Bearing the Unbearable
A Sacred Conversation with Dr. Joanne Cacciatore & Mirabai Starr
December 7th, 2025 | 11am Pacific | 75 minutes
A gathering for those who are grieving, especially parents who have lost infants and young children
Suggested Donation: $25-35 | No one turned away for lack of funds
Recording available to all registrants
How do we bear a loss that defies all language?
When profound loss enters our lives, it shatters not only our hearts but the very fabric of what we understand about ourselves and the world. And when that loss is the death of an infant or young child, the devastation can shatter everything. There is the grief of their death, and there is also the grief of all that will never be: first words unspoken, milestones never reached, futures erased before they could unfold. Perhaps there is guilt about what we could or couldn't do. Perhaps there is rage at a universe that allows such devastation. Perhaps there is a body that remembers holding this child, arms that still ache with emptiness.
How do we go on as parents when our children are gone? How do we carry any unbearable loss?
We will not arrive at answers in this gathering. Everyone's experience is so different, and the death of a baby or young child is a rupture that resists easy understanding. But we will meet this sacred sorrow with all the reverence and tenderness it deserves, holding space for the complexity of grief: the unbearable love, the questions that haunt us, and the slow work of learning to carry what cannot be fixed.
In this profound conversation, Death and Bereavement Scholar Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, whose life's work centers on accompanying bereaved parents (especially those who have lost infants and young children) with radical compassion, joins spiritual guide and bereaved mother Mirabai Starr to explore how we continue to love our children and honor our grief in a world that often asks us to do neither.
This Gathering Is For You If You Are:
- Grieving the loss of an infant or young child
- Grieving the loss of a child at any age
- Carrying any profound loss that feels unbearable
- Supporting someone through the death of a baby or child
- Seeking compassionate, non-pathologizing approaches to grief
- Looking for community with others who understand devastating loss, especially bereaved parents
- Searching for ways to honor your child's life without being told to "move on"
- Wondering how to continue as a parent when your child has died
- Needing permission to grieve in your own way and time
- Curious about Dr. Cacciatore's groundbreaking work with bereaved parents
Through Our Time Together, You Will:
- Discover compassionate approaches to bearing unbearable grief, particularly the death of infants and children
- Learn about accompaniment rather than "treatment" for loss
- Explore how ritual and remembrance can honor children's brief but profound lives
- Understand grief as a sacred response to profound love
- Connect with a community of fellow travelers in grief, especially bereaved parents
- Find language for what often feels unspeakable
- Gain perspective on how love and grief continue together
- Learn about Dr. Cacciatore's
- Compassionate Bereavement Care model developed for bereaved parents and Mirabai Starr’s approach to grief as a spiritual path
Questions We'll Explore:
How do we hold space for grief that defies language, especially when a baby or young child dies?
What does compassionate accompaniment look like for bereaved parents?
How can ritual help us honor our children's lives, no matter how brief?
What role does community play in bearing the unbearable?
How do we resist the medicalization of parental grief?
How do we continue as parents after our children die?
What does Dr. Cacciatore's work teach us about all forms of devastating loss?
Your Guides for This Journey
Dr. Joanne Cacciatore
Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a professor, researcher, writer, and bereavement educator whose work has transformed how the world understands grief, love, and compassion. She is the founder of the MISS Foundation, an international nonprofit providing support to families experiencing the death of a child or loved one, and the visionary behind Selah Carefarm, a first-of-its-kind therapeutic sanctuary where traumatically bereaved people connect with each other alongside rescued animals and the natural world.
A tenured professor at Arizona State University and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement, Dr. Cacciatore is in the top 2% of scholars in her field around the world. Her teaching focuses on traumatic grief, mindfulness, and compassionate care. Her nearly 90 peer-reviewed studies and groundbreaking Compassionate Bereavement Care (CBC) model have influenced grief practitioners, social workers, and clinicians around the world. Her work is characterized by a clear resistance to the medicalization of grief, emphasizing instead the sacredness of mourning as an act of enduring love.
Dr. Cacciatore's life work centers on accompanying bereaved parents, particularly those who have lost infants and young children. She describes the death of a baby as a shattering loss that defies language, a rupture not only of self but of identity, future, and bodily knowing. In such cases, her practice calls for radical compassion, ritual, and the creation of spaces (like Selah Carefarm) where grief can coexist with beauty, where mourners can re-enter the world gently, and where love and grief continue to speak through remembrance, connection with all beings, and egalitarian care that creates community. While her expertise with bereaved parents is unparalleled, her wisdom extends to all forms of devastating loss.
Dr. Cacciatore is the author of the international bestseller Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, along with Grieving is Loving, works that have touched readers globally for their lyrical honesty and wisdom. Her writings and lectures invite a deeper, gentler way of being with suffering, one rooted in presence, reverence, and the recognition that grief is not an illness to cure but a testament to love that continues. She has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, and Oprah Winfrey Network, and has received numerous honors for her humanitarian and academic contributions. In 2024, she was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, recognizing her lifetime of work advancing compassionate, evidence-informed care for the bereaved.
As a bereaved mother herself (her infant daughter Cheyenne died the same day she was born), Dr. Cacciatore brings lived experience to her scholarly work and compassionate practice.
At the heart of everything she does (whether teaching graduate students, tending to animals at the Carefarm, or sitting quietly beside a grieving parent) is an unshakable belief: that love, when met with compassion, can transform even the most unbearable sorrow.
Mirabai Starr
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and spiritual guide. Drawing from 20 years of teaching Philosophy and World Religions and a lifetime of practice, Mirabai shares her wisdom worldwide on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss.
She has authored over a dozen books including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and renowned translations of sacred literature. Her work bridges the mystical teachings across traditions with a focus on how personal heartbreak can open us to the suffering of the world and catalyze our commitment to alleviating it through compassion and service.
As a bereaved mother herself, Mirabai brings deep understanding of how grief can become a teacher, opening our hearts to both the pain and beauty of being human.
Event Details
Date: December 7th, 2025
Time: 11:00am Pacific Time
Format: Live Online Gathering via Zoom
Suggested Donation: $25-35 (No one turned away for lack of funds)
Recording: Available to all registrants
Please offer what is possible and generous to you to support our team in continuing to share these events.
We're Eager to Hear Your Voice
Participants will be asked to submit questions before the event to inform what our speakers share. You will also have an opportunity to ask follow-up questions during our time together live.
You are an important part of the conversation.
Grief Conversations Happen Every Month of 2025
Join the Wild Heart community in other heart-to-hearts exploring the full spectrum of grief.
These conversations are for those who may be feeling alienated in their grief experience, longing for community and supportive resources. We hope these dialogues with companions on the journey will offer new perspectives and aid in exploring grief as a spiritual process.
Explore All Grief ConversationsA Note from Dr. Cacciatore & Mirabai
Dear Friends,
The death of a baby or young child is a shattering loss that defies language. It ruptures not only our hearts but our very sense of self, our imagined future, our bodily knowing. We become parents in anticipation, in pregnancy, in those first precious moments or years, and when death comes, we are left with arms that ache to hold, with a love that has nowhere to go but inward.
We recognize that this particular grief is often minimized, pathologized, or met with uncomfortable silence. Too often, bereaved parents are told to move on, to try again, to find closure. But your grief is not a disorder to be treated. It is a sacred response to profound love.
In this conversation, we approach the death of infants and young children with the reverence it deserves. Dr. Cacciatore brings decades of groundbreaking work on traumatic grief and compassionate care, having walked alongside countless bereaved parents through the landscape of unbearable loss. As a bereaved mother herself (her infant daughter Cheyenne died the same day she was born), she understands this terrain from both scholarly expertise and lived experience.
Mirabai joins as a bereaved mother who lost her 14-year-old daughter Jenny, understanding how the death of a child reshapes everything we thought we knew about ourselves and the world.
While this gathering centers on the particular experience of losing infants and young children, all who are carrying unbearable grief are welcome here. We will create space for what is often unspeakable. We will honor the complexity of parental grief. We will explore how ritual, community, and compassionate presence can help us bear what feels unbearable. We will hold space for your child's brief but profound life, and for your continuing bond as their parent.
We hope you'll join us in this tender gathering.
With deep compassion and understanding,
Dr. Joanne Cacciatore & Mirabai Starr
