Blog
Welcome to the Grief Matters blog. We intend for this space to provide an opportunity for the Grief Matters community to write, read, share, and reflect about ‘all things grief.’ At Grief Matters, we understand grief as the experience of loss. This loss could be a death (a human, an animal). It could also be the loss of something else: your health, a job, an opportunity, a future goal, or dream.
While grief can look and feel different to every individual, we live our grief within our social networks and in our communities. We feel that community matters deeply to the experience of grief. So, we invite you to share with us in order to help create more grief-attuned communities.
How does grief matter to you?
What grief matters are important to you?
Email us your ideas about how you could contribute to the Grief Matters blog. Please see our guest bloggers guidelines.
Read our Fundamentals Blog Posts
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Grief/Animals Grief/Arts
We are the ‘public’ in the public health approach to grief. So, why does this matter?
Grief is having a moment. In Canada, at least.
We can thank Canadian Grief Alliance (CGA) for being an early adopter and pushing conversations about grief. CGA was formed by concerned Canadians who anticipated an avalanche of grief due to the COVID-19 pandemic. CGA lobbied successfully to get grief onto the 2023 federal budget for the first time in Canadian history. Amazing.
Photo by Timon Studler
What does it mean to grieve ‘well’?
We recently had the pleasure of being guests on the podcast, Sickboy (you can listen to that episode here. It was a live recording at the Halifax Central Library (so much fun!) During the conversation, co-host Jeremie Saunders made a comment that has stuck with us since. Jeremie observed that he “did not grieve well” and had been “a bad griever” after his beloved dog Bigby died.
*Photo by Jeremie Saunders
What Grief is Not
I am often asked to define grief. I have been thinking a lot about the improvisation (improv) principle of ‘YES, AND’ lately. The idea of improv in the performing arts and storytelling is that meeting any suggestion with a YES, AND then building on it, leads to creative spontaneity.
So what do grief and improv have to do with one another?
Photos by Tasha Lyn
What is grief literacy and how does it matter?
What is grief literacy and why does it matter? Grief literacy is a concept that was born in 2018 at a gathering in London (Ontario, Canada). At that meeting, a small group of people who are part of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement imagined together how civic action could create a grief-attuned world.
Photo by Neil Thomas