Learn how to tend to experiences
of grief, in ourselves and in our communities

As Deathwalker, a Celebrant and an educator Zenith Virago has led pioneering work with individuals and communities to take after-death care and death related ceremony back into their own hearts and hands for over 30 years.

In this episode, Zenith shares insights from and reflections from starting practice as a Deathwalker at a time when death care in Australia was far more institutionalized than today, through the decades later as a community educator and Tedx speaker who has now trained many hundreds of community members in the traditional skills of community deathcare and ceremony.

Zenith also offers practical insight on the unique ways that ceremony and ritual can support grief and healing beyond the boundaries of linear time.

Jana DeCristofaro, LCSW, is the Community Response Program Coordinator at Dougy Center where she also hosts the Dougy Center’s long running podcast Grief Out Loud. Since 2002, Jana has coordinated peer support groups for children, teens, young adults and adults. She also provides consultation and training for grieving families, students, community members and professionals locally and nationally.

In this episode, we discuss how implicit social expectations about grief can place further pressures on people who are grieving and how learning to be an effective grief-ally involves becoming more familiar with the all-too-human experience of heartache. We also discuss how schools can respond when facing the death of students or staff, by exploring how the existing caring capacities which schools nurture in everyday life are just as important as specialist mental-health supports, when responding to grief.

For over 25 years, Christopher Hall has been the Director and Chief Executive Officer of Grief Australia, a government funded specialist bereavement service which is based in Melbourne, Victoria. He is a psychologist who has developed a specialisation in the field of grief and bereavement over the past 30 years.

In this episode of Grief Tending, we discuss how adult children can support older family, relatives or friends who are facing bereavement. We explore how simply showing up and offering practical supports can sometimes be far more helpful to older people in contrast to focusing solely on the emotional aspects of grief, or recommending mental-health interventions as a default. Chris also reflects on how family and friends can either be a source of help, or a significant hinderance for grieving people when experiences of ambivalence, estrangement or trauma are present during bereavement. We discuss suggestions for supports which may be helpful when very complex family dynamics are present. Finally, there is exploration of how personalised family traditions (grief practices) can be incorporated into family life as a way of expressing love for someone who has died.

Bridget Sumser became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker to help people living with serious illness. Over the last 10 years, she has worked across healthcare settings, providing support and companionship to patients, families, community members and providers in various health care settings. Bridget’s practice is rooted in a commitment to social justice and understanding illness and caregiving within the context of a unique life. Above all, she looks to promote connection and well-being.

In this episode we explore how enhancing our perception of grief to acknowledge the many layers of loss that exist underneath the logistical tasks and physical adjustments for someone living with serious illness. We also discuss the possibility of learning to expect grief in everyday life, for example by relating to non-life-threatening losses, as a form of preparatory grief practice. Finally, we explore the unique interrelationship between grief and joy. Rather than being an either–or dichotomy, could it be possible for us reach in the direction of both grief and joy as core aspects of living in the presence of suffering?

Jessie Williams is Manager of Community Programs at CCNB, Australia’s largest community-led not-for-profit and she has held multiple leadership roles to improve dying and grief in Australia since 2015. Jessie, through her own lived experience of end-of-life care and grief, is passionate about advocating that death can be done differently. She is a TEDx speaker and regularly delivers presentations to workplaces and place-based communities.

In this episode Jessie Williams reflects on how learnings from her own lived experience and over a decade of work with The Groundswell Project have informed her advocacy to cultivate compassionate workplaces. We explore how the experience of employees returning to work following a bereavement can be significantly improved if workplaces develop grief-informed and death-literate approaches to employee (and collegial) care ahead of time. We also discuss practical strategies, both in–and–beyond the workplace for anyone who is seeking to be a grief ally. Finally, we discussed the unique role that community grief ceremonies hold in offering spaces for grief to be witnessed through ritual and transmuted by ceremony and how these much-needed liminal spaces can be a gentle antidote to the burden of carrying grief in isolation through our social lives.

Ladybird is a registered nurse, clinical social worker, registered craniosacral therapist practitioner and co-founder of The Humane Prison Hospice Project. She has 20+ years’ experience in hospice and palliative care, addressing trauma, mental health challenges and repercussions of sexual violence. Ladybird also co-facilitates Commonweal’s Cancer Care Help Program: Healing Circles, UCSF’s MERI Centre’s Last Acts of Kindness and is a study therapist with a University of Washington study of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy.

In this evolving conversation, Ladybird invites caregivers to consider how we may approach caring for grieving people from a place of companionship rather than one of mastery. By making space for not knowing (both within and between people) we may offer companionship in grief, even as a relative or patient’s own grief experience may be deeply personal to them. Ladybird also invites us to consider our lives as a fundamentally relational endeavour. From this perspective of coexisting in a shared relational field – we may then be able to explore gentle acts of re-connection during grief – to our own bodies, to other people, and also more broadly to other parts of the vast relational field in which we all exist (think: plants, animals, earth, ecology).

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a professor of Social Work at Arizona State University, and founder of both Sealah Carefarm and the MISS foundation. As both a bereaved parent and an internationally recognised expert in traumatic bereavement, Dr. Jo speaks from across perspectives as a grief advocate, researcher, and educator. She is also a bestselling author and featured in Oprah and Prince Harry’s Docuseries The Me You Don’t See on Apple TV.

In this episode Dr. Jo speaks to the added difficulties faced by bereaved people who are forced to grieve in dominant cultural contexts which are unable to make adequate space for discomfort, pain, or suffering. Reflecting on the impact of societal wide negative grief cognitions on bereaved individuals, Dr. Jo also shares practical insights for how grief supporters may reframe their efforts to care for community members. Finally, in an exploration of the somatic impacts of grief and trauma on the body and overall wellbeing, Dr. Jo reflects on learnings from both her lived experience and extensive research into a range of beneficial supports for grieving individuals.

Adriene Jenik is an artist, educator, scholar-activist and end of life doula who resides in the desert. In her work which spans several decades, she develops and shares creative processes that support personal introspection, social critique, community building, and cultural transformation.

In this episode Adriene shares excerpts from and discusses the process of co-creating The Artist’s Grief Deck. Emerging from the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the deck is a collective (crowd-sourced) grief toolkit which is also held as an online open repository, inviting submissions from anyone who would like to contribute to the ongoing collection. We also discuss how collective grief-literacy can be informed by leaning into experiences of caring for people who are living with illness or approaching end of life within our families or close community.

With so many varied societal messages about grief, especially those which avoid or try to fix grief – what might it look like if we put trust in the process of grieving itself? What might it look like to support those grieving to discover what they might need, or what might be helpful as a part of an active and unfolding process?

Dr Greg Roberts is a Doctor of Philosophy, an accredited Counsellor and Social Worker. For over two decades Greg’s work has focused almost exclusively on working with grief, bereavement and trauma. In this episode, Greg shares insights with us from his research, and from many years of experience companioning grieving people. Our conversation focused on some key principles that family, friends and community members might consider when trying to be supporting and helpful to someone who is grieving, illustrated with gentle stories and examples of how this can be implemented in everyday life

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, author, educator and soul-activist. For over 40 years he has been walking alongside grieving individuals and communities offering soul-centred psychotherapy, teaching and community grief rituals. In this episode we explore how considering grief as a necessary skill in the greater story-arc of our lives can invite us to respond with courtesy and compassion (rather than disbelief) when grief is present.

We explore the necessity of community involvement, care and support for people who are grieving death related loss. Francis discusses that although grief takes us into often unfamiliar and disorienting territory – if these encounters are held in relational frameworks of communal care – as grievers we can return from the depths so to speak – bringing with us skills, knowledge and ordinary medicine to share with our communities.