Whether you’ve recently lost someone, experienced a death 10 years ago, or just want a place to talk about your feelings around death and loss, social support through community gatherings can help.
After a loss, grief is a road we all travel. We live in a society that often doesn’t make room for this journey, the outcome of which can make us feel inconsolable, inconvenient, and alone. This is exactly why in 2024 Larkspur expanded our educational outreach to provide community events that encourage folks to come together and talk about death, loss, and grief.
Through social grief support and the creation of safe spaces, people feel welcome to express their hurt, share their experience, and feel validated that there is no standard way to grieve-–that we are all on our own journeys, and when we walk through them together the road feels less rocky.
The two community gatherings we host most often for those who have experienced grief are the Larkspur Book Club and our own version of a death cafe which we lovingly call, Death Over Donuts. Steady community support is life changing when we experience a loss, so we began these monthly events to offer a space for people to process in the months after they lose someone–after life goes back to “normal” and the funeral casseroles stop being delivered.
Every person within a community experiences grief, but it is also within a supportive community that we find encouraging and empathetic paths towards healing.
Our book club is one of our favorite grief support events for this reason. We know grief doesn’t stop once everyone around you goes on with their lives. We also know that any kind of commitment can be overwhelming after your world is turned upside down. This is exactly why our book club is not one you have to sign up for and stick with all year.
The Larkspur book club is a low-stress, no commitment, monthly offering where participants read a chosen book with themes of death, grief, or loss and then gather together in the cozy atmosphere of our library & learning center to discuss it. Some months you might feel like reading and discussing books with people, other months you don’t. We wanted to structure our book club this way to allow for the ebb and flow of this reality.
The grief support and community space is always here regardless of the season. While there is no membership to this book club, we’ve been heartened to see some of the same faces show up month after month.
We’ve been privileged to get to know people better through this gathering, and witnessed those same incredible people finding strength and new friendships with this grief group as a grounding place. The long grief journey starts to feel less alone when you meet other people who’ve experienced it.
Last year we read books such as, The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. By engaging with the books alone, and then coming together to discuss them, those who participate in this community gathering are able to find common ground in their grief, share passages that moved them, and find deeper understandings of their personal grief journeys through the characters, lives, experiences and wisdoms shared by each author we read.
Along with our book club another casual monthly gathering we offer is Death Over Donuts. The premise is simple: we gather, we eat donuts, and we talk about death.
It’s a come-as-you-are kind of event. Nothing needs to be pre-prepared or read over beforehand. Larkspur families, friends, and other Nashville community members come together to find an honest and safe place of respite. Whether you’ve recently lost someone, experienced a death 10 years ago, or just want a place to talk about your feelings around death and loss, this event is for you.
Events like Death Over Donuts can be a balm in a world that feels like there’s no room to talk about death. It’s not a place to fix our grief, but it’s a space created where the big feelings around it have a soft place to land.
The tradition of the death cafe began in Switzerland in 2004 by Swiss sociologist and anthropologist, Bernard Crettaz. It’s taken on many different iterations since its inception, and the movement has traveled to countless countries across the globe, but we like to think that our little cozy corner of the world here at the Larkspur Library & Learning Center hosts one that feels safe, fun, and supportive.
Last year we played The Death Deck together several times. Last week at our first meeting of 2025, we tried our hand at the Life Story Interview Kit so we could get to know a little bit about what makes up our lives before we die. During the holidays we made a memorial table cloth to celebrate and honor those we loved who are no longer at the dinner table. Not all meetings are structured with creative games to get to know one another better or to share our feelings, but every now and then we like to share the tools we have with our community.
If you’re interested in joining any of our upcoming social gatherings, including Grief Bingo, guided hikes at our preserve, and so much more can all be found on our community events page.