Dinner parties designed to help mourn, heal
These dinner parties make some space for grief
Christmas was always her father’s holiday. Courtney Arnold’s dad loved the music. He loved the tree. The two of them would sit side-byside on the floor, sorting through strands of brightly coloured lights to make sure every bulb was glowing.
Her father hadn’t yet been diagnosed with cancer on their last Christmas together in 2014, but Arnold had noticed that he looked thinner and seemed weaker. After the holiday, when she helped him carry the tree out to the curb, she spontaneously snipped a sprig of pine from the branches. Somehow, she knew she needed to keep something tangible from that moment.
She’s been thinking about all of this as the seasons shift and a torrent of memories comes rushing back.
“It’s starting to get to the holidays,” she said, as she sat in a cosy living room surrounded by a circle of women she knew would understand. “And Christmas lights, I mean. I can’t do it. My father was the light man. You could see my house from outer space.”
The apartment filled with laughter.
Arnold was 24 years old and preparing to start law school at American University in Washington when her father died of lung cancer in 2015. The grief overwhelmed her. She tried group therapy but found she was often the youngest person in the room — sometimes by many years. Then she saw a post on Instagram about the Dinner Party (thedinnerparty.org), a non-profit group that supports young adults who have suffered a significant loss by bringing them together over potluck dinners.
The organization began eight years ago in Los Angeles, when co-founders Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez — who had both lost a parent to cancer — threw a casual dinner party for friends who had also experienced parental loss. Word spread, and people started asking how to organize similar dinners themselves.
The Dinner Party has since grown into a national community led by more than 250 hosts across the U.S. (as well as five Canadian cities — Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton and Calgary), as thousands of young people have been drawn to its intimate settings, created to help them mourn and heal. It is a refuge that offers particular comfort to the bereaved around the holidays, when festive parties are filled with superficial chatter and social media feeds are flooded with idyllic photos.
On this crisp November evening, a group of a dozen women filled paper plates with roasted acorn squash, pot pie and corn bread, before settling into chairs and meditation pillows in the Washington home of 26-year-old host Sarah Tralins. Passing bottles of wine, they chatted about how they were really doing, and who they were missing — mothers, fathers, friends, siblings — with the arrival of a season steeped in nostalgia.
“I had a panic attack in Target that first year, and I was like, well, I learned my lesson! No going to Target between the end of November until after Christmas,” Arnold said. “It’s three years now, and I still have these blocks.”
For Tiffany Virgin, 26, every U.S. Thanksgiving is harder than Christmas.
“I get very ugh about Thanksgiving because it’s very much a family holiday,” she said. “My dad used to make the turkey, he used to make the pie. My mom doesn’t cook, so my dad did all of it. I’ve downplayed it a lot, I make it not such a big deal, but secretly it is a very big deal to me. I just don’t allow myself to get very excited about it, knowing the absence of him.”
The gathering felt more like a friendly hangout than a structured group therapy session. While dinner hosts like Tralins are given training and support by the Dinner Party, they are not professional grief counsellors; the goal of the organization is simply to offer communal support to young people who are trying to learn how to live well after loss. And for the people in Tralins’ living room — whether they were still moving through a raw grief or had lived many years since the death of their loved one — the group had become a particularly vital resource.
“It’s like therapy,” Virgin said, “but even better because everyone understands.”
“You don’t get that look,” said Katherine-McClain Tuite, 24, who lost a friend in an accident several years ago.
The group shared certain commonalities: None had children. All were still navigating the selfdiscovery of their 20s and early 30s, and so they talked a lot about their sense of identity — how they had changed as time carried them further from who they were when their loved ones died.
Each of them had stories about making that adjustment, and the decisions they made about what to keep — belongings, traditions, fragments of memories — and what to let go.
As a veteran host, Tralins knew that the intensity of the group’s conversation could continue to reverberate in the days after their dinner. So as the clock ticked past 9 p.m., she gently steered the discussion toward the transition from the comfort of the room to the reality of the world waiting outside.
“It can sometimes be very hard to go back into the week,” she said. “So let’s take a few more deep breaths.” The room fell silent, save for the sound of exhalations and Tralins’ soft voice. “Ask yourself, what can you do for yourself this week?”
Arnold knew her answer. She thought of her father, who would not be there to see her graduate. She thought of what the group had talked about, the need to make room for both before and after, with and without.
“I’m going to order my regalia for graduation,” she said, and her friends cheered. “It’s time.”