Outside the Lines: The Art of Caring & Grief

How do we care for ourselves and others through grief and loss?

November's Outside the Lines session will focus on grief, caregiving, and the emotional weight of supporting someone through a difficult time.

THE REAL STORIES

We’ll hear personal stories from our panel Cherise Tuttle, Shelly Escobar, and Hari Khalsa RN, whose experiences with loss are very different, but all speak to how grief changes us and how we learn to move forward.

Cherise Tuttle shares her experience of losing her husband to a paragliding accident —a sudden and traumatic loss that changed the trajectory of her life in an instant.

Shelly Escobar shares her experience of losing her father, who was the first person in Mammoth to die from COVID-19—a loss that unfolded during an unprecedented time of fear, isolation, uncertainty, and collective grief.

Hari Khalsa RN, End-of-life doula, Grief Hall facilitator, and Director of SIGHT - share about what led to creating Grief Hall and her experience support the grieving process and end of life.

Their stories are profoundly different, but together they raise a universal question:

TOPIC'S WE'LL EXPLORE

- Different experiences of grief and loss
- What happens after the initial loss
- Caring for others while navigating your own grief
- The invisible emotional labor of caregiving
- Guilt, anger, resentment, and compassion fatigue
- How relationships and identity change through loss
- How to ask for help
- How to actually support someone who is grieving
- Finding moments of joy while carrying grief
- How they have each found a way back to moving their body to process grief 

We don't have to know how to fix grief. We can learn how to sit with it—and how to better care for the people carrying it.

This evening explores what happens when someone we love is suddenly—or gradually—no longer part of our everyday lives.

Grief isn't only about the moment of loss. It can change our identity, relationships, routines, sense of safety, and understanding of the future. And while we often know how to show up in the immediate aftermath of a loss, we don't always know how to support someone months or years later, when the rest of the world has moved forward.

What happens to us when someone we love is gone—and how do we learn to carry them with us?