Grief is painful. It can also be beautiful.

Grief Cabaret is a year-long, pay-what-you-choose membership where you will deepen your personal practice of grieving through creative ritual, writing, and the act of witnessing.

Enrollment is now closed until February 2025. Join the waitlist below for priority access.

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

Join a club of weird, wonderful souls on a journey towards alchemizing our grief.

Grief Cabaret is for those who are ready to stop hiding the tender, grieving parts of themselves (the ones society so often asks us to quiet) and to begin communing with Creativity to let their shadows and stories speak.

It is for those carrying grief - new or old, named or unspoken - within their bodies and their pasts, who long for more ritual and rootedness in their daily lives. For those seeking deeper connection, who are open to stepping into a compassionate, global circle of others on the grieving path, too, but feel best working at a steady, self-paced rhythm.

Grief Cabaret is for anyone ready to make a gentle year-long commitment to their inner world and to make 2025 a time of unearthing and rebirthing. It is for those who are ready to step into a collective space devoted to alchemizing personal and collective grief into something alive, meaningful, and beautiful, and who know, deep in their bones, that even the heaviest grief is rooted in love, always love.

Writing

Crafting

Inside Grief Cabaret, you’ll receive weekly creative Cabaret Acts to complete & seasonal invites to our Solstice Share Gatherings.

For fifty-two weeks, you will be invited to call forth the stories held in your bones through weekly prompts called Cabaret Acts. Guided by the rhythm of the seasons, these prompts are crafted to support your personal unfolding and delivered straight to your inbox each week.

Some weeks, you’ll be asked to write your grief - unearthing your stories through poetry, prose, and memory. Other weeks, you’ll turn to your hands and senses with art projects, altar-making, and creative rituals.

As the weeks flow and you deepen your relationship with both creativity and grief, what will emerge is a living archive—a year-long tome of love and a sacred record of your journey into grief.

What is grief,

if not love,

perservering?

-Vision, WandaVision

Gathering

Sharing

Four times per year, around the solstices, we will gather on Zoom for our Solstice Share Gatherings. These are sacred spaces for witnessing and being witnessed, led by co-founder Lauren Carroll.

Here, you are invited to bring the fruits of your labor: to read your words aloud, share your projects, and let your art be seen, but sharing is never required. You may choose instead to simply listen and hold space for others, to sit quietly in (virtual) circle surrounded by those on the same spiral path - fellow grievers who have committed to showing up for themselves and tending to their inner worlds for 52 weeks.

We will laugh. We will cry. We will allow ourselves and our stories to be seen by compassionate souls from all over the world. These gatherings are an opportunity to come into communion with others working with the alchemy of their grief. Attendance at Solstice Cabaret gatherings is completely optional, and to honor the privacy of our members, they will never be recorded.

“Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.”

― David Kessler, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief

Inside of Grief Cabaret, you Will Be Met With…

Space & Trust 

This is a self-directed year-long practice. You are the ritual-keeper and the griefwalker. We entrust you with your practice and expect all members to commit the time they need to complete the weekly prompts. Set aside time, light a candle, and allow your imagination and creativity to be free. Each week is yours to shape.

Sacred Witness & Listening 

Gatherings are held with respect and reverence for ourselves and for one another. We join together to hear and be heard, to see and be seen. We will share, we will laugh, and we will cry. And it is all welcome.

In this space, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the music-makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. What we are not - universally - is writers. 

This is not a memoir-writing or a pure grief-writing program. This is a creativity & feeling program. Some of us may be poets or authors, but most of us are beautiful, flawed humans, seeking expression, whose grief is ready to be seen. You don’t need any writing experience to be a Grief Cabaret member. All you need is the courage to show up for yourself.

Come to create.

Come to be held.

Come to cry. 

And be witnessed.

Come to write and color and weave

& color outside the lines

& be transformed

By the power of your words.

Come to put pen to paper

And see what emerges.

Come to feel.

What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play; Life is a cabaret, old chum, Come to the cabaret.

Questions Answered

  • Yes, we meet online only. With Grief Cabaret members calling in from all over the world, Zoom makes it possible to connect at the same time. (A real-life Grief Cabaret, with costumes and all, would be magical, though… perhaps in the future…)

  • Not only are you welcome here, you are needed here. You carry the the wisdom of the long-time griever and your presence in our group would be a treasure and gift to all. Not only will you honor your grief and likely create works you will cherish forever, your experience will enrich the whole.

  • We understand, and we wish we could offer an alternative, but since we hold these gatherings sacred and wish to protect the dialogue within, we choose not to record them. With the deepest respect for privacy and sovereignty, we hope you can come to the others (we offer four gatherings per year).

  • Weekly Cabaret Acts come in all shapes and sizes, and vary in form and structure… Some are more memoir-based. Some may lean towards the abstract. Some require deep imagination. Some are very tangible. Curated across the seasons and the year, they work synergistically to tend to your grief and lead you back to your inherent wholeness. 

  • We recommend you begin with a beautiful journal, preferably new, dedicated solely to this program. Some weeks ask for you to utilize artistic mediums such as colored pencils, markers, or paint.. But is is always up to you, and the prompts are open to interpretation. 

  • When you join Grief Cabaret, you will immediately have access to the class’s private student portal, where we will post updates, Zoom links, and personal notes to the group.  This is where we will share the details for our gatherings, which are always around the solstice at a date and time that is comfortable for most.

  • The Grief Cabaret is a year-long commitment to yourself, and a spiraling ritual into the practice of grieving. Enrollment for the entire year is required.

  • This is a closed container program with the same cohort moving through the seasons together. We welcome new members four times per year,  as the seasons turn, so we suggest joining the waitlist so you will be notified when the doors open up again.

  • This is a pay-what-you-choose program valued at $66 per month. You will find special discount codes at the bottom of this page to lower the price to $22-$55. Enter those codes at checkout and your special price will be locked in for the entire year.

DOORS ARE CLOSED

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DOORS ARE CLOSED *

All are welcome. Doors open four times per year. Enrollment opens again in February 2025.

Whether your grief is new or old, the cabaret is waiting. New members are admitted seasonally. This is an intimate container and a one-year commitment.

Join the waitlist below for priority access to the Grief Cabaret.

Our Teaching / Learning / Creating Style at La Mort

We leave behind the polished, gate-keepy approach to education. We teach in ways that carry story and experience. We listen. We laugh (a lot). We go off-script sometimes. We cry (with you)(for those you’ve loved)(for those we’ve loved). We like science and studies and logical frameworks, but also mysticism and poetry and all that stuff. We really love to honor history and those who came before. We move through some serious curricula, but don’t take anything too seriously. We dedicate ourselves to seeing you, and want you to feel seen. We deeply honor our intuition and yours. We lead with integrity (always). And we welcome the odd-balls and misfits,  because it takes one to know one.