On the Mourning Together name and logo.

When I was working on naming this project that my soul kept asking me to create, I took my time and let myself observe messages that would come through in day to day life. I went through a couple other potential names and decided on Mourning Together. I had been listening to the podcast, Good Mourning, and in my mind, I congratulated the founders on finding a perfect name. While I know they mean to say that mourning is ultimately good for us, I later critiqued the “good” because it is a value judgment, and we truly need to withhold judgment on ourselves and others in this liminal stage- there is no right way to grieve. But I love the double meaning in the words Mourning and Morning. It speaks to the freedom we find in clearly stating when we are in a state of mourning- in a society that wants us to keep it private and handle it ourselves. By declaring we are in mourning, we create a new start for ourselves- a morning.

As I was defining what I wanted our online grief support community space to be, I kept coming back to community. My vision is to create a safe space where we can gently teach one another how to be the loving village we need in times of grief. Mourning Together. Immediately, I imagined us having mornings together- which inspired the name for our live sessions- Sunday Mourning Together. Mornings are so powerful when we are up and moving intentionally. Dawn is similarly a liminal state. Dawn is when we transition from our dreams (our spirit life) into our everyday life, as conducted by our body/mind and network of relationships. So we will support our body/mind, spirit, and relationships in the Mourning Together online community.

I did pause at the natural abbreviation of MT for Mourning Together. Spoken, it sounds like empty. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt appropriate. After a loss, we often feel so lonely and empty. And deeper, from Francis Weller’s “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”: 

When you find a channel for your rage and deepest suffering, and there’s another hand there reaching back, what lies in the wake of it all, is finally- blessed peace. Calm. Nothing has changed about your loss…it’s still there. But your relationship with it has been greatly altered. You have been heard and held tenderly. You have been drained. And then you can open yourself up again. You can start to rebuild in that annihilated place” (Weller, p84).

How beautiful! What a way to capture that feeling in words. May this be our way forward: Listening and supporting and expressing- together.