Witnessing Grief: Tending our Grief in Community

​Grief is intimate and deeply personal, and it was never meant to be carried alone.

​Many of us have learned to carry it privately — to metabolize it on our own time, quietly, so as not to burden anyone. We believe that we get good at it. In fact, we get so good at it that we can go years without ever saying the thing out loud in a room with other people — the grief still in the body, waiting. That privacy costs us something.

​This is an evening to try something different.

​Together we'll slow down, name what we're carrying, and practice letting grief be seen — and holding someone else's without needing to fix it, or to fix our own. There is nothing to resolve.

​The invitation is to be fully present, building our capacity to stay with what's here, and discovering the gift of being held in community.

​Every grief belongs — the death of a loved one, a diagnosis, a relationship, an estrangement, a marriage, a pet, a place, a job, a future that isn't coming. Fresh grief and grief you've carried for decades. You're welcome even if you're not sure what you're grieving.

​Come as you are. You'll be invited to share what is real for you. You're free to stay quiet.

​Everything is welcome.

​Quintin Mecke is a grief counselor, somatic facilitator, and end-of-life doula in San Francisco. His practice — catching the curve — is grounded in the body, in ritual, and in the conviction that grief is a relationship to be lovingly tended, not a problem to be solved. quintinmecke.com