Not every loss begins with a death

There is a sentence we hear constantly, in almost the same words every time.

I don't know if this really counts.

It comes from the woman whose marriage ended two years ago and who still cannot drive past a particular exit. From the man who has been his father's caregiver for six years and whose father is still very much alive. From the person who got the diagnosis, kept the job, told nobody, and now cannot explain why they feel like they're attending their own funeral.

They have all decided, on their own, that what they're carrying doesn't qualify. Somewhere along the line they picked up the idea that grief requires a death certificate.

The Conversations track exists because of that sentence.

What this track actually is

Eight sessions on October 15, spread across the day, each one an hour or less. Not lectures. Not panels where four experts talk at each other while you watch. Each is led by a facilitator who has either lived the thing or spent years sitting with people who have, and the shape is closer to a conversation you'd want to be part of than a presentation you'd want to take notes on.

It's really two tracks, listed under one heading on the schedule to keep it simple, so two conversations run side by side in every slot. You're choosing, not missing out. Everything is recorded, so you can watch what you skipped.

You don't have to talk. Plenty of people don't. The value of a room like this is often just finding out that the thing you assumed was your private malfunction has a name, and a room full of people in it.

The eight, and who each one is for

We organize our work at Reimagine around fifteen life challenges: the ones people actually arrive with. Most of the Conversations track maps straight onto them.

Loss and bereavement

The Stories We Carry After Loss opens the track. Nina Rodriguez hosts the Grief and Light podcast, more than 120 conversations in, and she came to the work as a bereaved sibling. Her session is about the stories that get attached to a death: the ones you inherit (be strong, time heals, move on), the ones you tell yourself afterward about guilt and identity, and the ones you eventually choose to carry forward.

Living Life After the Unimaginable sits in the one o'clock hour. Dionne C. Monsanto, a grief transformation coach who has been featured on CBS, PBS, and in Essence and Time, talks with Myra Sack, author of the memoir Fifty-Seven Fridays. Both women lost daughters. This isn't a session about the first year. It's about the tenth, and the practices that keep a life going that long.

Relationship challenges

The Loss of Us is the session for the grief nobody sends a card about. Gina Moffa is a licensed grief and trauma therapist of twenty-two years and the author of Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go. She's joined by grief educator Stephanie Sarazin. Between them they cover estrangement, divorce, friendships that quietly stopped, and the specific strangeness of grieving someone who is still alive and still, technically, reachable.

Others' illness or hardship

Finding Your Balance in the Midst of Caregiving, with caregiving advocate Jessica C. Guthrie. Caregiving eats a career, a marriage, a savings account and a sense of self, usually in that order, and the person doing it is rarely counted as someone experiencing a loss. Guthrie names the emotional labor out loud and gets practical about boundaries and asking for help. If you're a caregiver, you already know that's the hardest sentence in the language.

Life transitions

Aging as Grief, Aging as Growth. Kelly Dearman runs San Francisco's Department of Disability and Aging Services and sits on Reimagine's board. Sian-Pierre Regis is a filmmaker whose documentary Duty Free follows his mother after she was fired from a hotel job at seventy-five. Together they make the case that aging is a series of real losses that deserve to be grieved and, at the same time, not a decline you're supposed to apologize for.

Collective traumas and events

Political Grief: A Circle of Presence, led by Katie Louise Cooper, a death doula and mortality wellness guide based in Mill Valley. Read the session description carefully, because the boundary is the point: this is not a space for political strategy, debate, or analysis. It's a space for people who are exhausted by the news and have nowhere to put it. No one is going to argue with you. No one is going to organize you.

Identity struggles

What Makes Us Human? Grief, AI, and the Future of Meaning. Meghan O'Gieblyn is an essayist published in Harper's, The New Yorker and Wired, and the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine. Jonathan Lipps is a principal software engineer at Sony PlayStation whose academic background is in philosophy, linguistics and theology. This one is the outlier on the schedule and we kept it deliberately. There is a grief circulating right now about work, craft, and what a person is for, and most of the places to discuss it are either sales pitches or panic.

Regrets and failings

Living and Dying with Fewer Regrets, with death doula and writer Darnell Lamont Walker. Eight prompts, worked through together: getting honest with yourself, facing your mortality, telling your story, letting go of perfection, defining success on your own terms. It's the most forward-looking hour in the track and, going by the questions, the most uncomfortable.

Why we built it this way

The obvious version of a grief summit is bereavement, all day, at increasing volume. We've run enough programs to know that the bereaved are not the only people in the room, and often not even the majority.

The unnamed losses are where the silence is worst. There's no ritual for a friendship ending. Nobody brings a casserole when your body stops doing what it used to do. Your colleagues don't observe a moment for the version of your career that isn't coming back. So people carry those things without the small social scaffolding that even a death gets, and then wonder why it feels so heavy.

Naming a thing doesn't fix it. But an hour in a room where somebody describes your exact situation out loud, in front of other people, and nobody corrects them, that does something. We've watched it do something several thousand times.

If you recognized yourself in any of that

The Conversations track is part of the Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time, on Thursday, October 15, from 10 AM to 3 PM Pacific. It's online and free to attend, and it sits alongside the rest of the program: keynotes, creative workshops, embodied practice, and drop-in support rooms that stay open all day.

Come for the whole thing or drop in for one session. And you don't need to have decided whether what you're carrying counts. That question is the one we're here to retire.

Have a look around the schedule · Download the full schedule (PDF) Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 AM to 3 PM PT · Online · Free to attend, donations welcome