Cultural Bereavement: Identity
Join us in our tenth and last monthly conversation for 2023 to dive below the surface of what cultural bereavement is, how it develops, what it can look like. In this event, we'll address the loss of identity and its impact as an aspect of cultural bereavement. This grief is a complex component of (im)migrant and refugee experiences, contributing to varied and complex individual and communal outcomes. Previous themes centered loss of: language, womanhood, food, history, home, dreams, voice and support.
MESO is headed up by Tida Beattie and Soyeon Davis, both trained end-of-life doulas and grief mentors and guides. Tida's family immigrated to the US from Thailand. Soyeon and her family emigrated from South Korea.
Both have been long-distance caregivers to their immigrant parents, starting around 2019. Attempts to collect culturally inclusive information, education and resources to support their immigrant families addressing issues of care, aging, death and grief have been scarce. What they primarily found reflected one lens and perspective and provided no room for cultural safety, representation, nor relevance.
As a result, Tida and Soyeon founded MESO to provide culturally attuned resources to intergenerational immigrant families, their caregivers, and their grievers in order to fill a critical need for information and to create open, non-judgmental spaces of support to shore up grounding foundations, build inner capacity and resilience.
