Grief Cafe

Not listened yet but grief caught my eye and Brene is brill

Our first podcast back.
Topic: Shaking s**t out of trees.

Missed y’all.

ABK ❤️👊🏼❤️

https://bit.ly/3LAlDn8

Poignant to hear Paul McCartney talking about writing Yesterday and musing on the mourning for his mum. The next ep is about Eleanor Rigby, a homage to old ladies he knew through bobajob and their loneliness https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09zf0dx

BBC Radio 4 - Paul McCartney: Inside the Songs, 2. Yesterday Paul remembers how he wrote Yesterday at the age of 22.

Thanks to Sacred Space Kingston for this

Cathy shared this to the Grief Café group this morning - wonderful. Reminder: Grief Café Onlne this evening

This touched me today, what has moved you recently?

"The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.
How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering.
Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible. - Francis Weller

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Art by: Lucy Campell

What happens to your social co**se?! https://digitallegacyassociation.org/

Digital Legacy Association - Home The Digital Legacy Association has been launched at Hospice UK's annual conference to provide frameworks, training and support for healthcare professionals

About coming to terms with a terminal diagonosis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgJD6ksdkWY

End Game | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix Netflix's latest documentary explores the end-of-life support system provided by doctors, nurses, and hospice professionals. Now streaming on Netflix. Watch ...

All welcome, Friday evening. If you're bereaved, suffering any loss like a job or relationship, you are pondering mortality, or Grief Cafe resonates in any way, join us. Message for the Zoom link, best wishes, Fiona and the regulars https://fb.me/e/cdZKt615G

My mother died of Covid. I turned to other women of color for advice on loss Losing my mother during a pandemic has been surreal and confusing; it’s hard to figure out what moving forward looks like

9 thought provoking quotes about the end of life There are few states of being that have inspired as much contemplation, discussion and emotion through the ages as death. Here, we look at nine famous, thought-provoking quotes on the subject…

I remember hearing some of these - good to get to grips with issues
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kgksn/episodes/downloads

BBC Radio 4 - We Need to Talk About Death - Downloads Podcast downloads for We Need to Talk About Death

If you feel like you can’t function at full capacity right now, there are very good reasons why.

Grief Cafe updated their business hours.

**Two places available on End of Life Planning Course**
Death Planning - want to get started? A group of us from the Grief Cafe Online community are doing an 8-week End of Life Planning course. It starts next Thursday, 1st October, 8 - 9.15. Weeks 3 and 6 are built in catch-up weeks.
By the end of the course you will have An End of Life Plan which is a combination of documents that cover everything that someone would need to know about you if you either, a) lost mental capacity to be able to make your own decisions or, b) died. It includes documents under the headings legal documents, practical arrangements and wishes.
We are testing this for End of Life Planning coach Annette Earl of Dockleaf Conversations. The group is looking for people who are comitted to working on this together and coming to each session, as well as providing feedback to Annette. She's asked for a very modest fee of £9. If you are interested message me, Fiona Law, and/or leave a comment here https://www.annetteearl.com/

Annette Earl | End of Life Planning Coach Dockleaf Conversations | End of Life Planning Made Simple

Good Grief Festival Online (Oct 30th-Nov 1st) A virtual festival exploring the human experience of love and loss. Register now for free tickets.

Grief Cafe is gathering itself for online meetings again - please bear with us. In the meantime check out Death Cafe Bristol, for example https://www.facebook.com/events/601300160547402/621389988538419/

Old Age Rational Su***de https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.12456

Old age rational su***de In the societal debate surrounding voluntary euthanasia or physician‐assisted su***de, there is a concern that older people will be left exposed to any legislation, subject to either faint suggestion...

Your perspective on dying changes - we can't make assumptions about older people https://discoversociety.org/2018/02/06/ageing-and-dying-are-a-continuum/

Ageing and Dying are a Continuum Naomi Richards When I submitted my first article to an international ageing journal (Richards 2012), I was genuinely perplexed to receive a review asking me to justify that 68 counted as ‘older’ an…

Interesting paper on reasons why people seek assisted dying in Switzerland, 'As the individual cases discussed in this article show, requiring doctors to adjudicate on a person’s level of suffering and to facilitate their su***de is problematic as soon as one becomes aware that suffering is rarely solely somatic but, rather, is bound up with people’s biographies, social worlds, and existential dilemmas. None of these is static.' https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2016.1255610

www.tandfonline.com

Yuli Somme is an advocate for natural funerals and makes the loveliest shrouds and burial pods at prices comparable with the funeral businesses out there. She and I started the Chagford Death Cafe of which this iGrief Cafe Online evolution. We are planning a podcast or talk...really looking forward to that https://bellacouche.com/product/leafcocoon-alternative-eco-coffin/

Leafcocoon alternative eco coffin - 'staying close to nature' The Leafcocoon alternative eco coffin for natural burial. Biodegradable and environmentally friendly, hand-made by Bellacouche Dartmoor, Devon, England UK

Free Will Service Find out how we can help

I'm getting rid of the lockdown locks and I hope you will support me with this and donate to MacMillan. If you'd like to join me, that'd be wonderful and I won't feel quite so much of a freak. I've set 1st August but would like to bring it forward. I also need someone who can do the buzzcut for me... https://bravetheshave.macmillan.org.uk/shavers/fiona-law

lots of useful resources here on this page, The Art of Dying Well https://www.artofdyingwell.org/

Home - The Art of Dying Well Providing hopeful accompaniment for the human journey Dying well means different things to us all. Death is an individual experience, but a community of accompaniment on the journey can help us to prepare by bringing consolation and spiritual peace.

On 23 June at 11:00, Humanists UK is holding a national memorial ceremony to help those who have experienced loss due to the coronavirus pandemic and to mark three months since the start of the UK lockdown. The ceremony will offer an opportunity to reflect on what we have been and are still going through, pay tribute to those we have lost, offer hope, and reckon with the grief, mourning, and anxiety so many of us have known these past three months. https://humanism.org.uk/2020/06/15/humanist-national-memorial-ceremony-to-mark-three-months-since-lockdown/

Sam shared this free course info about End of Life Care https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/end-of-life-care/1/register?return=03hcpfwj

Page from End of Life Care: Challenges and Innovation - The University of Glasgow Explore dying and palliative care practice around the world and evaluate new trends and ideas surrounding end of life care issues.

Sam told us about this film from Grayson Perry today when we talked about how different cultures do death rituals https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grayson-perry-rites-of-passage/on-demand/64824-001?fbclid=IwAR00Qx12fN7Vj7FZfUtJN6GX-BXjGrNuyJhNLaWD5P2okw4_Qrq8VdDJVhk

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage: Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage - On Demand Should we reinvent how we mark landmark events in our lives, to fit with modern life?

*I don’t know why grief’s delivery system is so inefficient*
Grief Cafe is about this kind of grief too, as well as bereavement and other loss.
Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran priest and writes in a badass way about faith and life. This is from the intro to a recent episode of her podcast, The Confessional.

"I wrote this in the first week of April 2020 during a global pandemic.

I finally had a really good cry this week. The inciting incident wasn’t remarkable—I was just reading over something I wrote years ago when I was still in my parish. It was an essay about Holy Week and before I could even prepare for them, the tears came. At first I was crying from the grief of a beautiful time in my life that I will never have again. Then I was crying about Holy week this year being so completely fu**ed because we are all stuck in our homes. Then I was crying because I wondered, was I as present as I could have been during that time in my life? Then I was crying because I realized how similar this feels to when I look at pictures of my children from when they were toddlers—when I wonder if I was too caught up in the exhaustion and challenges of motherhood to have soaked up the magic of it. Then I was crying wondering if I only seem to appreciate the beauty of my life in retrospect. Then I was crying ‘cause I wish I had been a better mother and then I was crying because my friend Rachel died a year ago and I miss her.

I don’t know why grief’s delivery system is so inefficient like this, how it seems to drop off all it’s packages at once, no matter when they happen to have been shipped.

All I know is that when sadness shows up, it’s like it puts its foot in the door and waves in all it’s friends. We just can’t control the guest list. Compounded emotions like grief are just so unpredictable. And also, humbling."

"When we mourn (and we're talking about true mourning here, not complaining or self-pity) we are in a state of freefall, our heart reaching out toward what we have seemingly lost but cannot help loving anyway. To mourn is by definition to live beween the realms" Cynthia Bourgeault
Join us on alternate Wednesdays for the Grief Cafe Online https://www.facebook.com/events/898891587201406/

Grief is the subject of this film, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0008z8p/julieta

Julieta A woman is forced to confront her past after meeting a friend of her estranged daughter.