When Grief Becomes the Gateway: A Candlelight Vigil for a Breaking World

Reimagine has been holding Candlelight Vigils since March 2020, since the earliest days of the pandemic, as a way to break down taboos and hold space for all that we have lost. On July 8, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we gathered again, this time to hold something larger than any one person's loss: the collective weight of a world that feels, to so many of us, like it is breaking.

The invitation was simple and honest. 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?

This is what unfolded.

Grief Is the Gateway

The heart of the evening was a reflection from Francis Weller, the writer, soul activist, and author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, who spent four decades as a psychotherapist before turning his full attention to grief and ritual. Weller offered the gathering a framework that reframes everything most of us have been taught about sorrow.

Grief, he said, is not merely an emotion. "It's a core human faculty. It's a core skill," one we are taught almost nothing about, so that when it arrives we feel ill-equipped and look for the nearest exit. What he invites instead is what he calls an apprenticeship with sorrow, a long and deliberate study. And unlike a craftsman's apprenticeship, which ends in mastery, this one leads somewhere else. "The apprenticeship with sorrow does not lead to mastery," he said. "It leads to elderhood." It is how we ripen as human beings.

Weller was clear that much of the grief we carry now is not ours alone. "Most of the grief you feel is not personal," he said. "It is not yours, but it is ours. It is ours to share, to carry, to tend." Grief, he reminded us, has always been communal. It is only recently, and particularly in white Western culture, that it has become a private affair, something we are asked to shoulder in isolation. And the level of grief in the world right now, he said plainly, is far too much for anyone to carry privately.

The Long Dark

Weller did not offer easy comfort, and the gathering was stronger for it. He described the present moment as a threshold time, a long season of descent into what he calls the long dark. This is not, he cautioned, the kind of difficulty that resolves at the end of an administration or a news cycle. It may be the work of generations.

But descent, in his telling, is not the same as despair. Things germinate in darkness. Imagination, creativity, reverence, incubation, all of them do their quiet work out of the light. The values that the dark asks of us, humility, deep listening, reciprocity, are precisely the ones we most need. Drawing on the language of alchemy, he described this as the nigredo, the blackening, a necessary stage of decay in which systems that no longer serve life begin to break down.

What matters, he said, is that we do not try to clamber back up to the light too quickly. Our task is to learn the necessity and value of the dark, and to throw ourselves into the world like fertile seeds, so that something might germinate even now.

We Cannot Do This Alone

If there was one practical teaching the evening returned to again and again, it was that this work is impossible in isolation. "This is the solitary journey we cannot do alone," Weller said, quoting Ira Progoff. No one can walk your grief for you. And also, you cannot walk it by yourself.

What we need, he offered, is threefold. We need to actively work our grief through imagination, art, ritual, writing, and conversation, keeping it warm so it does not harden into what he called oppression rather than depression. We need community and friendship, human and more-than-human, the trees and stones and rivers included. And we need ritual space, the oldest language we speak, which gives grief a container so that we are free simply to release.

That teaching was not abstract. It was embodied all evening.

The Rituals That Held Us

The gathering was bookended by ritual, guided by artist and end-of-life doula Mangda Sengvanhpheng, founder of BACII. At the center of the screen stood a communal altar she had created in response to the evening's guiding question. A flaming heart at its center represented all of our hearts, connected across distance and time. Seeds beneath the cloth held our hopes. Stones around the edge carried the weight of our grief, and also its wisdom. "This love can extend beyond ourselves," she said, "across distance, generations, and time."

Mangda, whose program The Grief We Carry supports frontline immigration legal workers, described her grief work as a form of contribution, a way of building capacity in the people doing some of the hardest work there is. The evening closed with a Basi ceremony from Laos, where her family is from, in which participants tied a white string around their wrists and offered a blessing outward, to someone else or to the world.

Between these rituals, musician and community song leader Liz Digitale Anderson taught the gathering a call-and-response song. It is what she called a zipper song, one where you name the thing that is overwhelming you and work through it together. This grief is a wave. This fear is a wave. This love is a wave. And the line the whole community held together: I am strong enough to hold, wave after wave. Later, as attendees filled the chat with the names of those they were grieving, Liz sang a refrain that lingered long after the screens went dark: You do not carry this all alone.

Grief That Knows No Borders

This was, unmistakably, a gathering that held collective and public grief alongside personal loss. Public health strategist Paurvi Bhatt, the bereaved daughter of immigrants and a proud Minnesotan who first encouraged Reimagine to hold this vigil, spoke about the disorientation of watching her own community become the center of national events, and the loss of connection and identity that came with it. Nurse and activist Sarah Warren led an honor ceremony that named her grandmother, her mother, and many others whose lives and deaths have marked recent years, holding them all in a single act of collective mourning.

We will not, in this space, adjudicate the events these speakers spoke to. That is not the work of a vigil. What a vigil does is turn us to face one another. As Sarah Warren put it, "Knowing we are not alone in our pain is an act of justice." People came carrying anger, disbelief, fleeting joy, and profound loss, loss of loved ones, of safety, of a sense of self, of community. The vigil made room for all of it.

From Grief to Acts of Love

This vigil was also the beginning of something. It launched a four-week program, Channeling Personal and Collective Loss into Acts of Love, led by Reimagine facilitators Dara Kosberg and Mangda Sengvanhpheng. Rooted in the psychological research on post-traumatic growth, the program invites participants to lean into their grief, both personal and collective, and channel it into small, concrete acts of love: for themselves, for the people they love, and for the world beyond. Each week, participants leave with one small commitment, one sweet step to carry forward.

That, in the end, is the throughline of the whole evening. As Weller reminded us, quoting Thich Nhat Hanh, what we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the earth crying, because that grief is a reflection of our love for the world. The broken heart, he said, borrowing from Joanna Macy, is the one that can contain the whole universe. We have to be willing to let our hearts break, because we have no idea what we will be able to hold once we do.

Weller closed with a line from Rumi that is as good a benediction as any for these times: those tender words we shared with one another are stored in the secret heart of heaven. One day, like rain, they will fall and spread, and our mystery will grow green across the earth.

Watch the full recording of the vigil below.

Reimagine is a nonprofit catalyzing a community of people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths who come together to face adversity, loss, and mortality, and to channel life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth. To join the four-week program Channeling Personal and Collective Loss into Acts of Love, or to explore Reimagine's guided pathways rooted in post-traumatic growth, visit letsreimagine.org. Reimagine has been holding Candlelight Vigils since March 2020.