Grieving the loss of a child is one of the hardest challenges life can throw at a person.
The Vernon chapter of The Compassionate Friends aims to help parents in this position. Towards that end, and together with the Emily Dahl Foundation, the organization has announced a keynote speaker will be offering a presentation called What is Good Grief Support?
Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is the speaker, and she’ll be taking the stage at the Vernon Towne Theatre Thursday, June 22.
Cacciatore is a bereaved mother and the founder of the MISS Foundation, an international non-governmental organization that serves families whose children have died, and the Selah Carefarm, a sustainable restorative community that provides aid to anyone suffering traumatic grief.
Cacciatore is also a professor and senior scholar in the Wrigley Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, spearheading the graduate certificate in trauma and bereavement. Her best-selling book, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, has won national awards while helping to revolutionize the way culture thinks and feels about grief.
Cacciatore works with and counsels families from all around the world who have experienced catastrophic deaths. She served on Oprah and Prince Harry’s mental health advisory board for several years and was featured in their docuseries, The Me You Can’t See. She also teaches meditation, mindfulness and compassion practices to students and clients from around the world.
For nearly 30 years, Cacciatore has worked to change the way grief is regarded in society and treated by professionals. She has done this work so that people like her, when she lost her child, can learn to cope and integrate grief in their own time with compassionate and understanding support.
The Emily Dahl Foundation has been working with Compassionate Friends since 2019 to help others understand and work through the loss of a loved one. The Emily Dahl Foundation was founded in 2019 in memory of founder Sherman Dahl’s daughter, who took her own life at age 18 in January of that year.
“This is something we have been working on for a number of months. It was Dr. Stan Eamon that first gave me one of Dr. Jo’s books - Grieving is Loving. This act of kindness by Stan really impacted me and it was not long after this that Joanne and I met and began to share our stories of the loss of our children,” said Dahl.
“It took a few months for Joanne to fit this in her schedule, but she did, even though she was already fully booked for 2023. She is an amazing woman, and we are so excited to announce this joint effort … This will help so many people. Everyone has a story of grief and the loss of a loved one, and many suffer because of a lack of proper support in this area of our lives. We have to help each other, and we must have the correct understanding of the depths of our being in order to do this.”
Doors will open at 5 p.m. at the June 22 event. There will be a wine and cheese reception as well as auction items throughout the evening. Presentations will begin at 6:30 p.m. with a live stream presentation by Cacciatore at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 and will be available online. All net proceeds from the event will go directly to the Vernon chapter of Compassionate Friends.
READ MORE: Compassion continues for grieving Vernon parents
READ MORE: VSS volleyball event raises $2,600 for the Emily Dahl Foundation