Sunday, November 2, 1:00 PM
Sonin Room
Please bring a photo of your loved one.

Following the loss of a loved one, we don’t need solutions. We don’t need to move on from our grief. We need others to see it, to acknowledge our loss. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

Saying the name of a lost loved one out loud and talking about their life, within a structured format, can be a blessing.

A light lunch will be served.

The kindest response to someone who has lost a loved one is to say: Tell me a story about him, her, or them.

“We have this idea that our grief is linear and if we do it correctly, the loss won’t bother us anymore. Like we have this sort of communal expectation that hardship goes away quickly and if it doesn’t go away quickly, you’re doing it wrong. So that does a disservice to grieving people because they feel like they’re failing their own grief. And it does a disservice to people who are trying to be supportive because we have an imagined timeline in our heads and we’re assessing the person we care about as to whether they match to that timeline or not.

So, we’re really failing each other in that way. Grief is part of love. Grief is going to last as long as love lasts. When we look at grief as part of love, we understand that it doesn’t have an end point. It may not always be as intense as in those early days, weeks, months, years, but it will always be with you. It’s much more realistic and much more kind, both to the grieving person and those who want to be supportive, to think of loss as something that gets integrated into a person. It’s not something that gets overcome and left behind.

Things get different. They don’t get better.”
~ Megan Devine