Are you missing a child who has died?  A mother who is gone? 

Maybe this season of Mother’s Day is a painful trigger for you, leaving you feeling isolated and out-of-step. 

You are not alone. 

 Reading writers who have navigated this terrain and writing our own way through the wild landscape of loss can be a potent balm for our hearts, and a beckoning into a wider space of love.

What if, instead of trying to move beyond your grief, you embrace it as a testament to your love?

How can reading about others’ experience of losing a child or a mother soothe your heart and infuse your own loss with meaning?

What is the connection between grief and artistic expression?

-Missing a child who has died (or is estranged)

-Missing a mother who has died (or is estranged)

-Feeling alienated from the rest of society as they celebrate Mothers Day

-A sense that you are doing something wrong to be sad at a time of celebration

-Wondering if you’re ever going to “get over” your loss

Meet Mirabai

Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement guide, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. Her latest book, WILD MERCY: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019”. She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

Meet Rosemerry

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Rosemerry has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006—a practice that especially nourished her after her teenage son Finn chose to take his life in 2021. Find her daily poems on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practice, and her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. She has thirteen books of poetry, the most recent is All the Honey, a braiding of grief, joy and grace. In January 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore and is helping others explore grief, bereavement, wonder and love through poetry.

Meet Claudia

Claudia Love Mair has written 13 books, including Mourning Pages: Working Through Grief the Write Way, releasing in the fall of 2025 from Broadleaf Books. Currently she is studying to be a death doula with the Guided Spiral Deathkeeper Program. In addition Claudia Love is a Neighborhood Healer, offering mental health first aid to Black Kentucky residents. She partners with eKY Mutual Aid to provide support to creatives in crisis. In addition, Claudia Love co-facilitates the Abbey of the Arts book club, Lift Every Voice, and she serves as Coordinator for the Carnegie Center's Kentucky Black Writers Collaborative. Claudia Love lost her son, Lumumba, to fentanyl overdose in October of 2021. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her daughter and two cats, Batman and Gizmo.