The names in the chat

On the morning of October 15, Corey L. Kennard read four touchstones to a few thousand people he could not see. This is a grieving space, he said. A compassionate space. A brave space. An imperfect space. Then he said what it was not: not a place to blame, not political, not religious, and not a solution space. "We're not gonna get all the answers that we want today."

That was the frame for Grief in Our Time, the 2026 Reimagine Summit. More than 6,000 people signed up. Seven rooms ran at once for five hours, with more than 30 sessions and more than 60 speakers, artists and hosts. It was free, online, and the largest gathering Reimagine has held. What follows is not a summary of all of it. It is a few of the moments people are still talking about, the people who made them, and where those conversations are continuing now, with a pointer to the 34 recordings if you want the rest.

The names in the chat

The day opened with candles. Brad Wolfe, Dara Kosberg and Corey read the same blessing, one after another, the one Reimagine has used at its vigils for years: "We honor our personal dead, the dead across the world, and all of us still here together." Then Brad asked people to type a name, or a few words about what they were carrying, into the chat, and Joshua Hill played violin while the names came in.

They kept coming for a long time. Parents, partners, children, friends. Marriages. A sense of safety. A country. Hundreds of names scrolled past faster than anyone could read them, and the instruction was simply to witness them. Brad eventually had to say that just because the music had stopped did not mean people should stop typing.

Nobody fixed anything in those ten minutes. That was the point.

"Avoiding that grief was destroying me"

Meggan Roxanne, founder of The Good Quote, gave the first Main Stage talk and did not soften it. After her mother died in 2021 she kept functioning, kept running her business, kept finishing a book, and privately came apart. Four years in, she was living in her late mother's house and sleeping in her bed.

Her turning point was a one way ticket to St. Lucia, the island where her mother died and the place she had spent years avoiding. She stayed 75 days. She called it 75 Grieve. She watched the videos she had not been able to watch, talked out loud to her mother, and eventually sat outside the hospital room where it happened. "The grief I had been running from wasn't necessarily what was destroying me," she told Corey. "Avoiding that grief was destroying me."

Her practical advice was almost comically small next to the story: go for more walks. Start by walking to the end of the road. Her second book, You Deserve to Live Again, comes out November 3.

Not the monsters

Colin Campbell, whose two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver in 2019, moderated the conversation with Kelly and Miguel Cervantes about keeping love alive after a child dies. Their daughter Adelaide died five days before her fourth birthday. She hated Baby Shark and calmed down for Frank Sinatra.

Kelly told a story about her son Jackson, who was about eight when she tried to talk him into a Godzilla movie. He did not want to watch it. The monsters are not real, she told him. "Mommy, it's not the monsters that I'm scared of," he said. "It's the people who are running from them." She realized she was not afraid of her own grief, or of talking about Adelaide. She was afraid of how other people responded. Once she decided that was their problem and not hers, she could talk about her daughter again.

Miguel described the sunflower field the family visits on Adelaide's anniversary, which started as a way to get out of the house and has become a tradition with lemonade stands and sibling fights. "There's no prize for grieving the best or the most," he said. Colin's own advice, offered to anyone early in loss, was blunt: don't be afraid of the pain. "It's awful, but it's bearable."

Ezekiel Goodwin, who built the altar that sat on screen all day and who had lost his parents, five siblings, a nephew, a niece, his fiance and about ten close friends by the age of 40, closed that block with a smaller idea. Shrink the altar down. A photo, a candle, a flower. "You can take that with you in an Altoids tin," he said. Or skip the tin and be the altar yourself.

What nothing can take

The session on illness and identity was moderated by Lisa Keefauver, a social worker who had just finished a year and a half of cancer treatment, with Keltie Knight and Marisa Renee Lee. Keltie talked about the grief that arrived two days after a hysterectomy she had chosen, and about caring for her brother for the rest of his life. Marisa talked about long COVID taking the mind she makes her living with.

Marisa's question for anyone in a season of uncertainty came from watching her mother die when she was 25: "What are the things about you that nothing can take?" Keltie's was an instruction. "You're allowed to have your big feelings, and you're allowed to say them out loud." Lisa offered two words to put at the end of any sentence about how bad things are: for now.

Laureen Wysocki, an opera singer who cared for her husband through a decade of young onset dementia and then found Reimagine's group programs, ended with a line from Rosalynn Carter about the four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are caregiving now, those who will be, and those who will need one. "It's a universal experience. Let's not do it alone."

A song for Sara

At 1:00, Brad premiered a hand drawn animated video for "Sara's Got a Sunbeam," a song he wrote for a friend he had known since they met playing soccer at 12. When she was diagnosed with a rare pediatric cancer, he was 20 and afraid of hospitals. He brought his guitar instead, and played in her room for two years. "Nobody teaches you how to show up for this kind of situation," he said. "This is why Reimagine now exists."

What he noticed in that hospital room, and what became the question of the day, was that the music helping Sara was also healing him. "How can we find our own music through the hard parts of life?" It does not have to be music. Sara died at 21. Her family and Brad started the Sunbeam Foundation, which has raised more than a million dollars for pediatric cancer research. Every year on her anniversary they release butterflies at her grave, which is why the video is full of them. The song is on his new EP, Loss, out October 23, and the video is on YouTube. Reimagine built a free music pathway around the songs, for anyone who wants to listen and write alongside other people.

Everywhere else

The Main Stage was one room of seven. In Conversations, Gina Moffa and Stephanie Sarazin talked about the loss of us, the grief that comes when a relationship ends; Darnell Lamont Walker talked about living with fewer regrets; Dionne C. Monsanto and Myra Sack talked about life after the unimaginable; Sian-Pierre Regis and Kelly Dearman talked about aging as grief and as growth. In Creative Workshops, Katie Down taught deep listening, Monica Canilao had people drawing vessels for what they carry, and Wendy Videlock wrote poems about the animals that hold our grief. Embodied Practices ran breath with Sundari Malcolm, movement with Sasha Soreff and Larissa Velez-Jackson, and ancestor work with Brenda Salgado. Michelle Cassandra Johnson, Tori Tsui and alexandra "ahlay" blakely took on the weight of the world, and ahlay taught the whole room her song "Carry This All."

Dara Kosberg performed a piece from her solo show about getting the call that her mother was dying while she was studying in Australia, and it was funny, which was the point. Seventeen people read the Summit Cento, a poem stitched from lines contributed by the community, called "Our Grief." Miguel Cervantes sang. Room for Grief, the peer support space, ran four times during the day and was not recorded, on purpose.

"Community is the medicine"

Justin Michael Williams closed the day with the story of his grandmother, Baka, who was told she had two months to live and used one of them to make him promise he would record an album. He did not sing or play an instrument at the time. The album charted. The lesson he took from her was not about music. "We forget that community is the medicine," he said. Then he had everyone write a thank you letter to their future self, to be emailed back in December, and got a room full of grieving people to stand up and dance to a song called "I Am Enough."

Brad's closing reflection returned to the day's name. In these times, he said, the painful parts of life are making people lonely, divided and numb. His question was simple. Who did you talk to, really talk to, about the hardest thing you have ever been through? More than half of people can name one person or none. The whole project of Reimagine is to change that answer, and to treat pain not as the enemy but, in his words, as a doorway.

Then people relit their candles, found one other square in the gallery view, and spent thirty seconds wishing a stranger well.

Touchstones to carry with you

Corey's four touchstones were for the day. Nineteen of the people who spoke left one behind for afterward. A Summit Touchstone is a short reflection drawn from that person's book, practice or words, with a prompt to answer in your own. They live inside the Summit Pathway in the Reimagine app, in four sets: Holding It Together, Wisdom in the Present Moment, Calling Upon Protectors, and Ritual and Making Meaning.

Many of them come from people in this post. Colin Campbell left Finding the Words. Ezekiel Goodwin left Building an Altar. Justin Michael Williams left Future Self. Michelle Cassandra Johnson left Invoking Spiritual Protection, Wendy Videlock Wild Animal Wisdom, Dionne C. Monsanto Let Joy In, Darnell Lamont Walker Embracing Your Mortality, Sundari Malcolm Grief Gems, Mangda Sengvanhpheng Small Rituals for Transition, and Dara Kosberg The Funny Part. The rest are from Sherry Richert Belul (Say It Now), Christine Gautreaux (Somatic Play), Katie Louise Cooper (Circle of Presence), Jessica C. Guthrie (Finding Your Balance as a Caregiver), Blair Kaplan (Bouncing Forward), Butterfly (Guided Meditation), Garrick Colwell (Kitchen Table Conversations), and Stefanie Elkins and Lisa Pahl of Death Over Drafts (Getting the Conversation Going).

None of it is homework. The pathway is self paced, other people are writing in it alongside you, and nothing closes. If you registered for the Summit, sign in with that email. Open the Summit Pathway.

If you missed it, or want to go back

All 34 recordings are free at letsreimagine.org/summit-2026, organized by room. Under many of the sessions on that page sits the speaker's Touchstone, so you can watch, then go deeper with them in the app. The next Room for Grief is Thursday, November 19, and a four week group, Together Through the Holidays, begins December 1.

Thank you to every speaker, Collaborator, volunteer and staff member who made the day, and to everyone who typed a name.

And if you would rather see it than read about it, here is a six minute film of the day, cut from the recordings.