How October 15 actually unfolds

Five hours is a long time to give a Thursday, and "a day of gathering about grief" is not a description you can plan around.

So here is the day itself, in order, as it happens on the Main Stage. Six other tracks run alongside it, and you can move between them all day, but if you only ever look at one, this is the spine. Twelve sessions, one throughline.

10:00 · We light candles

The day opens with Grief in Our Time, twenty minutes of welcome from Corey L. Kennard, Reimagine's board chair, a pastor and healthcare activist, and Brad Wolfe, our co-founder and executive director. Ezekiel Goodwin, a death doula and artist who builds altars and memorial art with grieving families, presents the altar.

There is candle lighting, music, and the setting of intentions. Bring a candle and something to light it with, if you can. It is the only thing anyone asks you to bring, and lighting one at your own kitchen table while several thousand other people do the same turns out to do something that a video call has no right to do.

10:20 · Meggan Roxanne

Life After Grief: From Surviving to Thriving. Meggan Roxanne founded The Good Quote, a platform her publisher says reaches more than twenty million people, and her first book became a Sunday Times bestseller. In 2020 her mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer and Meggan became her full-time carer. Her second book, about returning to yourself after loss, is out in November.

Her half hour with Corey is about the part nobody prepares you for: not the acute stretch, but the long afterward, when everyone else has resumed and you are supposed to have too.

10:50 · Love Lives On

The first long conversation of the day, on whether you can keep loving someone after they are gone.

Colin Campbell is a writer and theatre director who lost two of his children in a car crash and wrote Finding the Words about it. Kelly Cervantes is the author of Normal Broken and The Luckiest. Miguel Cervantes originated the title role in the Chicago production of Hamilton and later played it on Broadway. Kelly and Miguel's daughter Adelaide died in 2019, just before her fourth birthday. Ezekiel Goodwin joins them on ritual, creativity, and how the people he has lost stay present in his work. Reimagine's Dara Kosberg moderates.

11:30 · Miguel plays

A Musical Offering with Miguel Cervantes. Ten minutes of music before the next conversation. The day has music running through it on purpose.

11:40 · Every Body

Navigating Illness, Health, and Identity. Keltie Knight, the three-time Emmy winner and E! host, on what an unexpected hysterectomy in her forties did to her sense of self, even though she had long since decided against having children. Marisa Renee Lee, the award-winning author of Grief is Love and Waiting for Dawn, on Long COVID and the identity shifts of chronic illness. Moderated by Lisa Keefauver, a grief educator and breast cancer survivor. Laureen Wysocki, who found Reimagine during Covid, talks with Dara Kosberg about being a caregiver and a widow.

12:20 · Comedic Storytelling with Dara Kosberg

The Power of Humor in Exploring and Transmuting Our Grief. Ten minutes. Dara runs Reimagine's programs, and she is also a writer, storyteller and comedian, a two-time Moth StorySLAM winner. She performs an excerpt from her award-winning solo show Homecoming, a dark comedy about complicated grief, identity, and finding humor in the hardest parts of loss. Yes, at a grief summit. That is rather the point.

12:30 · The lightning round

Adversity Alchemized: Reimagine's Innovators in Creative Altruism. Rebecca Soffer, cofounder of Modern Loss and author of the bestselling Modern Loss Handbook, moderates twelve Collaborators, two minutes each: Brad Wolfe, Christine Gautreaux, Cynthia Phelps, Dr. Qwynn Galloway-Salazar, Kelli Dunham, Martie McNabb, Veronica DeJesus, Kristabeth Atwood, Sherry Richert Belul, Day Schildkret, Dr. Sheila K. Collins and Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen.

Visual art, storytelling, comedy, music, movement, food, horticulture. The argument being made is that anyone can be a creative altruist, using imagination to hold space for other people. Twelve two-minute talks in a row is also, frankly, the most energising half hour of the day.

1:00 · Sara's Got a Sunbeam

Brad Wolfe & the Moon give the live debut of a song Brad wrote for his friend Sara, who died at twenty-one and is the reason this organisation exists.

1:10 · The Weight of the World

A Conversation and Restorative Practice. How do you stay open-hearted in a world of war, climate disruption, injustice and uncertainty, without going numb or burning out?

Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Finding Refuge and We Heal Together, the climate justice writer Tori Tsui, and the singer and communal grief tender alexandra "ahlay" blakely. It ends with a restorative mindfulness practice and song leading, because the point is not to leave you holding it.

1:50 · The Summit Cento Poem

A cento is a poem stitched together from other people's lines. We invited Collaborators, past speakers and community members to contribute verses, and they will read them live, one after another, assembled into a single poem. Reading: Barri Leiner Grant, Christine Gautreaux, J.J. Duncan, Rebecca Missel, Norma Rosie Wigutoff, Kristabeth Atwood, Butterfly (Tony Pham), Mangda Sengvanhpheng, Michelle Thornhill, Sherry Richert Belul, Nicholle Tan, Stefanie Elkins and Blair Kaplan. Dara Kosberg facilitates.

It is the strangest thing on the schedule and reliably one of the best.

2:10 · Summit Closing

We close the Summit together on the Main Stage. After a day of stories, practices and conversations about the losses we carry, this final session gathers what we have shared and sends us back out into the world with something to hold on to. Corey Kennard hosts.

And there is one name still to come. Our closing headliner will be announced next week. We have deliberately left this slot open on the schedule until then, so if you want to be first to know, register now and watch your inbox.

2:50 · We put the candles out

The Closing Honor Ceremony. People share, in the chat, the names of who and what they are grieving. There is music. We extinguish the candles together, and Corey and Brad close the day.

Reading a list of names scroll past, written by people you will never meet, each one a life that mattered to somebody, is not a thing we can adequately describe here.

One throughline

Read the running order and the shape is deliberate. The day starts with the grief we carry alone and ends with the grief we carry together, and the middle is the journey between the two.

You do not have to do all of it. Come at 10 and leave at noon. Arrive for the closing. Drop into a support room instead of a panel and count that as attending, because it is.

Register free · Have a look around the schedule · Download the full schedule (PDF)

Already registered? Sign in to build your schedule.

The Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 AM to 3 PM PT · Online · Free to attend, donations welcome