Grief Stories
Today, we’re excited to be featuring another grief mission, Grief Stories, a website featuring videos of people sharing their stories with grief, all in the hope of driving more connection and community for those grieving. They have a robust set of resources on their site as well, and they have a podcast you can check out if you’re more of the listener type! Read on below to learn more about Grief Stories and their background and mission.
Sharing Stories for Hope and Healing in Grief
Humans have been telling stories throughout time. We tell stories to teach lessons and share information, and to entertain. Stories are powerful, they can elicit a full range of emotion, and they can be a vehicle for healing in grief.
Two filmmakers recognized the power of stories to help the bereaved find hope and healing, and they recruited a social worker to support their efforts to create a free virtual resource that would offer information and comfort for those who are adjusting to a loss. Grief Stories was born, offering a library of short videos, blog posts, and a podcast designed to offer stories to aid in healing grief.
Sean Danby lost his vibrant, young wife Suzy to cancer. He was doing all the right things to grieve. He went to therapy, he joined a grief group, he was feeling and talking about his feelings. Still, at three in the morning when he was awake and alone with his grief, there was nowhere to turn. Surfing the internet brought him to a lot of sites with written information about the experience of grief, but in the wee hours, he didn’t want to read. When he shared this dilemma with his friend Rob Quartly, Rob suggested that there was an alternative. As filmmakers, they could make some films for Sean to watch that would help him feel less alone in the middle of the night.
The first films they made involved Sean’s family and Suzy’s care team. From there, the idea blossomed into the rich resource that it is now. The team at Grief Stories invites guests to share their stories of hope and healing in grief by creating short videos where real people talk about their experience of loss and what has helped them through it. With more than five hundred videos now, the library keeps growing, and the team is committed to increasing diversity and inclusion across a wide range of grief experiences.
You’ll also find a series of blog posts by people who work in the field of grief, with guest posts by those with lived experience. Mindful of the fact that sometimes in grief we have a shorter attention span, these posts are kept to around five hundred words, and focus on information intended to let people know they are not alone.
The Grief Stories podcast, hosted by registered social worker Maureen Pollard, is a series of interviews with a wide range of guests. There are three main podcast types. In the first, Maureen speaks with people about their experience of loss, and what is helping them adjust. In the second type, Maureen speaks with people who work in the field of grief about the key information they wish everyone knew about grief. In the third type of podcast, Maureen interviews artists about the power of creating art for exploring and expressing feelings as you move through the experience of grief.
There is a resource page, with links to organizations and information that the bereaved may find helpful, and a page with information about using the expressive arts as coping tools. You’ll find a page about creating visual art, using music and therapeutic writing for healing in grief.
As the project has evolved, it has become clear that sharing our stories helps everyone. Those who participate in the project by sharing their stories on film, in a blog post or as a podcast guest consistently report that they find this experience well supported and cathartic. They feel seen and heard in their experience and that is powerful. It also feels good to know that their story could help someone else feel less alone. Those who visit the website also report that when they are in the depths of their grief, they find it helpful to listen to stories they can relate to that offer hope for healing. Sharing stories helps everyone heal. ▪️
Thank you to Marueen Pollard and the Grief Stories team for contributing. You can find out more about Grief Stories at their website, on social media at @grief_stories , and by subscribing to Grief Stories wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you or someone you know is interested in being featured on Grief Collective, please reach out via email at hello@griefcollective.com.