Building Resilience Through Grief: Athletes for Hope & E-Motion’s Powerful Book Club Experience
Athletes for Hope and E-Motion, Inc. embarked on an inaugural virtual book club together over the summer of 2024, centering loss as a cornerstone to mental and emotional health work.The book club featured, Fifty-Seven Fridays: Losing Our Daughter Finding Our Way, which is a story about love, loss, resilience, and both the power and presence of time to shape a life. Author Myra Sack is a former Captain of Dartmouth Women’s Varsity Soccer and spent the first decade of her career in the sport-based youth development arena. Her story, and her work at E-Motion, Inc. highlight the power of movement, community and ritual to enhance coping and build resilience.
Both Athletes for Hope and E-Motion, Inc. appreciate the inherent power in team sport to navigate life’s uncertainties and losses. Together, we created a space that led to profound conversation and connection, and that serves as a model for embedding a book club experience into organizational offerings.
As a community, we learned a language of loss. We developed a deeper appreciation for what it looks like to create space for our deepest pain. Our book club discussions were interactive, dynamic and intimate and included a combination of psychoeducation on grief, as well as individual reflection and gently guided questions. While we all experienced different kinds of life-disrupting loss, the group found connection and comfort in each other’s immense pain and immense love. By the end of our experience together, we felt a shared sense of community, gratitude, and inspiration in the midst of never-ending heartbreak.
We spent four virtual sessions together over the course of a month. Our first and last sessions were longer, and included embodied practices including E-Motion’s sacred circle which creates space for naming loss in our life so that it can be integrated and honored. Our middle two sessions focused on whatever was most resonant for readers and participants and the ways in which Fifty-Seven Fridays was creating new and different ways for consider how we are grieving and what we might need as support. Saying yes to grief literacy work means saying yes to building coping and stamina. Saying yes to grief work means we are acknowledging how big loss can isolate and devastate us, and that there is no time when community is more important.
Without question, the most meaningful part of the experience was the way in which now, we’ve made deep and enduring connections with new broken-hearted, bold, and beautiful human beings who have all experienced the deepest loss. Each of us relates to sport in some cellular way, and benefit deeply from Athletes for Hope’s courage and conviction to initiate a book club with a story that is heart-breaking. When we as a society learn to make space for such immense pain, we make more space for immense love, as well. It is a rare thing to have a collaboration that is both so simple and natural, and also so profoundly impactful.
E-Motion is honored to partner with Athletes for Hope and we look forward to our next opportunity to build meaningful experiences together.