Telling Grief Stories to Inspire Community Healing

I am a student of restoration ecology grieving the death of my father and I want to share the stories of my experience. I’ve spent the past three years and seven months grieving his death. Through poetry and storytelling, I will express how I’ve begun to process and heal. Dad’s death changed my life and how I move through this world. The immense impact of grief has motivated me to share my story and include my community in my journey. By following my inclinations to take walks in nature like Dad and I once did, intentionally spending time with him, feeling my emotions, and writing about these intertwined experiences, I began to process and heal on my own. In the past couple years, my journey has morphed as I’ve started to bring grief with me into the professional and academic spaces I occupy. When I attended the National Wilderness Workshop, I took the terrifying first step in sharing my grief story in a professional setting. Through this experience and many others, I have learned that being open and honest about about my grief experience fosters community. My vulnerability in sharing has led me to: realize that professional settings can be safe spaces for grief, and that sharing my grief experience build connections and relationships, and creates further space to process and heal. I think that talking about grief can inspire the creation of safe spaces where more people can grieve. By collectively cultivating this space, communities can expand their capacities to hold grief together. Topic Warning: Parent Death