Welcome to the Reimagine Blog

What Reimagine board member Sue Moldaw discovered when she began singing at seventy-two.

The Conversations track is eight sessions on the losses that never had a funeral. Bereavement, relationship loss, caregiving, aging, political grief, identity and regret. You do not have to talk, and you do not have to decide whether yours counts.

Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor came to Reimagine to celebrate the paperback release of The Grieving Body. What followed was an hour on what loss does to the heart, the lungs and the immune system — and what it asks of us in return. What does your body know?

Some griefs can't be fixed, only held. We gathered with the writer Emily Rapp Black, the palliative care physician Dr. Sunita Puri, and musicians Vuyo Sotashe and Chris Pattishall to ask what you actually say to someone whose life has broken open.

Some pain is too big to hold alone. We came together with healers, artists, and activists to grieve what needs grieving, to sit with one another in the dark, and to ask a single question: How can our grief and pain become a source of power and love?

Most of what gets said about grief is about the beginning of it. The shock, the fog, the casseroles, the first unbearable weeks. There is far less language for what comes later, for the quieter territory on the far side of that first sorrow, when the heaviest weight begins to lift and life, almost without permission, starts to expand again.

For people whose mothers have died, whose mothers were complicated or harmful, who lost children of their own, who longed for motherhood and could not reach it, who are mothering people separated from them by borders or war, the day arrives like a wound reopened.

My dog Lady, a Pekingese, kept me going in life for many years. She came to me from someone who was moving into an apartment and couldn’t take a pet. I didn’t get all the details but I learned they “played rough.” She was so scared when she came to me. She was five. She couldn’t be easily rehomed because of her trauma, aSachment issues and later she developed high medical needs.

You have to be really determined to find an off grid phone booth in the middle of the desert. And I was. I was determined to find the Joshua Tree Wind Phone last week. A wind phone is an altar. It's an art installation. It's a spiritual portal, a shrine and a memorial. But most importantly, a wind phone is an invitation.

Grief reshapes us. It arrives uninvited, suddenly rewiring the world we thought we understood. When someone we love passes, we’re left holding fragments of a life—photos scattered across old phones, messages trapped inside accounts no one can access, memories fading faster than we ever expected. And in those moments, one truth becomes painfully clear: We don’t just grieve the person we lost. We grieve everything we can no longer remember.

“I’m angry, and I don’t know what to do with my anger.” Anger has fueled the response to AIDS since the very beginning. So it is not surprising that the anger felt these days is reminiscent of those early, terrifying days. The difference, though, is simple: forty years ago we were angry that we had no way to stop it, no way to help; today we have the tools, but they’re being taken away.

Pain is the stain of your name Tattooed on my heart The only voice in my brain The only indication that you remain The one tear in the rain You grab my heart anyway Even if I try to run away