Gathering in Tender Times
Gathering as an antidote to grief.
It is a tender time for many of us. The question I’m hearing in the hearts and minds of my friends and community is: How do we move through and convene during this end-of-year season when things feel heavy?
Over the past weeks, I’ve been spending time with people with exceptional skill in holding communities during moments of loss and grief. One such conversation was with Rebecca Soffer, the founder of a community called Modern Loss.
We know that connection is an antidote to loneliness. It is also an antidote to grief. Spending time together in authentic ways can be deeply healing. And doing that without denying the context of grief is a way through the pain.
This season, especially in the midst of so much loss and grief in the world, I invite you to ask yourself how you might gather in ways that are nourishing for you and the people around you.
Here are four questions you can ask when planning (or attending) a gathering during tender times.
1) What might feel good this year?
During this time of year, you may be receiving many invitations. Rather than knee-jerk responding based on whether you’re available, I invite you to practice what I call “intentional guesting.”
Making a decision about how you want to spend your time is very much a mind-body evaluation, and it’s especially important when stress and emotions are high. When you receive an invitation, pause and notice in your body how it feels. Am I feeling dread looking at this invitation? Am I feeling joy? Am I tired but open to where this will go? Then ask yourself who you want to be around — whether it’s for comfort or delight or whatever you might need — and who you want to connect with at a later time.
Then, you can RSVP with a “chosen yes” or a “connected no.”
Sometimes gathering better means gathering less. The connected no acknowledges the invitation, shows gratitude and closes the door. A connected no might read: “Thank you so much for this invitation. I so appreciate you thinking of me. We’re staying closer to home this year, and won't be able to come.”
As a host, I think about an invitation as throwing a ball to a guest. Part of being an artful guest is catching the ball and throwing it back, whether yes or no. (Versus not responding.)
2) Who can I turn to?
We often don't know one another's sorrow or how to hold someone else’s pain. In more traditional societies, it’s a community responsibility and opportunity to help hold that weight. When a community member experiences loss, there’s often a grieving period when the normal rules of life are lifted, and people have shared norms around how to help, how to tend, when, and how to gather.
We don’t often have modern rituals to hold the kind of loss we experience individually and collectively. So we must build these rituals anew. In a time of grief, where and who are the people who might also be grieving, who might share your experience, who understand what you’re going through, even if it's not the same loss? (These people also understand the last minute-ness of knowing whether or not one has it in them to show up.)
Step back further and consider: in your communities, in your friendships, where and how can you let people know what you’re going through if they don't know? Sharing a bit of context can help create space for grace in our communities, and for one another.
3) What is the shared context to bring people in?
I think of gatherings as temporary alternative worlds. And part of creating a temporary alternative world is creating a shared context for people. This context creation is particularly helpful when things feel tender, and people aren’t fully sure how to show up.
Rebecca’s father passed away on December 17th, so a couple of years ago on Hanukkah, during the time of year when she feels the loss most, Rebecca asked her people to bring the best jokes they’d heard that year. She explained to her guests that when her father was alive, every six months he’d invited his friends to get together for what he called The Laughers Club. For hours at a time, they sat in the living room telling the best jokes they had heard over the month. “I had agency over bringing that into my celebration even though it’s always going to be tinged with bittersweetness,” she told me. She found a gathering form that was both life-affirming and connected to the joy and humor her father brought to his world.
4) How can I honor the loss through meaningful connection?
My friend Maya's grandmother passed away when she was two years old. She and her cousin Jay inherited their grandmother’s treasured 1960s martini glasses. In their 20s, they pulled out those martini glasses every year on the anniversary of her death, and got together in person to sip her drink – a gin martini. And Jay (who was older and had more memories) would tell Maya stories about their grandmother. When the pandemic hit, and they couldn’t gather in person for their annual ritual, they realized they could do it on Zoom. They extended the invitation for Gin Martini Story Hour to their wider family, and continue to do so each year.
There are so many ways to remember and to honor our people and our losses. Part of modern ritual is finding ways of being together that remind us of and let us experience the values and interests and delightful quirks of those we continue to carry. Many of these modern rituals are invented traditions that remind us of their full character, the space they took up, and how they moved through the world.
Gathering is not the sole cure for our pain, but being together in nourishing ways can give some relief and respite.
As we approach the end of the year, I hope you find something here to nourish and nurture yourself and your people this season.
As always,
Priya
ICYMI
It was a real pleasure to sit down with the We Can Do Hard Things crew — Glennon, Abby and Amanda — to talk about gathering as an act of meaning-making and why introverts often create the best gatherings. Click here to listen to the entire episode.
Inspirations
Reminders for Human Goodness
“We cannot protect them from the truth of this. We can only protect them from being alone with it.” Beautiful interview from Anya Kamenetz’s newsletter with the Good Grief Network on how to emotionally process pain and crisis with children. Their focus is the climate crisis, but the practice is universal, practical, and helpful.
The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families But Should
When her mother died in 2014, anthropology professor Elizabeth Keating became haunted by the questions she never asked about her life. In her new book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, Keating shares insights on how to ask your elders stronger, more specific questions about their lives. It’s excerpted here in The Atlantic.
The Circle of Human Concern
If you don’t already know his work, john a. powell is a national treasure. I can't tell you how many people have referenced his work to me, specifically his concept of "the circle of human concern." I wanted to share a series of learning modules from the Othering & Belonging Institute at U.C. Berkeley on what it means to belong, why belonging is good for society, and how to create a stronger sense of belonging among your people. The 30-, 60-, and 90-minute modules include “Dialogues of Belonging,” “Belonging in Praxis,” and “Expanding Belonging.”
