In Conversation w/Claire Bidwell Smith + Marisa Renee Lee

Join authors Claire Bidwell Smith and Marisa Renee Lee in conversation around Lee's book 'Grief is Love: Living with Loss', offering wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions.

In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one—healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines.  Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires.

Marisa Renee Lee is a called-upon advocate, writer, and speaker on coping with grief. In 2008, she lost her mother to breast cancer, in 2019 Marisa and her husband lost a much-wanted pregnancy, and most recently, she lost a young cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing truly requires. As a leading grief advocate, Marisa offers incisive and compassionate advice on managing life after loss with unique insights for women and African American communities. Lee is a public speaker and regular contributor to Glamour, Vogue, MSNBC, and The Atlantic. She is a graduate of Harvard College and lives in the DC area with her husband Matt, son Bennett, and dog Sadie.

If you're suffering from anxiety but not sure why, or if you're struggling with loss and looking for solace, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief offers help and answers. As grief expert Claire Bidwell Smith discovered in her own life—and in her practice with her therapy clients—significant loss and unresolved grief are primary underpinnings of anxiety.

Using research and real life stories, Smith breaks down the physiology of anxiety, providing a concrete explanation that will help you heal. Starting with the basics questions—“What is anxiety?” and “What is grief?” and moving to concrete approaches such as making amends, taking charge, and retraining your brain, Anxiety takes a big step beyond Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's widely accepted five stages to unpack everything from our age-old fears about mortality to the bare vulnerability a loss can make us feel.

Claire Bidwell Smith is a therapist, renowned grief expert, and the author of three books of nonfiction: The Rules of Inheritance, After This: When Life is Over Where Do We Go? and Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. Claire offers numerous online programs for grief in addition to working with people one-on-one. Led by her own experiences with grief, and fueled by her work in hospice and private practice, Claire strives to provide support for all kinds of people experiencing all kinds of grief.

Doors at 6pm | Free