The Grief Wave: When Grief Gets Stuck

When grief gets stuck, you don’t have to face it alone.
Now seeing clients throughout California and nationwide (virtually).
The California Grief Center offers therapy, support groups, and Catharsis Theater experiences designed to help you move through what feels frozen—whether you’ve lost someone, lost your way, or carry unspoken sorrow.
Explore care, connection, and community at caligrief.com.

🧭 TL;DR | This Week at a Glance

✨ Profiles & Ideas
💜 Amanda Nguyen — Civil rights visionary redefining survivor justice

💀 Dia de los Muertos — Honoring the threads between the living and the dead

📰 News & Reminders
🕰️ The Clock Within Us — What new science reveals about aging — and how to live longer, better

🪦 Recipes for Remembrance — How families are etching their loved ones’ favorite dishes onto gravestones to keep memory, love, and taste alive.

🎉 Events & Gatherings

🔔 Nov 1 — Living Deeply Retreat with Elizabeth Stomp and Lulu Toselli
(Santa Monica & Virtual)

🕯️ Nov 13 — Understanding Traumatic Grief Conference
(Lynnwood, WA + Virtual)

🙏 Nov 15 — Community Grief and Gratitude Ritual
(Santa Barbara)

🌅 Dec 3–8 — 2025 Ram Dass Legacy “Open Your Heart in Paradise” Retreat
(Napili Kai Beach Resort, Maui)

💔 The Traumatic Loss Companion Course — An online program for navigating sudden, unexpected, or traumatic loss
(Virtual | Self-Paced)

🌊 California Grief Center
Virtual grief counseling in CA and nationwide, support groups, Catharsis Theater, and companionship for every stage of loss.

💌 Dear friends of The Grief Wave,

Grief can be a still place—quiet, heavy, hard to move through. But even in stillness, something sacred stirs. Sometimes grief gets stuck not because we’re broken, but because the love underneath it hasn’t yet found a path forward.

This week’s edition invites that movement: the courage to speak, to honor, to remember. From Día de los Muertos, where laughter meets remembrance, to Amanda Nguyen’s extraordinary resilience and reform, we explore what happens when pain turns toward purpose.

If your own grief feels lodged somewhere deep, may you know this: motion can return. Connection can return. And so can peace, in its own time.

Wherever you are this week—building an altar, lighting a candle, or simply pausing to breathe—may you feel the quiet truth that remembrance is not an ending, but a continuation of love.

✨ Profiles & Ideas

💜 Amanda Nguyen

Civil rights visionary redefining survivor justice

Born in California to Vietnamese parents, Amanda Nguyen was a Harvard student when she discovered how the legal system failed survivors of sexual assault. Rather than accept the silence built into the process, she drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act—a bill that passed unanimously through the U.S. Congress. Her courage reframed survivorhood as activism and lawmaking as healing, inspiring a global movement for dignity and reform.

Her advocacy soon reached beyond the courtroom. As the founder and CEO of Rise, Nguyen led campaigns to pass survivor rights legislation across states and abroad. During the rise of anti-Asian violence, her viral video ignited international attention and helped mobilize solidarity for the Asian American community. Named to TIME’s Women of the Year, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, she became a voice of moral clarity in an era of collective reckoning.

In 2025, Nguyen became the first Vietnamese American woman to travel to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard mission, carrying lotus seeds to study life’s resilience in microgravity. From Harvard labs to congressional halls to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, her journey continues to blur the boundaries between science, activism, and hope. Amanda Nguyen’s life reminds the world that survival can become legislation—and that even from great harm, humanity can still rise.

💀 Dia de los Muertos

Honoring the threads between the living and the dead

When death is near, remembrance becomes an act of love. Across Mexico and beyond, families gather on November 1 and 2 to honor those who have passed—lighting candles, cooking favorite meals, and filling the air with the scent of marigolds. This is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead: not a time of mourning, but of reunion. Between laughter and prayer, stories return to life. Sugar skulls bear the names of the departed; pan de muerto rests beside photographs and offerings. Even the night feels alive, as music, color, and memory blur the line between the living and the dead.

Its roots run deep—part Catholic Allhallowtide, part Indigenous reverence for ancestors, shaped by centuries of faith and survival. Some call it syncretic, others symbolic, but its meaning is unmistakable: love outlasts loss. Each altar, each candle, each poem reminds us that death is not an ending, only another homecoming. Día de los Muertos lives on as both ritual and resistance—proof that remembrance can be joyous, and that grief, too, can dance.

If you’re nearby Long Beach, MOLAA hosts a free family festival in Long Beach on Sunday, October 26, 2025, with the theme RESILIENCE (RSVP required).

📰 News & Reminders

🕰️ The Clock Within Us

What new science reveals about aging — and how to live longer, better

In 2025, as scientists deepened their search for ways to slow biological aging, researchers and volunteers gathered at Northwestern University’s Human Longevity Lab in Chicago to explore a question once thought impossible: can we change the pace of time within our own bodies? Led by Dr. Douglas Vaughan at the Potocsnak Longevity Institute, participants underwent a battery of tests — from cardiovascular scans to cognitive exams — to measure how fast they’re aging and what might help slow it down.

Through DNA analysis known as the GrimAge test, researchers estimated biological age by studying how methyl groups attach to our DNA — a process that speeds or slows depending on lifestyle, stress, and environment. The findings carry both urgency and hope: that aging is not fixed, and that interventions like exercise, diet, stress reduction, and perhaps one day medication or gene editing could extend not just life span, but health span.

Vaughan and his team are also confronting inequities in longevity. In Chicago, just a few miles separate neighborhoods with life expectancies of 55 and 92. Their goal: to democratize aging science, finding affordable ways for everyone — regardless of wealth or zip code — to thrive longer. As one study participant reflected, rolling up a sleeve for science felt like more than data collection; it was a small act of optimism against time itself.

🪦 Recipes for Remembrance

How families are etching their loved ones’ favorite dishes onto gravestones to keep memory, love, and taste alive.

In 2025, a quiet story of grief, food, and remembrance began to spread across social media — a recipe carved in stone. In cemeteries from Nova Scotia to New York, families were memorializing their loved ones not with epitaphs, but with favorite dishes: tea biscuits, spritz cookies, lemon bars. Rosie Grant, a librarian-turned-archivist from Washington, D.C., began documenting these culinary gravestones for her project @GhostlyArchive and her debut book, To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. What started as a viral TikTok about one woman’s cookie recipe became a global collection of edible legacies.

Grant’s travels led her to families like the McNutts of Nova Scotia, who immortalized Debbie’s tea biscuits after her long battle with cancer. Each engraved recipe told a story of love expressed through food—of grandmothers baking bread weekly, of fudge recipes passed down, of errors corrected with laughter. Historians and artists alike see this trend as part of a broader shift toward personalization in memorials: headstones as testaments to daily joy.

At a time when death can feel distant or sanitized, these gravestone recipes offer something intimate and tangible. They invite strangers to bake, taste, and remember—proof that even after loss, the flavors of a life well-lived can linger.

🎉 Events & Gatherings

🔔 Living Deeply Retreat with Elizabeth Stomp and Lulu Toselli

Santa Monica & Online (Hybrid) | Saturday, November 1, 2025

For over 20 years, InsightLA has welcomed people from all backgrounds into a community of mindfulness—spaces to pause, restore, and reconnect with the heart.

This fall, we gather at the Benedict Canyon Retreat House for a daylong Living Deeply Retreat with Elizabeth Stomp and Lulu Toselli. Rooted in mindfulness and compassion, the program offers guided meditation, movement, walking practice, and gentle silence in a peaceful natural setting.

Each retreat invites both newcomers and longtime practitioners, providing tools for steadiness, clarity, and care amidst life’s uncertainty.

💛 Registration open now. Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. PT, Benedict Canyon.

🕯️ Nov 13 — Understanding Traumatic Grief Conference

Lynnwood, WA + Virtual | Thursday, November 13, 2025 | 9:00am-5:00pm PST

For nearly three decades, Support 7 has walked alongside those navigating the aftermath of loss—creating spaces of understanding, compassion, and education for professionals and community members alike.

This November, they gather at Alderwood Community Church in Lynnwood for the 2025 Understanding Traumatic Grief Conference, a full-day event dedicated to exploring the impact of overdose and traumatic loss. Guided by experts including Dr. Ted Rynearson, Dr. Steve Juergens, Paula Becker, Dr. Barry Brown, and Jennifer Levin, PhD, the conference offers powerful conversations, shared stories, and integrative insights into how grief touches body, mind, and spirit.

All are welcome—survivors, therapists, chaplains, first responders, and community members—to learn, connect, and honor those affected by addiction and loss. Together, we’ll deepen our understanding of grief and strengthen the networks of care that help carry it.

💙 $65 in-person (includes lunch) | $35 virtual
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025 | 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. | Alderwood Community Church, Lynnwood, WA

🙏 Community Grief and Gratitude Ritual

Santa Barbara | Saturday, November 15, 2025 | 9:30am - 5pm PST

For over two decades, Wild Belonging has gathered communities to honor the sacred connection between grief, love, and belonging—a shared space to remember, release, and renew the heart.

This fall, we meet at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara for a Community Grief and Gratitude Ritual, a full-day gathering guided by Alexis Slutzky, MA, MFT, Elisabeth Gonella, Kolmi Majumdar, and Rene Tonalli. Inspired by ancestral and earth-based traditions, the ritual invites us to express sorrow, sing, move, and be held in the beauty of togetherness.

Each ritual welcomes all—whether you come with fresh loss or quiet gratitude—offering a place to tend the heart, transform pain into care, and remember our shared humanity.

💛 Sliding-scale donation $40–$120. Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025 | 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. PT | Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara.

🌅 2025 Ram Dass Legacy "Open Your Heart in Paradise" Maui Retreat

Napili Kai Beach Resort | December 3-8, 2025

Since 2008, the Ram Dass Legacy Retreat has been a sanctuary for seekers—a gathering to reflect, connect, and return to the heart.

As we approach December, we meet once more at the Napili Kai Beach Resort for Open Your Heart in Paradise, honoring Ram Dass’s vision with music, meditation, teachings, and community. This beloved retreat continues to welcome pilgrims, newcomers, and longtime friends alike on the spiritual path.

All are invited to join this immersive six-day experience of silence, song, practice, and celebration in Maui.

💛 Registration open now. Dec. 3–8, 2025, Napili Bay.

💔 The Traumatic Loss Companion Course (Virtual)

An online self-help program for individuals living with the aftermath of a sudden, unexpected or traumatic death of a loved one

Since its creation, the Traumatic Loss Companion Course has been a refuge for the grieving—a guided path through pain, chaos, and the search for meaning.

As you face the aftermath of a sudden, devastating death, you are invited to join this online program led by Dr. Jennifer Levin. With warmth and clarity, she offers video modules, guided practices, and community calls designed to support you through trauma and grief, step by step.

All are welcome to begin this self-paced journey of healing, understanding, and connection with others who truly understand.

💛 Enrollment open now. 12 modules online + monthly live calls.

🌊 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.

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.
💌 To get these in your inbox, sign up for The Grief Wave Newsletter.