Welcome to This Club Suuucks: Grief Support for Parents After the Lasagnas Are Long Gone. These episodes are recorded from the weekly #ChildLossChat on Twitter Spaces hosted by Melissa Monroe, aided and abetted by co-host Alexandria Szeman. Melissa has supported hundreds of bereaved folks through her work as a doctor and teacher of acupuncture. Her understanding of grief became more personal after her two-year-old daughter Alice died in her sleep of unknown causes* just eleven days after her second birthday in 2013.

No one wants to be in the bereaved parents club, but here we are.

After Alice died, Melissa found immense healing in many forms including EMDR therapy, writing, and – in Alice’s memory—helping others deal with grief and trauma. In addition to starting her blog “Mothering in Memoriam,” Melissa founded the Agastock concert to benefit the Southern California Counseling Center’s Trauma and Resiliency Training Program so that more therapists could be trained in EMDR and other trauma modalities. In 2018, this incredible sliding-scale Center was able to open a second location in the underserved Watts community, where they dedicated a room to Alice’s memory. She also developed grief and trauma continuing education courses for acupuncturists at eLotus.org. She continues to treat patients in her Los Angeles clinic and has recently completed a memoir about her path to healing after Alice’s death.

Dr. Alexandria Szeman is the award-winning author of New York Times Book Review’s Notable Book and Top 100 Books of the Year, The Kommandant’s Mistress, which also won the Kafka prize “for the best book of prose fiction by an American woman.” She won the Elliston Poetry Prize for excerpts from two of her books: Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on the Holocaust, and Love in the Time of Dinosaurs. She is a childhood sexual abuse survivor and advocate, and she frequently writes about migraine. She co-hosts #ChildLossChat, #SexAbuseChat, and #BookMarketingChat.

This Club Suuucks aims to destigmatize grief and trauma through open discussion around issues facing the bereaved. Whether you are bereaved, want to support the bereaved, or realize that learning to cope with grief and trauma in all its forms leads to a more meaningful life, we will be holding space for you after the lasagnas are long gone.

For more information on Melissa’s work, visit https://www.melissamariemonroe.com/

*Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC) is a category of death assigned when no cause of death can be identified after a thorough autopsy and death investigation. Though relatively rare, SUDC is the fifth leading cause of death in toddlers.