You can just come and sit down

Most of the reasons people give for not coming to something like this are really the same reason.

I wouldn't know what to say. I don't want to be put on the spot. I'd end up crying in front of strangers. I'm not sure I belong there. Underneath all of it: I do not want to be asked to perform something I cannot perform.

Room for Grief exists so that nobody has to.

What it actually is

Drop-in support rooms, open across the day on October 15. Four of them, one in each block, each held by a Reimagine Collaborator who has spent years sitting with people in grief.

There is no curriculum. There is no exercise. Nobody presents anything. It is a room with a facilitator in it and however many people have wandered in, for as long as they want to stay.

Here is what that means in practice, stated as plainly as we can:

• You do not have to talk. Not at the start, not at the end, not at all.
• Your camera can stay off. Nobody will ask you to turn it on.
• You do not have to introduce yourself, or say what happened, or explain why you are there.
• You can leave whenever you want. Ten minutes is a legitimate visit. So is arriving, sitting, and going.
• You do not have to know what you are grieving. Plenty of people who come do not, or would not put it in those words.

If you have ever left an event early because you could feel it coming, this is the room you leave into.

Who is holding them

Each session is one facilitator and whoever turns up.

Kristabeth Atwood (10:50 AM PT) is a pastor, as she puts it, for people who don't do church, and the founder of Rites of Passage, LLC. She guides people through spiritual direction, grief support and personalised ceremonies for life transitions.

Garrick Colwell (11:40 AM PT) is a certified grief educator with KitchenTableConversations.org. He has been a hospice volunteer and chaplain since 1987, which is a long time to have been in rooms like this one.

Michelle Thornhill (12:30 PM PT) holds space for grief, remembrance, and the healing that comes from being witnessed.

Butterfly (Tony Pham) (1:10 PM PT) teaches meditation and compassion at Tibet House US, is certified in Compassion Cultivation Training, and spoke at the Dalai Lama Global Vision Summit in 2023.

Different people, different rooms. If one does not suit you, there is another in the next block. On the schedule, the track is listed as Grief Support, and each session is called Room for Grief with the host's name.

Who it is for

Anyone. That is not a slogan, it is the design.

It is for people who came for a specific session and found it hit harder than expected. For people who registered for the day and cannot face a panel. For people who are not grieving anything nameable but have felt off for months. For caregivers who never get a room of their own. For people whose loss is old enough that they think they have lost the right to bring it up.

And it is for anyone attending the rest of the Summit who needs somewhere to go for twenty minutes. A five-hour day about grief will find something in most people. We would rather you had a room than a closed laptop.

Why we build it this way

The instinct with grief support is to structure it. Give people a prompt, a framework, a set of stages, something to do with their hands.

We have run enough of these to know that the structure is often what keeps people out. A prompt is a request. A framework implies there is a way to do this correctly and therefore a way to do it wrong. And for someone who is already at capacity, one more thing to get right is exactly one thing too many.

So the room asks nothing. What it offers instead is the thing that actually helps, which is other people being in the same weather at the same time, and somebody experienced holding the edges of it so you do not have to.

You can just come and sit down. That is the whole invitation.

Room for Grief is part of the Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time, Thursday, October 15, from 10 AM to 3 PM Pacific. Online, free to attend, donations welcome, and the rooms are open all day.

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

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