Festival 2024

Grief tending in the community and death & remembrance café

Organised by Grief Tending in Scotland

Sunday 3^rd November

Salisbury Centre, 2 Salisbury road Edinburgh EH16 5AB  

This activity is open to the public.

A grief tending in Garden from 11-1.30PM and a death & remembrance cafe in art room from 2 - 4. 

For the morning session we’ll be in the garden; around the fire for check-ins. We’ll give our presence and attention to any and all layers of grief that arise in the day. To help us frame our scope, we’ll use the ‘Five Gates of Grief’ that Francis Weller describes in his book ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’ -  Francis Weller on Grief (2013) You don’t need to have read the book.

The afternoon will be a Death and Remembrance Cafe - At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death.  Our objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’. A Death Cafe is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes.

You can attend both or one of the events, each event will be have a max number of 20 participants.

What to bring:

• Suitable clothing for being outside for two & half hours during the morning
• An object or picture that for you has connection with grief

Facilitators

Douglas Guest has over 30 years’ experience of working in the public and 3^rd sector, and has been running men’s groups and grief tending in community events for several years. He has led on seminars and conferences in an number of fields, written national training programmes, and co-created Year of the Dad for Scottish Government.

Maeve Butler works in psychotherapies and third level education. She has been connected with the Salisbury Centre since 2012, and has been engaged with various forms of grief work since 2019, including Grief Tending in Community.

For more information and/or to book your place, email douglas_guest@yahoo.co.uk.

Thanks https://www.toabsentfriends.org.uk/ to their small grants makes this possible.

Photo credit: Douglas Guest