The Grief Wave: Reaching For What We Can No Longer Touch

🧭 TL;DR | This Week at a Glance

⚖️ Lisa Cook: The Economist America Cannot Afford to Ignore
Trailblazing Fed Governor Lisa Cook resists removal, raising urgent questions of equity and power.

🕯 Grief 101: Why Americans Are Grief Amateurs
When death is hidden and grief is shamed, we remain unprepared for life’s most universal experience.

🔥 EU Wildfires Shatter Records
Over 1 million hectares burned this year — grief now lingers in the very air we breathe.

🧠 The Fragile Gift of Consciousness
After high-risk brain surgery, Eric Markowitz found that presence, not thought, holds the essence of being alive.

🏫 20 Years After Katrina: New Orleans Schools Still Struggle
The grief of a city echoes in its classrooms; recovery remains a constant work in progress.

📖 NEA Cancels Creative Writing Fellowships
Since 1966, these fellowships nurtured American voices. Now, the program has been cut.

🎤 Interview with Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse
“Writing feels already written, out there somewhere. My job is to write it down before it disappears.”

🕯 HOPE Group (Aug 30, Online)
Mindfulness and presence in the face of suicidal struggle.

🤝 Mindful Self-Compassion (Sep 4)
An eight-week practice to meet suffering with kindness.

🎉 Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman’s 80th (Sep 27)
A joyful celebration of two beloved teachers.

🌊 California Grief Center
Therapy, groups, and training for every stage of grief, loss, and transition.

💌 Dear friends of The Grief Wave,

As summer edges toward its close, we are reminded that every season carries its own griefs — light fading, warmth receding, the familiar slipping into memory. Grief is much the same: a tide that recedes yet leaves its traces on the shore, a chapter ending while the story continues. To notice these endings is to honor what was and prepare for what must come next.

This week’s stories show how grief threads through every corner of our lives — from Lisa Cook’s silenced leadership to Europe’s burning forests, from Katrina’s long shadow to the fragile gift of consciousness itself. We explore why Americans remain “grief amateurs,” how art and silence help us hold what might vanish, and where we can gather for healing and renewal.

Grief is not only loss; it is a passage carrying us toward presence, connection, and the possibility of beginning again.

⚖️ Lisa Cook: The Economist America Cannot Afford to Ignore

Economist, policymaker, trailblazer: Lisa D. Cook’s career stands at the crossroads of history, justice, and America’s financial future.

Born in 1964 in Georgia, Cook came of age in the aftermath of the civil rights era. She became the first Black woman to serve as a Federal Reserve Governor — a role not only symbolic but substantive, bringing expertise in innovation, inequality, and international finance to the nation’s central bank.

Now, in August 2025, she has been abruptly removed by Donald Trump. The act reverberates beyond economics. It raises questions about who is allowed to lead, whose voices are silenced, and what vision of America shapes our most powerful institutions.

Lisa Cook’s story is larger than one person. It reflects griefs and triumphs carried across generations, the unfinished struggle for equity in the nation’s economic life, and the resilience required to hold immense vision alongside immense burden.

🕯 Grief 101: Why Americans Are Grief Amateurs – Our Cultural Illiteracy Crisis

When death is hidden and grief is shameful, we all become novices at life’s most universal experience.

Most Americans will face multiple profound losses by midlife, yet our culture leaves us unprepared. In a society that hides death, sanitizes mourning, and offers only three days of bereavement leave, we become “grief amateurs” — stumbling through loss without language, ritual, or support.

This cultural illiteracy isolates mourners, pathologizes normal sorrow, and leaves us vulnerable in an age of climate disaster, political upheaval, and generational transition. Grief literacy isn’t morbid; it is life preparation — a way to carry love, memory, and loss with compassion and resilience.

🔥 EU Wildfires Worst on Record

Record wildfires burn more than 1 million hectares of EU land this year.

Europe is burning. Over one million hectares have already been consumed by wildfire this year — the largest loss since records began. The scale is staggering: an area bigger than Cyprus, a scar across landscapes and lives.

For communities in Spain and Portugal, devastation is not abstract. It is smoke in the lungs, homes evacuated, forests reduced to ash, and futures rewritten in heat and flame.

When the fires fade, a heavy silence remains: blackened earth, emptied towns, and the ache of knowing what vanished cannot be easily restored. In that stillness, the cost of climate change is impossible to ignore.

🧠 The Fragile Gift of Consciousness

After high-risk brain surgery, Eric Markowitz discovered that consciousness is not rooted only in thought—but in presence itself.

After high-risk brain surgery, journalist Eric Markowitz discovered that consciousness is not rooted only in thought — but in presence itself.

His brush with mortality reshaped his understanding of life, love, and what it means to be truly awake. For those who hear his story, it is a reminder that existence can be undone in an instant, leaving behind the grief of unfinished days and the quiet gratitude of survival.

Often it is not the ordeal but the silence that follows — carrying presence, connection, and the quiet miracle of still being here.

🏫 20 Years After Katrina: New Orleans Schools Still Struggle

The grief of a city still echoes through its classrooms. Two decades on, education remains a work in progress.

Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans schools remain marked by reinvention. The storm swept away more than buildings; it forced a system-wide reset that replaced nearly every public school with charters. For some, this was liberation. For others, a rupture.

Test scores and graduation rates have improved, but at steep cost: thousands of teachers lost jobs, beloved neighborhood schools closed, and families still wrestle with inequities baked into the system.

Recovery here is not a finish line but a work in progress, where progress and loss are carried side by side.

📖 NEA cancels decades-long creative writing fellowship

Founded in 1966 to support American writing, the NEA last week announced the cancellation of its 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships.

For nearly six decades, the NEA Creative Writing Fellowships gave American writers time, space, and recognition to create work that shaped culture. From Alice Walker to Louise Erdrich, the $50,000 grants nurtured voices that changed literature.

That tradition has now ended. The Trump administration has canceled the FY 2026 fellowships as part of a broader effort to redirect resources toward political priorities like AI competency, religious institutions, and the semiquincentennial of American independence.

The loss reverberates far beyond individual authors. It signals a shrinking of the nation’s literary imagination, where art once nurtured by public support must now contend with silence and exclusion.

🎤Interview with the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Jon Fosse

“When writing a novel or a play or whatever, at a certain point I get this feeling that it's already written, not inside me, but out there somewhere. My job is to write down what is already written before it disappears."

Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel laureate in literature, describes writing as a journey into silence and rhythm. From song lyrics and poor poems to layered novels and plays, his work has always emerged from what he calls “a secret place inside me.”

For Fosse, literature is not self-expression but escape — a way to enter another universe where words break open into pauses, atmospheres, and unsayable truths. In his silences, he invites us to listen beyond words, to the quiet truths that give human life meaning.

🕯️ HOPE Group: Sitting With the Unbearable—Mindfulness & Suicidal Struggle (with Patrick Park)

Virtual (Zoom) | Saturday, August 30 | 10:00–11:30 AM PT

Since 2020, HOPE has been a refuge from chaos, offering space for reflection and presence. This month’s theme: mindfulness, deep suffering, and sitting with suicide, with guest Patrick Park, a senior Zen teacher.

Donation-based and open to all.

💛 Donation-based & open to all

🤝 Mindful Self-Compassion 8-week Program (Hybrid: In-person & Virtual)

Starting Thursday, September 4 | 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM PT | Benedict Canyon, LA & Virtual

Taught by Lisa Kring, this evidence-based course blends Buddhist wisdom and clinical research to help you meet suffering with kindness. Includes guided meditations, discussions, and practical tools for emotional resilience. CE credits available.

Fee: $600 | With CEs: $685.

🎉 A Joyful Celebration: Honoring the 80th Birthdays of Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman

Saturday, September 27, 2025 | 2:00–5:00 PM PT

Guided presence, shared stories, and gratitude for two beloved mindfulness teachers. Proceeds support InsightLA’s mission of access, equity, and care.

📅 Saturday, September 27 | 2:00–5:00 PM PT | Santa Monica + Live Online

🌊 Get Help from the California Grief Center

You do not have to grieve alone. Whether you have lost someone, lost your way, or carry unspoken sorrow, there is a place for you here.

What We Offer:

• Grief Therapy (in-person and virtual)

• Catharsis Theater (monthly gatherings)

• Virtual Support Groups (confidential and facilitated)

• Grief Counselor Training (Fall 2025)

Our Philosophy: We do not treat grief as a problem. We treat it as a passage.
Consultations are always free.

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

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