This conversation is about emerging from our collective grief and about creating our future together. It’s about our interconnectedness and what it means to live a good life in community with each other. We love adrienne’s vision and clarity and hopefulness and honesty. We love adrienne, our memelord.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.

What does it mean to grieve as a community? As a country? We’re thinking about what it means to face our losses and our grief head on — together — in order to repair our society. What does it mean to lose a future that we might have imagined? Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg joins us to talk about some of the roots of our grief culture here in America, and with that knowledge, what collective grief and healing can look like in our communities.

For today’s meditation: grab a pencil and paper! The bestselling illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton is the founder and host of Draw Together and she will lead us through a drawing exercise “Chill Out Drawing for Stressed Out Times.”

Today we’re talking to Dr. Dorothy Holinger, psychologist and author of The Anatomy of Grief. This validating conversation is an exploration of the science and spirituality of grief, how deeply personal and individualistic the grief experience is and how integral it is to all living beings.

Today is a breathing meditation with Linda Thai. Linda is a therapist and leads meditations as part of her somatic healing practice. She will take us on a 10 minute meditation to explore our relationship to our ancestors through release and healing. And for those us that get antsy about the idea of meditating for 10 minutes - we get it! Take a walk and see how it feels.

America! The land of opportunity! And also, for so many Mash-Ups, the ambiguous loss of immigration and uprooting a life and a history comes with a complex web of emotions. We’re talking to the trauma therapist and educator Linda Thai about ancestral grief, and how unmetabolized grief, particularly in Mash-Up families, is passed down through generations.

A series of 4 songs on grief from Daniela Gesundheit and Snowblink. A lot of Daniela’s music engages with grief, as she weaves together stories from her personal experience and her Jewish traditions. These meditative episodes are an invitation to get out of our heads and into our bodies.

We speak to grief experts, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers on grief, trauma, and loss to define grief and loss and their many manifestations. We outline how the American experience of grief is unique and how other cultures may be different.