🔊 1 day until... Grief, Jazz, and the Courage to Tell the Truth

🧭 TL;DR | This Week at a Glance

🌟 Dame Cleo Laine: A Jazz Legend Remembered
The voice that stretched across genres, generations, and grief.

🎭 Catharsis Theater: This Saturday in Culver City
Grief isn’t just personal—it’s communal. Join us for an in-person experience of psychodrama-inspired healing, shared truth, and emotional release—not therapy—but it heals.

🧘‍♀️ HOPE Group & Trudy Goodman: This Weekend
Mindfulness, change, and deep presence—in-person or virtual.

🧠 The Tangled Net #4: Healing Is the Next Intelligence
What if the next revolution in mental health is between us, not just inside us?

🗽 The Tricentennial Project: Mourning What’s Lost, Imagining What’s Possible
A national initiative that understands real change requires real grief.

👨‍👧‍👦 New Fatherhood Groups
Safe, honest space for expectant and new fathers navigating identity, loss, and growth.

🏕️ Camp Erin for Grieving Kids
Free one-day support camp for youth and families in LA—now enrolling.

🌊 CGC Therapy, Events & Training
Grief doesn’t have to be lonely. Our services are designed to help people find meaning after loss.

💌 Dear friends of the California Grief Center,

This month brought more than heatwaves.
We’ve seen protections rolled back, truth dismissed, and our most vulnerable neighbors left to fend for themselves. It’s enough to make the heart ache.

So we’re turning, again, to community.
To ritual. To remembrance. To each other.

This issue of The Grief Wave holds it all:
the radiant legacy of Dame Cleo Laine,
this weekend’s return of Catharsis Theater,
and new spaces for fathers, children, and all who grieve.

We don’t offer easy answers.
We offer presence.
To hold the ache.
To find what matters.
To stay human—together.

🌟 Honoring a Musical Hero: Dame Cleo Laine, Voice of a Century

Dame Cleo Laine—Britain’s first lady of jazz—used her voice like a compass, guiding listeners across continents, genres, and hearts.

Born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927 to a Jamaican father and English mother, she rose against the odds to become the only British jazz singer to win a Grammy—and the only one with a four-octave range that could swing from Schoenberg to Shakespeare.

Whether at Carnegie Hall or the Royal Festival Hall, she sang to stir the soul. She co-founded The Stables with her husband, Sir John Dankworth, lifting up young musicians and entire communities.

In a world too often off-key, she remained a true note.

🎶 Thank you, Dame Cleo. The music lives on because of you.

🌱 Upcoming Gatherings for Collective Healing

Because some grief is too heavy to carry alone.

🎭 This Saturday: Catharsis Theater for Grief & Loss

July 26 | 1–4:30 PM | Blue Door Theater, Culver City

You don’t need a diagnosis to grieve. 

And you don’t need to grieve alone.

Catharsis Theater is a powerful in-person healing experience for those carrying sorrow, loss, or emotional pain. Rooted in the methods of psychodrama and sociometry—pioneered in the 1920s by Dr. J.L. Moreno—this experience blends therapeutic theater with modern, trauma-informed care.

Since 2023, we’ve hosted 38 gatherings—each one a space for truth-telling, connection, and emotional release.

✨ Why it works:

• Not performance—but raw, real, and restorative

• Not scripted—but structured for emotional safety

• Not traditional therapy—but deeply therapeutic

👉 For any kind of loss or transition—personal, professional, relational, political, planetary, past or future.

🎟️ 40 spots available | Tiered pricing

📍 July 26 | 1–4:30 PM | Blue Door Theater, Culver City

🙏 Special thanks to ArtsUp! LA for hosting. 
A portion of all proceeds supports their vital mission: inclusive, accessible healing arts for LA communities.

🕯️ HOPE Group: Mindfulness, Disability & the Wisdom of Change

Saturday, July 26 | 10–11:30 AM PT | Virtual (Zoom)

Since 2020, HOPE has offered quiet refuge from chaos—a space for reflection and presence.

🧘‍♂️ This month’s theme: Mindfulness, Disability & Change
With special guests from ArtsUp! LA.

💛 Donation-based & open to all

🕯️ Sundays Together with Trudy Goodman

Sunday, July 27 | 10–11:30 AM PT | In-Person & Virtual (Zoom)

A special Sunday morning with Trudy Goodman, Zen teacher and founder of InsightLA.

🧘 Guided meditation
🗣️ Dharma talk & dialogue
💬 Optional breakout groups
🎥 Event will be recorded

No prior experience needed. All are welcome.

🪻 Rooted Together: Support During the Political Storm

Thursday, July 31 | 12:00–1:00 PM PT | Virtual | Free

In partnership with NASW-CA, this weekly group is a place to breathe, connect, and heal amid state violence and political grief.

✨ Led by Brian Stefan, LCSW, and NASW facilitators.

✨ The Tangled Net #4: The Mind at the Edge of Its Next Great Leap

We’ve spent centuries treating pain like a private burden.
But now, a new wave is rising — where neuroscience meets storytelling, AI meets soul, and healing becomes communal again.

🌍 What if trauma isn’t a flaw — but a clue?
🤖 Can machines help us honor what makes us human?
🎭 What happens when grief, ritual, and relationship return to center stage?

✨ Maybe the next great leap isn’t in our brains — but between us.

🗽 The Tricentennial Project: Grief, Renewal, and a Nation Becoming

Launched by the Truman National Security Project, this bold initiative asks:
What kind of country will the U.S. be in its 300th year?

It’s not just policy—it’s mourning and imagination, in equal measure.
Because grief makes room for possibility.

🕯️ We must grieve what’s been lost: lives, trust, truth, and time.
🌱 And dream forward: toward justice not yet realized, leadership rooted in care, and healing for all.

✨ The next chapter isn’t written yet. And maybe—just maybe—we get to write it together.

👨‍👧‍👦 New Fatherhood Groups for Men in LA

If you’re a father—or love one—this is for you.

Fatherhood is wonderful, challenging, and sometimes quietly grieving. Too often, men are expected to “hold it together” without support.

Led by Brandon Gross, LMFT, these new groups offer a space for men to be real—with themselves and with each other.

📍 Two Group Tracks:

• Group 1: Expectant Fathers

• Group 2: Fathers with kids ages 0–5

📆 Includes:

• 4 weekly Zoom sessions

• 1 in-person gathering

• Tools, insight, and group wisdom

💰 $250 total (sliding scale available)
📧 To learn more: [email protected]

Because honest connection heals what stoicism hides.

🏕️ Camp Erin: A Healing Summer for Grieving Kids in LA

Grieving children need community too.

Camp Erin Los Angeles, hosted by OUR HOUSE Grief Support Center, is a free, one-day support camp for kids and teens ages 6–17.

📅 August 23 or 24 | Glendale, CA

✨ Activities include:

• Plate smashing

• Music therapy

• Rock climbing

• Camper sharing circles

• Therapy ponies

🧡 Know a family in need? Please share.
📧 [email protected]
🌐 ourhouse-grief.org/camp-erin

Because grief is too much for a child to carry alone—and they shouldn’t have to.

🌊 Support from the California Grief Center

Whether you’ve lost someone, lost your way, or carry unspoken sorrow—we’re here.

The California Grief Center offers:

• 🧠 Grief therapy (individual, family, couples)

• 🌎 Virtual support groups (nationwide)

• 🎭 Catharsis Theater events (monthly)

• 📚 Grief counselor training program (Fall 2025 launch)

We meet people in their grief—and walk with them toward meaning.

✨ Consultations are always free.
Whenever you're ready—we’ll walk beside you.

💛 With care,
Brian Stefan, LCSW
Founder & Clinical Director
California Grief Center

✅ P.S.
Know someone quietly grieving?
👉 Forward this letter. Everyone belongs. You never know who needs it.
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