What 70 Grieving Mothers Taught Me This Year

By the time this year’s Love Mama Grief Retreat ended, I thought I was fine.

In fact, I felt better than fine. I felt energized. And that surprised me.

This was our third time holding the retreat at 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, California, and our largest yet. Seventy grieving mothers gathered beneath the redwoods for five days of healing, connection, tears, laughter, movement, ritual, and remembrance. I was teaching more than I ever had before, while also carrying all the other roles I hold at the retreat: creator, host, facilitator, moderator, and container.

The first year I led the retreat, I came home and spent nearly three days in bed. This year, with our largest group yet and more on my plate than ever before, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

As we gathered for our last session, I looked around the room and saw hope. Not the fragile kind that depends on circumstances changing. The hard-earned kind that emerges after someone has walked through the unthinkable and discovered she can keep going.

Many of the mothers who arrive at the retreat are carrying isolation, exhaustion, and the private belief that they will be in pain forever and that no one could understand what it means to lose a child.

What moves me most are the conversations that happen at the end. Again and again, mothers pull me aside to share what they couldn’t say when they arrived. They tell me how hopeless they had become. How alone they felt. How impossible it seemed to imagine a future they wanted to live. Some share that before coming, there were moments when the pain became so overwhelming they weren’t sure they wanted to keep going. Not because they truly wanted to die, but because they could no longer imagine how to live without their child.

Then they tell me something else. They can now see a path forward. They are leaving with tools, with community, with sisters who understand, and with a renewed belief that healing is possible. Their grief has not disappeared. What has changed is that they no longer believe grief is the end of their story.

One of the most beautiful parts of every retreat is the sisterhood that forms in the space between structured sessions, in the hallways, at meals, during the quiet moments that no one planned.

This year, because so many mothers were returning for a second or third time, we created a Big Sister program. Women who had once arrived shattered by the loss of their child volunteered to support mothers attending for the first time. Watching them step into that role was one of the most moving experiences of the week.

There is something that happens when someone who has been through your specific kind of pain sits with you. Not to fix it. Not to offer a timeline. Just to be there, having survived it, and to let their presence say what words usually can’t: you will get through this too.

The retreat is built around the understanding that grief doesn’t just live in the mind. It lives in the body, and the body needs its own kind of attention.

One of the most powerful moments of the week happened during a sound healing session. As the mothers allowed whatever they wanted to move, years of suppressed emotion began rising to the surface. The room filled with tears, cries, and sounds that many of these women had spent years trying not to make. What struck me most was not the intensity of it but the tenderness. Mothers reaching for each other’s hands while crying themselves. Women in shared heartbreak, not trying to fix anything, just holding each other in it.

Afterward, many talked about how comforting it was to hear other mothers grieving alongside them. Their pain was no longer happening in isolation. It was being witnessed. And there is something deeply healing about realizing the weight you’ve been carrying alone was never meant to be carried alone.

Another moment I look forward to every year is ecstatic dance. We invite the mothers to move their grief through their bodies with no steps to learn and no expectations. Just whatever the body wants to do.

At one point, I started skipping around the room, and before long, a train of grieving mothers was skipping behind me, laughing as we moved together across the floor.

I talk about this often, and I saw it again in that room: joy and grief are not opposites. They can coexist. Allowing yourself a moment of lightness does not mean you love your child less. It means you are still alive, and that matters.

Since coming home, several of the mothers have sent me videos of themselves dancing, walking, and moving. Their bodies are participating in life again. That is not a small thing.

I had planned to stay an extra night after the retreat ended, assuming I’d need time to recover. But as the final session closed and the mothers began leaving, I felt lighter than expected.

Then, as I walked across the campus with two friends, something started building inside me. A buzzing under my skin. My nervous system felt activated in a way I couldn’t name. I told my friends I needed a moment alone and made my way to the Mother Tree.

The Mother Tree has been part of my healing since the early days after Sammy died. There’s a natural split low in her trunk, a perfect place to sit, and I spent countless hours there in those first weeks of grief. So I climbed back into that familiar space and let whatever wanted to come, come.

What came was grief. A deep, powerful cry that moved through me. As I sat there I realised how much I had been holding during the week. Not just my own grief, but the grief of seventy mothers. Their stories. Their courage. The unimaginable reality that seventy women had gathered because seventy beloved children were gone.

That evening, something unexpected surfaced. Anger. Not directed at anyone in particular, just anger that moved through me and left me withdrawn, irritable, and quiet in a way my friends weren’t used to seeing.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I understood the anger was not the real story. It was carrying something else. The accumulated grief of seventy mothers. The helplessness every grieving parent knows. The quiet, unreasonable expectation that five years later I should somehow have this figured out. My own grief for Sammy.

Most of the week, I had been teaching mothers how to make room for difficult emotions instead of pushing them away. In the end, the retreat asked the same of me.

Seventy grieving mothers came together beneath the redwoods and reminded one another that healing is possible. That hope can return. That joy and grief can coexist.

And they reminded me that grief still has things to teach me.

For that, I am deeply grateful.

Nearly all of the mothers who attend the Love Mama Grief Retreat do so on scholarship, and every member of our faculty generously volunteers their time and gifts.

This retreat is made possible through the support of Parent Collective, the 1440 Foundation, Life After Love Foundation, and Channeling Grief Substack, along with the generosity of individual donors who believe grieving parents deserve access to healing regardless of their financial circumstances.

I am also deeply grateful to 1440 Multiversity, whose extraordinary campus continues to hold all of us so beautifully.

If you or someone you know is carrying this kind of grief and needs support, the Grief Healing Collective is open to you.

If you’ve been carrying your grief alone, please know you don’t have to. There are people who understand this particular kind of heartbreak, who won’t ask you to explain it or get over it. It’s okay to let yourself be held by people who understand.