Grief education sessions

Educating the community about grief is an important part of our mission. The goal of our grief education programs is to naturalize grief, encourage empathy, and create more compassionate communities for all.

We offer a variety of education sessions about grief that can be delivered in community and online. Most sessions are 60 minutes and led by BFO-MR staff or trained volunteers.

If you are a business looking to offer education for staff, please check out our Grief at Work program.

Session Topics

Grieving the Death of a Friend

Friends are often our chosen family, and their death may be felt as deeply as the loss of a partner or relative. Support tends to focus on immediate family members which may leave friends feeling like their grief experience isn’t valid. In this session, we talk about the loneliness and isolation that can occur when your friend dies and share tips, information and resources.

Mind, Body, Spirit

Grief can affect all aspects of our being – physically, emotionally, cognitively and spiritually. This session shares information about how grief affects various aspects of our lives and shares ideas and strategies for how to cope.

Tending to Belongings

After a death, deciding what to do with your person’s belongings may be a difficult process. This session offers insights and suggestions on how to honour the space and belongings of someone who has died and shares practical suggestions on how to begin the process.

Understanding Grief

This session offers a high-level understanding of what you or others might experience when grieving a death and shares ideas and strategies for how to cope.

Grief in the Workplace: Supporting the Professional Caregivers

Building on our Grief in the Workplace session, this presentation also offers coping strategies specifically for professional caregivers who have been affected by a client’s death in the workplace.

Grieving a death by suicide

Grief may be more complicated when the death is sudden and there has been no opportunity to say goodbye. This education session explores what grief after a suicide death may look and feel like. We share a high-level understanding of grief and the factors that can influence it, as well as some strategies for coping.

Ambiguous Grief

When you’re experiencing grief from an unclear loss or one that stays unverified or without resolution, it can be difficult to know where to start. In this session, we talk about what ambiguous grief is and its effects.

Coping with Special Days

When you’re grieving, special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s/Father’s Day and the holidays, no matter what you celebrate, can be a time of overwhelming emotions, new challenges and unrealistic expectations from family and friends. This session acknowledges the difficulties these special days can bring and discusses coping strategies to help you through.

Grieving a death by overdose

Drug poisoning and overdose deaths are often viewed from a stigmatizing lens which not only affects the person who is grieving, but also their communities. Feelings of guilt, shame, and isolation are common for those who are grieving a death by substance. This education session focuses on learning more about the impact of deaths by overdose and drug poisoning from a personal and community perspective. Supportive first-person language is used and ideas for support are offered.

Secondary Losses

After a death, the physical loss of a person isn’t the only loss we experience. In this session we share how death can cause other losses – relationships, support systems, identity and more. We’ll discuss how to name those secondary losses and share strategies to navigate them.

Self-Care & Grief

When someone dies, self-care can take a backseat as we focus on the many other things that follow a death. This session talks about the importance of self-care while grieving and offers practical suggestions on how to begin.

Grief During a Pandemic

It’s been three years of losses. Whether you’ve experienced the death of someone you know, are mourning the loss of a job, social connection or the usual routines of daily life, what many of us are feeling right now is grief. Join us to learn more about how grief may be affecting your life and ways you can manage it.