What is a Grief Care Plan? A living document that helps individuals, groups, and families navigate their grief at any stage before or after the death of a friend, family member, partner, coworker, or animal companion (or other losses not named here). It can be revised as needed.

What does a Grief Care Plan Include? Resources and services available to us in our grief: therapists and counselors who specialize in grief, local support groups, online communities or support groups, people we can call, hotlines for crisis support, books, grief writing groups, grief community centers, and more.

If you’re curious about the current landscape of bereavement leave policy—sometimes referred to as compassionate or grieve leave policy—nationwide or interested in making changes or additions to your company or organization’s policy, this service is right for you. I want to help you and your business create a more compassionate and person-centered grieve leave policy.

Trans & Non-Binary Death Planning

Traditional death care spaces–funeral homes, crematoriums, cemeteries–along with funerary products and practices–obituaries, memorial sites, postmortem body care–still have much work to do when it comes to trans-affirming death care and planning. Many trans people will experience postmortem misgendering, misrecognition, and transphobia.

The goal of this workshop is to empower trans, non-binary, and genderfluid individuals to kick off their own death care planning. In this workshop, we will focus on and learn about a very important form that allows individuals to appoint an agent regarding disposition of their remains, including other funeral arrangements: the Appointment of Agent to Control Disposition of Remains form. Trans and LGBTQ+ funeral and death care professionals strongly encourage trans and non-binary individuals to fill this form out to ensure that they are not misgendered in their deaths or subject to a misaligned gendered funeral.

Supporting Friends in Early Grief

We don’t always know what to say or how to help when we see our friend’s pain in grief. Maybe we feel scared to say something or we don’t know how to help. We tend to say the wrong things. Drawing from the latest bereavement research, data, and writings by psychotherapists, hospice social workers, neuroscientists, social scientists, and more, this one-hour presentation provides attendees with practical tools and information about how to support their friends who are in early grief.

Grief in the Workplace

This 1.5 hour presentation is designed for managers, supervisors, HR teams, and business owners. The presentation will cover topics like bereavement leave, how to provide support to a grieving colleague, social and cultural differences in grief, how to navigate grief when a colleague dies, and more. This workshop can also be tailored to the unique, immediate needs of your organization.

Crafting a Grief Care Plan

In this gathering, each participant will receive a copy of a grief care plan template. We will discuss what a grief care plan is and what it includes, followed by crafting your own in real time.

*Sage+Cedar offers one-on-one grief care plan drafting separate from this workshop.

DSM LGBTQ+ Grief Circle

The DSM LGBTQ+ Grief circle meets in person every third Thursday of the month from 6pm-7:30pm in Study Room 1 at the Central Library located in downtown Des Moines. This is a no-cost and queer-led peer support group for LGBTQ+ adults who are grappling with and learning how to integrate grief and loss into their lives.

This grief circle is for LGBTQ+ adults who are grieving the loss of someone to a sudden death, an illness, and other kinds of death not mentioned here. The loss can be new, recent, or from years past. This group is a space to also bring animal companion loss, compounded grief (back to back deaths and losses), and community-specific loss. This grief circle is open to disenfranchised loss (e.g., reproductive loss, loss of someone to incarceration, relationship loss).

Due to spacing limitations, the grief circle can only allow for 10 attendees per meeting. Because of this, we ask that attendees register in advance before each monthly meeting.