Grief Dinners

What if you threw a potluck dinner for friends, and everyone who came was grieving? Cool, right! Well, cool if you had lost someone, because finally you would have people to talk to who understood.

An organization called “The Dinner Party” invites people who are grieving to potluck dinners. Gatherings have been hosted in cities across the country, and currently there are gatherings in more than 60 cities, with a few smaller towns in the mix.

            This is not grief therapy; it’s grief support. 

            It’s about providing desperately needed support and encouragement to people when the world begins crashing down and despair deepens because you feel alone. The death of someone we love rips a hole out of our middle, and we are fighting to hold on as the edges of life fray around us.

            The idea of The Dinner Party is to provide a place where people who are experiencing their first significant loss can share their stories with others who are going through the same experience and have the same questions. Your loss can be a parent, sibling, partner, child or close friend. Those who gather are often in their 20s and 30s, because they are the first in their social group to lose someone and their friends have no clue what to do to help. People feel abandoned in grief without anyone to talk to.

            The hosts try to match people with similar interests, passions, and stages in life. They also have tables for folks over the age of 45, and a few tables that are intergenerational by design. Lasting friendships often form at the dinners.

            The organization began in 2010 when five women in Los Angeles, who each had lost a parent, met for dinner in someone’s backyard, and talked about their individual journeys with grief. They found it so helpful that they began hosting dinners in other places. Their mission is to “transform life after loss from an isolating experience into one marked by community support, candid conversation, and forward movement.”

            In the larger cities, someone coordinates the gatherings. If you’re in one of those cities, and would like to come to a dinner to see if it’s right for you, look at its website for contact information: http://thedinnerparty.org. You can also host your own dinner, and the website offers guidelines to help.

            *

            I haven’t been to a dinner, but I have been on a grief retreat with 24 people where we talked for five days about grief non-stop. 

            Each morning before dawn, I would make tea in the kitchen and ready myself for the day. Often JoAnne or Leslie would join me and we would talk about where we were in grief and what we do when we feel stuck. 

            Throughout the day there were various group gatherings, time to talk to each other at meals, and time to be alone to walk in the woods and process what was going on. There were no judgments made about each other’s grief, just acceptance, sharing, and encouragement. Late at night, George and I would discuss thoughts and emotions that had been stirred up during the day, as well as about matters like cooking and our fathers.

            Being in a place where we could see each other’s face, where we could hug, made a big difference. By hearing others talk about their grief, I better understood my own. By taking the risk of sharing with others, I found a community of support.