F Your Rainbows: How to Check Your Inner Grief Weather

F Your Rainbows: How to Check Your Inner Grief Weather

People love to offer silver linings and rainbows to grievers. But when you’re devastated by loss, you might not want to hear it. That’s when you might think: F* Your Rainbows

The problem is, when you’re devastated from a recent loss, you might not want to hear about silver linings and rainbows:
“At least they’re no longer suffering.”
“At least they lived a good life.”
“He would want you to be happy.”

(Hint: Anything that starts with “at least” is unlikely to be helpful.)

As a griever, you might well be thinking: F*ck your rainbows.
🌪️ ☔ 🌩️ 🌧️ 🌦️ 🌤️ ☁️ ☀️ 🌈


I use a weather analogy to describe stages and phases of grief and loss:


🌪️ The thick of the storm – You’re in the terrible early stages of dealing with the emotional and practical aftermath of the death of a loved one. You and your family are just trying to survive the storm.

🌧️ 🌩️ Persistent dark, rainy clouds – You’re resuming parts of your life, like school or work. It may feel like you’re just going through the motions. There may be a feeling of disconnect, between other people cheerily living their lives, and the gloominess you’re experiencing.

🌦️ 🌤️ Clouds dissipating and peeks of sunshine – You’re out of the worst of the storm. You’re smiling a bit more, even when you think of your loved one. You feel more hope that though life will never be the same, life can go on.

🌈 Ready for Rainbows – Time has passed, some healing has been done. You find comfort or meaning in remembering your loved one. You can spot and appreciate the proverbial rainbow after the rain.


It’s OK to be where you are, no matter your inner grief weather.

These aren’t linear stages. Some days, it may all be dark clouds. Others, an unexpected ray of sunshine comes through. Then the clouds may return.

Just remember: The sunshine is always there, beyond the clouds.

On the darkest days, the sun still shines, even when we can’t see it yet. And even if we’re not ready for rainbows yet, maybe someday we will be.

I like using this metaphor of inner grief weather to check in with ourselves and others.

How’s your inner grief weather today?
If you were to express it in a weather emoji or two, what would it be?

I’d love to hear from you — Connect with me on Instagram @curating_grief or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charclam/ or attend The Grief Gallery’s free monthly gathering.

Feel free to reach out hello@charlenelam.com

Want help unpacking your own experience of grief and loss, and finding your way through the storm of major loss, especially after the death of a loved one? Find out more about working with me and my Unpacking Grief coaching package.

hello

I'm Charlene

I help grieving people feeling burdened by responsibilities, resentments and regrets after the death of a loved one to feel lighter –– so you can live your own fullest life. 

After the sudden death of my mother Marilyn in 2013, I put my life, work and grief on hold as I struggled to deal with the estate, paperwork and belongings.

Healing took time -- and it took help.

I'm a certified grief coach, and I developed my Curating Grief framework to help people process grief in a creative, accessible way. Learn how to move forward, without leaving your connection to your loved one behind.

 

Get In Touch

  • hello@charlenelam.com

GRIEF SUPPORT

Monthly Grief Gathering

You're invited to join The Grief Gallery's free monthly gathering for creative inspiration and community connection. Hosted by grief coach and curator Charlene Lam.

CONTACT

  • hello@charlenelam.com

CONNECT

YOU ARE ALL WELCOME

Trans-inclusion LGBTQI rainbow flag to welcome for grief support

WORK WITH ME

GRIEF COACHING

MEET ME IN LISBON

SPEAKING AND WORKSHOPS

MONTHLY GRIEF GATHERING

Join us for The Grief Gallery's free, supportive grief group gathering the last Wednesday of the month, 2pm ET (7pm UK).

RSVP

SEE ALL EVENTS

Visit curatinggrief.com/grief-events

CURATING GRIEF PODCAST

GRIEF RESOURCES

Find Grief Resources

Need help with grief? I can help.

Get in touch: Email hello [at] charlenelam.com

Note: Coaching and coaching consultations are not a substitute for counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, substance abuse treatment, or other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, contact 911 or your local emergency services.

Copyright © 2023 Charlene Lam. Curating Grief ™ and The Grief Gallery ™. All Rights Reserved | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

 

Proof of Life and Proof of Death

Life After Loss as an Executor: Proof of Death and Proof of Life 

If you’re handling the estate or otherwise “the responsible one” after the death of a loved one, you may experience a delayed grief response. I’m a grief coach who dealt with my mom’s estate, and here’s what I mean.

In this video and post, I share five ways that my Asian heritage has influenced my experience of grief. I discuss the assumptions made about different cultures’ approaches to grief, the norm of not talking about illness and death, the role of superstition and traditions, the expectations of how to grieve, and the multi-layered nature of my grief journey.

Hi, I’m Charlene Lam. I’m a certified grief coach and the founder of The Grief Gallery. I was born in Europe and I grew up in New York City in Chinatown and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I can only speak for myself and to my own experiences of grief and all the factors that go into that: My family history, the culture of my family of origin, and the larger culture that I grew up in.

I really want to emphasize that because there are a lot of different kinds of Asian-Americans. There are a lot of different kinds of Asians! We are not a monolith. Our cultures can be very different and our individual experiences can be really different. So I just want to speak for myself and my own experience.

Some context for the losses I’ve experienced:

One, my grandmother, she died of cancer when I was five. That was my first experience with understanding what death was. And that wasn’t an easy lesson for reasons I’ll share in a moment.

And then my mother died from a stroke when I was 35 in January 2013. That was the biggest loss that I’ve experienced as an adult.

Here are five ways that my Asian heritage shaped the kind of support that I got and influenced my experience of grief and loss.

1. Assumptions about Grief in Asian and Eastern cultures.

There are a lot of assumptions made about how different cultures experience grief and approach grief and death and loss. I’ve had everyone from friends to strangers to therapists and other grief support people say: “Oh, well, you know, Eastern cultures have such a healthier relationship with death” and “Asian cultures have so many more ways and practices of staying connected to their ancestors.”

That might be true. And as I said, we are not a monolith. We are lots of different kinds of cultures. Eastern culture includes East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia. And there are a lot of different cultures and religions and practices within those regions.

And just because generations and generations ago in China, there might have been practices for staying connected to our ancestors, that doesn’t mean that any of that carried over to my experience growing up as a Chinese-American child or in my practices as an adult.

So that’s one: Assumptions made about what my practices might be, what my family and what my culture’s approach to grief, death, and dying might look like.

2. In my Asian-American family, not talking about illness and death was actually the norm.

Contrary to the popular belief that Eastern cultures are so much better about talking about death and dying and staying in touch with our ancestors and people who have passed on, that absolutely was not my experience.

In fact, it was the opposite. Throughout my childhood and even my adulthood, a lot of information was withheld. When someone was ill, when someone was in trouble, when someone had died, I often would not find out for days, for weeks, or for years.

There might have been a range of reasons for that: I was the youngest child, so sometimes that was to protect me. With my grandmother, my mother didn’t have the language to explain what death meant, that my grandmother was actually gone.

And often there were cultural aspects.

I remember standing with my mom in the lobby of our apartment building after my grandmother died. A neighbor asked, how is my grandmother doing? And my mother said, “She’s fine.” As a five-year-old, I was so confused: What do you mean she’s fine? You’ve just been saying that she’s gone, she’s dead.

Looking back now, I have so much compassion for my mother, for why she said that. My mom tried to explain it to me later, saying she didn’t want the neighbors to gossip, she didn’t want to have to field questions. (After all, she was a grieving daughter herself!)

And as my aunt explained it, often in our culture, there might be aspects of not wanting to bother other people, not wanting to share bad news.

Not talking about illness and death was just the norm in my family of origin. So you can imagine how that influenced my experience of grief and loss, and the idea of getting support, when I was taught:

  • Talking about illness and death is unlucky.
  • You shouldn’t be talking about it.
  • People don’t want to talk about it.

I can only imagine how isolated other members of my family might have felt at different times of loss. Because potentially other people didn’t even know that they had lost a person!

So, that’s number two: Not talking about illness and death was actually the norm. And that leads to …

3. Superstition played a big role in my culture’s approach to grief and loss.

A big reason that my family of origin, my Chinese-American family, did not talk about death and dying was because it was considered unlucky. There were a lot of superstitions that my family members had inherited from their family members and from their culture. And while my parents and immediate family weren’t that traditional, they still held on to some of those superstitions.

For instance, Chinese New Year – the Lunar New Year – is an important time of year culturally. You might know about some of the things that are considered lucky: Red envelopes, oranges, the color red. All considered lucky.

 And there are a lot of things that are considered unlucky when it comes to the Chinese New Year, including talking about death and dying.

Unfortunately for me, my mother died shortly before Chinese New Year.

My family members said, “Don’t tell people. It’s unlucky. We don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable heading into the Lunar New Year.”

And these were family members who had been in the U.S. for decades! In a lot of ways were very modern, but they still held on to some of these superstitions. When my uncle was sick a couple of years ago, he didn’t want to go into the hospital. because the Lunar New Year was coming up.

I’ve heard similar accounts from other Chinese friends and colleagues who said, “Yeah, I wasn’t welcome into other people’s homes because I had recently experienced a death.”

Again, you can imagine how isolating that might feel in circumstances that already feel isolating!

Studies show that community support can be so important after we lose a loved one. You can likely see how that role of superstition might have blocked the receiving of that community support.

4. As an Asian-American griever, I felt disconnected from cultural traditions.

Another way that being Asian influenced my experience of grief was feeling disconnected from cultural traditions.

This varies a lot from family to family. Some families are really traditional, and they do practice using an altar, for instance. Maybe their family had Buddhist traditions, and they maintain that. Maybe they went to the cemetery regularly and had rituals and ceremonies.

I personally did not grow up with those traditions. I saw altars in restaurants and businesses when I grew up in Chinatown. I knew that offering fruit and burning incense on those altars were things that were done. But I never understood the meaning or purpose. That was not something that we did in our home, and my parents and family members didn’t really tell me much about it.

Why was this the case? I think as Chinese-American immigrants, my parents emphasized fitting in and assimilating with American culture.

That’s a long tradition of this. Asian-Americans are often cited as the model minority. And that is a myth: the model minority myth. But the belief that fitting in was the way to success was not uncommon for a lot of Chinese immigrant families, and that was certainly the case for my family.

For instance, rather than sending me to Saturday School so that I could learn Chinese along with some of my classmates in Chinatown, my parents didn’t want me to do that. They wanted me to have more of a childhood, an American-style childhood where you had your weekends off. So while I appreciate that, there were definitely aspects of Chinese-ness, my heritage and traditions that they didn’t teach me. As an adult I do feel that disconnect.

There were also expectations about how to grieve: How to grieve in a Chinese way or an Asian way, and how to grieve in an American way. Some family members expected grieving to look like being stoic and being strong. And then some of my more Americanized family members expected me to be more emotional and to cry more after my mother died.

That was another aspect of feeling disconnect — not knowing what was right and not feeling like I knew what was expected of me.

5. Multiple layers of grief and loss as an Asian immigrant.

That brings me to my last point about how being Asian influenced my experience of grief and loss and still continues to: It’s a multi-layered experience. This is true of a lot of grievers, where we keep on peeling the layers of the onion (if you’ve heard that saying). There are these layers and layers that we keep on peeling and finding as we learn more, as we integrate loss into our lives, as we learn to coexist with our grief, even as we move forward with our own lives.

For me, those layers often involve looking at what shaped my family’s responses to death, dying, and grief.

When I was younger, I had a lot of resentment and judgment for how they responded. I had a lot of judgment about family members withholding information, or trying to protect me by making sure I was being more American than Chinese.

Over the years, especially in more recent years, I’ve been peeling back layers of why they did that, and I have so much more understanding and compassion for them.

Often it came back to a matter of survival. Either for economic survival, and sometimes for their actual survival.

The aspects of lying and telling half-truths that I encountered were so confounding when I was little. Growing up in the U.S., I learned in elementary school that you shouldn’t lie, that you should always tell the truth. It did not make any sense to me why my family members would withhold information, and why they would lie about some of these hard truths.

As I got older, and as I learned about things like the Cultural Revolution in China and discriminatory immigration laws in the U.S., I came to understand that a lot of my Chinese-American heritage involved necessary lying.

Survival involved telling half-truths, masking and not telling the full story, whether that was because U.S. immigration laws said that Chinese men could not bring their families. Or whether it was because I had relatives who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China, and they brought the impact of that trauma over when they immigrated to the United States. 

There are so many layers that I’m still unpeeling. More recently, I was reading about the history of New York’s Chinatown, and why Chinatowns formed. I read that Chinatowns were built as a form of protection because of attacks on Chinese immigrants in the larger society. And it had never struck me that was a reason why Chinatowns would form, and why Chinatowns would be so insular, and why they kept to themselves. 

There are layers of grief associated with all of that — layers of loss and layers of me trying to better understand relatives that I’ve never met or don’t remember.

I recently cleared out my family’s storage unit, and I found photos of my grandfather and my grandmother.

My grandfather died when I was three. He got cancer and did not tell anyone about the symptoms until it was too late — which is not uncommon for men of a certain age or generation. But again, that was the story of my family’s life, not telling things.

My grandmother died when I was five, so I don’t really remember her.

I think: What layers of loss and grief did they carry? Did they actually have any kind of opportunity to address their grief? And what were they taught?

I’m still peeling back the layers.

Thanks for learning a bit about my stories of Asian grief and loss. Again, I can only speak to my own experience as a Chinese-American, as someone who grew up in New York, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and who grew up in my particular family, in our particular society.

But I hope that gives you some ideas of the different ways that being Asian might influence someone’s experience of grief and loss.

I’d love to hear from you — how have your culture, heritage and family of origin impacted your experiences of grief and loss? Connect with me on Instagram @curating_grief or attend The Grief Gallery’s free monthly gathering.

Want help unpeeling the layers of your own experience of grief and loss? Find out more about working with me and my Unpacking Grief coaching package.

hello

I'm Charlene

I help grieving people feeling burdened by responsibilities, resentments and regrets after the death of a loved one to feel lighter –– so you can live your own fullest life. 

After the sudden death of my mother Marilyn in 2013, I put my life, work and grief on hold as I struggled to deal with the estate, paperwork and belongings.

Healing took time -- and it took help.

I'm a certified grief coach, and I developed my Curating Grief framework to help people process grief in a creative, accessible way. Learn how to move forward, without leaving your connection to your loved one behind.

 

Get In Touch

  • hello@charlenelam.com

GRIEF SUPPORT

Monthly Grief Gathering

You're invited to join The Grief Gallery's free monthly gathering for creative inspiration and community connection. Hosted by grief coach and curator Charlene Lam.

CONTACT

  • hello@charlenelam.com

CONNECT

YOU ARE ALL WELCOME

Trans-inclusion LGBTQI rainbow flag to welcome for grief support

WORK WITH ME

GRIEF COACHING

MEET ME IN LISBON

SPEAKING AND WORKSHOPS

MONTHLY GRIEF GATHERING

Join us for The Grief Gallery's free, supportive grief group gathering the last Wednesday of the month, 2pm ET (7pm UK).

RSVP

SEE ALL EVENTS

Visit curatinggrief.com/grief-events

CURATING GRIEF PODCAST

GRIEF RESOURCES

Find Grief Resources

Need help with grief? I can help.

Get in touch: Email hello [at] charlenelam.com

Note: Coaching and coaching consultations are not a substitute for counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, substance abuse treatment, or other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, contact 911 or your local emergency services.

Copyright © 2023 Charlene Lam. Curating Grief ™ and The Grief Gallery ™. All Rights Reserved | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

 

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Need help with grief? I can help.

Get in touch: Email hello [at] charlenelam.com

Note: Coaching and coaching consultations are not a substitute for counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, substance abuse treatment, or other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, contact 911 or your local emergency services.

Copyright © 2023 Charlene Lam. Curating Grief ™ and The Grief Gallery ™. All Rights Reserved | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

 

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Fresh Grief? 5 Things to Know

What do you do after someone dies? In the weeks or months after a loss, there can be a lot to handle, practically and emotionally. Here are top tips from grief coach Charlene Lam, from grief’s “timeline” to getting grief support.

If you’ve lost a loved one, a friend, a family member. I’m sending you so much love.

Here are a couple of things that I would like you to know if you’ve lost someone fairly recently — and “recent” can mean anything from 2 weeks to 2 years! (Grief time is not like normal time.)

1. Whatever you’re feeling right now and whatever you’re going to be feeling is perfectly fine. It’s normal.

Whether it is anger, whether it is regret, whether it’s guilt, sadness or nothing at all … all of it is a normal response to loss. There isn’t one emotion that’s associated with grief.

You are NOT doing it wrong, if you’re not feeling sad “enough” or on the other hand, because you’re feeling too much! It’s all normal, and your emotions might change from day to day and from moment to moment. Try not to judge your emotions. Don’t judge how you’re doing. Whatever you’re feeling is perfectly fine.

2. Grief has no set timeline. Even emotions can change from moment to moment, day to day.

We’ve all heard about the 5 Stages of Grief, right? But that’s a really outdated model and poorly understood. It wasn’t meant to be a step-by-step linear process. It wasn’t designed to apply to grief after the death of a loved one. (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was studying individuals facing their own deaths.)

For some people, having the idea of stages can be comforting and if that’s you, that’s great!

Grief is Not Linear

But we do want to challenge the idea that there are linear stages, and that at some point, we’re done and then we graduate from grief! That’s just not how it works.

Yes, your grief is going to change over time and it’s going to change over the years, but there are no set stages and you might feel different things at different times. Anniversaries and significant dates might bring up different emotions.

You might be surprised by your emotions — often.

F* Your Rainbows and the Weather Analogy

There is no set timeline for grief.  Plus there’s what I call the F* Your Rainbows factor (here’s an Instagram graphic that illustrates it).

A lot of grief advice or things that people say  come from a good place — and hopefully good intentions — but they can be really clumsy.

People are often talking about grief or losses that they’ve experienced when they are further down the line. They have had more time and space to process.

When you’ve just experienced a significant loss, it may feel like you’re still in the storm or in the immediate aftermath. You are in survival mode.

People speaking after their own storm might say things like, look at the Rainbows and the Silver Linings. And some of that can come off as really insensitive and really clumsy.

I think of it this way: They don’t remember what it’s like to be in the storm of a recent loss, in that “stage” or phase of “acute grief” or early grief where the loss is very fresh and the pain very raw.

When you’re in the midst of the storm, you likely don’t want to hear about rainbows or silver linings or “at least your loved one didn’t suffer” or “at least they lived a good life” —  anything that starts with  “at least” for sure.

So people might offer Rainbows and they might offer Silver Linings, and you might not be ready to hear it. And that is totally fine.

When you are in the midst of the storm, you are just trying to survive.

I will offer that at some point, there is the possibility for rainbows. For me, personally, I found it helpful to think that at some point, I would be able to see Silver Linings, I would feel like there were more sunny days than dark days.

So if that’s you, if that analogy feels comforting to you, please do feel free to use it. But don’t feel like you have to embrace those Silver Linings or the Rainbows that people might offer.

3. You might experience a range of emotions. Here are options for dealing with them.

There are a couple of ways that you can respond when you have an emotion.

One, you can allow the emotion, you can just let it be. You can just feel it.

Two, you can resist the emotion, where you try to pretend it’s not there. You try to push it down, you don’t want to accept it.

Three, you can react to the emotion. Maybe that looks like sadness you want to drown in alcohol. Maybe in anger you lash out at someone.

We can’t always control it, but if we’re to look at the range of options for when you have an emotion — whether it’s to allow it, to resist it, or to react to it or react from it — I would suggest seeing if you can allow the emotion.

In the moment, deep sadness, anger, guilt, shame — they all feel terrible. But if we can just allow it and let it process through our body, work through it with a therapist or grief coach, work through it with movement (whatever makes sense for you), I think that can be a healthy way to hold those emotions that are going to be coming up.

4. OPP — Other People’s Process

Do you remember that song OPP by Naughty by Nature? OPP stands for different things but in this instance, I’m going to say that OPP stands for Other People’s Processes.

Different people do definitely grieve in  different ways. Different people have varying capacities for handling emotions and scenarios.

Especially when a close family member or a loved one dies, it brings up a whole range of reactions and emotions. 

These differences in emotions, reactions and expressions can be a big source of conflict after someone dies, because people are going to respond differently. People are going to have different expectations.

You might be surprised by people’s responses. 

These are influenced by a number of things:

One, the relationship that you had with a person will affect your experience with grief. Your relationship with the person is going to be very personal (seems obvious). How you feel and how you think about that person is really going to affect how you feel about their loss. The relationship that someone else had with that person might be very different.

People tend to have default or preferred styles of processing grief.

There are also a range of ways in which people naturally process their emotions and how they process grief. So for instance, there are cognitive processors: People who want to think about things, want to analyze them, want to make sense of it all.

And there are people who might tend toward emotional processing. They want to cry, they want to yell, they really want to talk about their feelings and express their feelings.

It’s not binary. But sometimes there can be a tendency toward one over the other. I am much more of a cognitive processor: Show me all the grief theory! Let me do all the research. Give me a checklist.

Whereas, other people in my family were much more emotional processors after my mother died.

  • It took a while to recognize that we had these different ways of processing.

  • It took grace to let it be okay that we did have these different styles and not to expect other people to process in the way that I expected them to.

  • It took effort to not take it too personally when people implied that I wasn’t expressing or processing my grief in the way THEY thought was right.

So let other people’s processes (OPP) be their own and embrace what feels good to you.

5. Support. Build your support system.

Don’t be afraid to lean on people for practical or emotional support. There is a lot that can come up in terms of responsibilities, depending on your relationship with the person and whether you’re officially in charge of the estate or unofficially the default person who takes care of things.

So lean on all the help that you can get. There are a lot more services and resources now, which is really exciting. There are startups out there that can help you with taking care of paperwork, with calling to cancel accounts and dealing with all those estate matters. My grief resources page has a list of some of those options for practical support and emotional support after loss.

Your Support System Might Look Different Than You’d Expect

You might be surprised by who is part of your support system after you lose a loved one. I was pretty surprised it wasn’t necessarily my closest friends. It wasn’t necessarily the family members that I thought would be my biggest supports. I got in touch with cousins who I hadn’t necessarily been that close to or talked to that much, but they were such an important source of support after my mom died.

You might need to see who responds to you in the way that you need it.

  • Sometimes I needed co-workers who would help distract me from all the things that were going on after my mother died.

  • There were friends who had experienced the loss of their parents who could speak about it and share their experience. That was really valuable for me as a form of emotional support, to validate my experience, to hear what they did and what they experienced.

  • In terms of practical and emotional support, I identified that I needed people who were kind and competent to help me deal with things like my mother’s house.

  • If you can name and identify some of the ways that would be helpful to you in the coming months and in the coming years, reach out to those people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, don’t be afraid to lean on people.

You might want to go beyond family and friends.

  • Community: Having people that you can talk to who know, somewhat, what you’re experiencing, can be really helpful. In my case, I was lucky enough to have friends and people in my network who had experienced parental loss and who were willing to talk about it. Other people don’t necessarily have that but there are a whole range of support groups out there now, whether it’s in the form of Instagram posts or actual support groups that meet on Zoom, that talk about various kinds of loss. 

  • Professional help: There’s a spectrum of care available for grief support. For some people, community support from friends, family, church members or support groups is adequate. Others may opt for professional support from a grief counselor, therapist or psychologist, and/or when they’re ready, a grief coach. Medication and working with a psychiatrist is also an option. All of these are valid options, in my opinion. 

Create that support network. Lean into it. Take amazing care of yourself.

When you lose someone, that is a massive experience. It takes our human brains quite a while to catch up: How is this possible? What does it mean?

Take it slowly. Give your brain time to catch up. Your body is going to really feel it as well, so be very gentle with yourself.

Sending lots of love to you. And when you’re ready, get in touch for more grief resources:

Join my monthly group gathering for The Grief Gallery. It’s free on Zoom and it’s the last Wednesday of every month. 

– If you feel like you would benefit from grief coaching and one-to-one support, you can also book a complimentary call with me.

Get all the support that you can. You deserve it. Healing takes time and it takes help. Don’t be afraid to ask for it. Take care.

GRIEF SUPPORT

Monthly Grief Gathering

You’re invited to join The Grief Gallery’s free monthly gathering for creative inspiration and community connection. Hosted by grief coach and curator Charlene Lam.

hello

I’m Charlene

I help grieving people feeling burdened by responsibilities, resentments and regrets after the death of a loved one to feel lighter –– so you can live your own fullest life. 

After the sudden death of my mother Marilyn in 2013, I put my life, work and grief on hold as I struggled to deal with the estate, paperwork and belongings.

Healing took time — and it took help.

I’m a certified grief coach, and I developed my Curating Grief framework to help people process grief in a creative, accessible way.

 

Get In Touch

  • hello@charlenelam.com

HELP WITH GRIEF

Unpacking Grief: Coaching Packages

How do you want to remember your loved one, now and in the future? With my Unpacking Grief coaching package and Curating Grief framework, I combine my grief coaching and curating skills to help you process your loss in a creative, accessible way.

CONTACT

  • hello@charlenelam.com

CONNECT

YOU ARE ALL WELCOME

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WORK WITH ME

GRIEF COACHING

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SPEAKING AND WORKSHOPS

MONTHLY GRIEF GATHERING

Join us for The Grief Gallery's free, supportive grief group gathering the last Wednesday of the month, 2pm ET (7pm UK).

RSVP

SEE ALL EVENTS

Visit curatinggrief.com/grief-events

CURATING GRIEF PODCAST

GRIEF RESOURCES

Find Grief Resources

Need help with grief? I can help.

Get in touch: Email hello [at] charlenelam.com

Note: Coaching and coaching consultations are not a substitute for counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, substance abuse treatment, or other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, contact 911 or your local emergency services.

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