Sarah Hines, Founder, A Meaningful Death, joins me to discuss LinkedIn's first ever crowdsourced poem on Grief

A couple of weeks ago I asked my LinkedIn network to share what they grieved most as a result of COVID19 intending to take their reflections and create a verse that would capture the full range of their feelings.

You can hear this poem in the previous episode - for this episode Sarah Hines of Starling Minds and Founder of A Meaningful Death joins me to explore what it is that people are grieving and how might we best respond.

We begin talking about change but the conversation quickly moves to the subject of hugs and then belonging,  which Sarah sees as the common thread running through the griefs that were shared.  We talk about touch deficit, haircuts, friends, travel, my on the spot theory about different levels of grief.  Sarah explores how the grief many feel who have lost loved ones during the pandemic gets mixed in with and complicated by regret and we talk about how some grief is more inward looking and about what we have lost whereas other grief is about what we could contribute.

Along the way we talk about liminal time, the importance of rites of passage, the loss of purpose and what we need to do to build a better world.  

Towards the end we briefly look at the death of George Floyd and its aftermath through the lens of grief before ending almost where we began with a few thoughts on hugging.

Reading this I realize this conversation covered a lot of ground.  This means we barely scratched the surface of some issues and didn't get to talk about others.  I like to think this reflects the complexity and importance of the role grief plays right now as we navigate the unknown.

For more info on my work as a conference emcee, spoken word artist, panel moderator and event designer check out my site at https://conferencebard.ca/