The Portland Grief House

Traditional support groups gather around shared, specific pain – addiction, cancer, a pet who just died, or a parent, or a child. That’s useful and powerful. We’re trying something a little different. This experiment is about finding out what happens when we unite around a common activity – like origami folding or drinking tea or climbing trees – and allow our grief to be varied.

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At the Grief House we don’t sort grief by type or arrange it from hardest to easiest. We don’t expect anyone to move through it or escape it and the work we do doesn’t rely primarily on talking. Grief comes up in many ways. It is a universally shared experience, but it can be isolating, partly because we’ve learned to communicate ourselves to each other as one thing at a time.

Come be perfect and broken and gardening. Come be perfect and broken and dancing. Let’s make a place where we can practice being alive and complicated, together.