Home › AFTER

AFTER

Mission Statement:

We believe grief is not a problem to be solved, it isn’t wrong and can’t be fixed. Grief is love in its most wild form and the only real medicine of grief is companionship. It’s in finding the depth of love necessary to witness each other’s pain without rushing in to clean it up. As a community of fellow grievers who understand each other best, we will provide tools for learning to live a new way of life inside of grief through support and activities that help lessen the pain and reduce suffering.

We live in a culture where we have a deep aversion to feeling or facing the realities of pain. This is never more prevalent than in our beliefs around grief, where we experience the deepest reaction of emotional pain and have no place to feel it, be in it, or even understand it without feeling as if we are “broken.”


AFTER meets bi-weekly. See our Facebook page for the link at:
https://www.facebook.com/AFTER-104446428423938

AFTER is a bereavement group that is meant to bear witness to and support one another in the journey after losing someone we love. AFTER has Grief Agreements that are posted and followed each meeting. We believe grief is painful and inevitable, and should not be experienced in isolation. Pain is a part of the process but suffering does not have to be.

Virtual support group meetings will be online via Zoom and participants may join using the following link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86542631492?pwd=VTVHT1E1akpMYzhwU29DcVRaUzVtdz09

Meeting ID: 865 4263 1492
Passcode: 113447

One tap mobile
+13126266799,,86542631492#,,,,*113447# US (Chicago)
+19294362866,,86542631492#,,,,*113447# US (New York)

The agreements in no particular order are:
  • We are not here to fix pain, we are here to tend to it. Some things cannot be fixed, only carried.
  • Grief is not a disorder that needs to be diagnosed.
  • Acknowledgment is everything. Acknowledgment of our loss, our inability to be who we were before… all of it.
  • Grief is a part of love, what we are living is love in its rawest form
  • There isn’t necessarily a reason for everything or a silver lining behind this cloud, platitudes do more harm than good.
  • There are no defined stages in any order, each loss is our own, it’s unique, and it’s ours to walk as we so choose; it does not have to make sense to anyone else. Grief is as individual as love.
  • Loss is something that is integrated, not overcome. We won’t “get over” this but we can learn to live in this and still experience joy.
  • Every loss is valid, every loss is not the same.

AFTER meets bi-weekly, meeting in person at our location on the 2nd Thursday of the month and virtually via Zoom the 4th Thursday of the month.

Every 2nd Thursday of the month, AFTER will meet at:

Spring Green Educational Foundation
2319 Detroit Ave.
Maumee, OH 43537
(view map)

All meetings are from 7 – 8:15 p.m.

Please email Dawn Duhaime at dawnduhaimesgef@gmail.com for more information or contact her at 419-250-0810

 

We encourage you to check out the website below to learn how one mother and father took the pain of their grief and chose to share their son's story in order to prevent other parents from enduring the same pain.  LeAnne co-facilitates our virtual grief support group and has been a significant part of After's journey.

https://jacobsjourney.online/