My grandmother had a chair. Everyone in my family knew which one it was, and after she died nobody sat in it for a long time. We did not discuss this. We just did not sit there.

If you have lost someone, you know the chair I mean. It might be an actual chair. It might be a seat in the car, a side of the bed, a name that used to be on the group text. Whatever it is, December is when you notice it most, because December is when everyone gathers and the gap becomes a shape you can see.

The holidays are not neutral ground

From about the middle of November, the world starts insisting. Music in every store. Photos of other people's tables. Sentences that begin with the most wonderful time of the year. None of it is malicious. All of it assumes you are able to participate.

And so grieving women do what we always do. We show up. We cook. We wrap. We answer how have you been with a word that costs nothing, and we put the real answer somewhere behind our teeth and carry it home.

I am not going to tell you to skip the holidays. Most of us cannot. What I am saying is that you should not have to hold it alone the entire month with nowhere honest to set it down.

So we are making somewhere

On Saturday, December 5, twelve women are meeting in a room in Atlanta for seventy five minutes. It is called The Empty Chair, and it exists for exactly this.

Here is what it is not. It is not therapy, and I am not a licensed clinician. It is not a support group where you go around the circle and everyone has to talk. It is not a room where anyone will tell you she is in a better place, or that everything happens for a reason, or that God needed another angel.

Here is what it is. Twelve women, a door that closes, and more writing than talking. Guided journaling through the parts of grief that do not get said out loud. A quiet moment where each woman says a name, if she wants to. Two minutes of being genuinely heard by one other person, with no advice offered. Practical language for the questions that catch you off guard at gatherings, so you are not improvising in your aunt's kitchen.

Nothing you write has to be shared. Some women will speak. Some will sit and write the whole time. Both are the work.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Twelve seats, and that is on purpose

I could fill a bigger room. I do not want a bigger room. Grief work does not happen at scale, and a woman in the back of a crowd of sixty will not say her person's name out loud. Twelve is small enough that nobody disappears.

Your ticket is thirty dollars and includes your own copy of The Healing Girl, the workbook I wrote for grief, plus a workshop journal made for the afternoon with a seven day guide for the week after. You will not walk out empty handed and you will not walk out finished, because that is not how this works.

If you are carrying a loss into this season, whether it happened this year or nine years ago, there is a seat. You do not need to have it together to sit in it.

Details and registration are here.

If grief is sitting on you in a way that feels dangerous rather than heavy, please reach out for real time support. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour.

With you on the journey,
Autumn