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 past newsletters.
My Grief is on Full Display
My grief is on full display daily. I have been wearing my grief, in a variety of forms, for the past 22 years. When my son died just hours after he was born, his tiny body was taken in a bassinet to the morgue and I was told that I was free to go home. I had to collect my bag, my clothes, my hopes and dreams, and leave the hospital without him.
Introducing Susan MacLeod, Cartoonist-in-Residence at Grief Matters!
Recently, my drawing practice has turned to creating grief and death stories in the hope my cartooning can lessen my real fear of death, grief, and loss as I age. I’ve been drawing people in nursing homes for well over ten years now.
*Photo by CBC
Why I love Dan Levy’s Good Grief movie
Recently, a family member commented that there was a movie coming out that had three of my favorite things. My social media tends to be an echo chamber of my interests and so I already knew about the upcoming movie, written by and starring Dan Levy, called Good Grief. So, I said that two were grief and queerness, but I could not figure out the third.
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
Parasocial grief and why I can grieve Matthew Perry
Academics and clinicians love to break down concepts into component parts. These parts then can take on lives of their own.
I’m not a fan of how grief is continually being broken into parts. Ambiguous grief. Anticipatory grief. Abbreviated grief. Absent grief.
*Photo by Tim Marshall
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
Falling leaves marking time
Falling leaves marking time. Autumn is the hardest season for me. It can be a melancholy time in the northern hemisphere, with leaves changing colour and sweaters coming out of storage. In Canada, I physically steel myself for the holing up I will do over the next few months as I turn up the thermostat, get out the couch throws, and change to flannel bedsheets.
Photo by Karolina Bobek
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