and the four practices she built, one deliberate step at a time, to survive it. Part Two follows her back into those same four practices years later, facing a different loss: forests, rivers, and a climate collapsing around her. What emerges from both is the Reconciled Ecological Self, Sarkissian's original framework for staying connected to what we love as it changes, rather than retreating from the loss of it.

At the center of the book sits a mystery Sarkissian herself cannot fully explain. In 1993, she filled a large pad of paper with seven drawings in bright, thick colored pens, and then put them away. She would lose them not once but twice, first for twenty-eight years, then again for five more, resurfacing only in the last week this book was written. What she found in them, finally, was a warning she had given herself decades before she had words for it: proof that personal grief and planetary grief were never two separate sorrows, and a hard, honest look at why even someone who never doubted the truth of that warning could still bury it, twice, rather than carry it.