Charlene Lam - Grief Coach

It’s my birthday, and I miss my mom. I got through Mother’s Day this weekend by focusing on birthday treats: Three kinds of cake! A children’s book! Dinner out! Just being spoiled by my husband. 🍰📚💖

Some years, Mother’s Day is all about celebrating her. This year, it just felt too bittersweet. I think she’d understand. Of course, she would, she’s my mom. 🥹

🎂 My birthday wish: If you read my Curating Grief book and liked it, please leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. The book and my Curating Grief work are the biggest ways I pay tribute to my mom — that and taking amazing care of her daughter 🥰

Join me in NYC for The Grief Gallery: Objects of Longing and Belonging, May 15-16!

Part of , this free event series includes:

🧧 Chinatown walking tours, Fri May 15 + Sat 16

🖼️ Pop-up installation of The Grief Gallery, Fri 15

🎨 Grief, arts & design gathering, Sat 16

We will explore the roles objects play in our sense of identity and place, what makes an item iconic, and of course, grief and creativity.

If you have an interest in the intersection of grief, arts and design, you are welcome to join! Special shoutout to members 💖

All events start at the wonderful .to.chinatown Hub in Chinatown.

RSVP at curatinggrief.com/gathering

Join me in NYC for The Grief Gallery: Objects of Longing and Belonging, May 15-16!

Part of , this free event series includes:

🧧 Chinatown walking tours, Fri May 15 + Sat 16

🖼️ Pop-up installation of The Grief Gallery, Fri 15

🎨 Grief, arts & design gathering, Sat 16

We will explore the roles objects play in our sense of identity and place, what makes an item iconic, and of course, grief and creativity.

If you love NYC and Chinatown, welcome! If you have an interest in the intersection of grief, arts and design, you are welcome to join! Special shoutout to members 💖

All events start at the wonderful .to.chinatown Hub in Chinatown.

RSVP at curatinggrief.com/gathering

This Sunday is Tomb Sweeping Day, or Qingming Festival. Don’t know what that is? I didn’t either. Even though I grew up in NYC Chinatown 😅

Thanks to a workshop at .to.chinatown Hub and guest speakers Alice of and culture bearer Mica , I now know more — and got to take part in a bit of this ritual, which is apparently an important Chinese tradition.

I wish my mom was still here so I could ask her why we didn’t have altars or many Chinese traditions. I remember visiting the cemetery with family now and then — was that part of Qingming? 🤔

For Tomb Sweeping Day, or Qingming Festival, families gather to visit graves, honor ancestors, and offer food, flowers, and other goodies. Hearing about Alice’s Chinese family traditions and Mica’s rituals drawn from her Filipina heritage was fascinating, humbling, inspiring, a whole mix of emotions.

Of course I had to contribute items to the collective altar: my mom’s scarf and passport photo. My Pau Pau’s pin cushion. Recurring characters in The Grief Gallery’s exhibitions. Now playing new roles in connecting with my own heritage and culture.

Curating Grief is part of a long lineage of humans making meaning through tangible items. I didn’t have access to Chinese cultural traditions, so I made my own. It means a lot to me to be able to integrate the two in some way.

Thank you for the invitation and opportunity. Thank you for your beautiful children’s book With You in Spirit: A Qing Ming Story, which is teaching me more.

May we all find ways to connect and make meaning, especially after major loss 💖

Happy Lunar New Year 🧧🍊❤️ I’m thinking of all the ways I feel connected and disconnected from my heritage these days. I might not know or practice many of the traditions, but I’m grateful for good food, red ribbon dances, and my Chinese-American mother who navigated both identities all her life.

In the 1970s, she and her friends co-founded a Chinese dance troupe in NYC. (It would become )

But when she put me in dance classes at a young age, she chose ballet. I danced for decades, and she spent many hours ferrying me to classes.

I still dance. It’s a vital way I connect with my mom and my heritage — and my grief. Though as usual, I do it my way, with red ribbons and fans on the beach, in the snow, on the street.

The last picture is an illustration I commissioned from for the “Remembering Marilyn” series. This is how I want to remember her: Her love of dance and music 🩰🎶 I love how it includes both ballet and traditional red ribbon dance!

For more about how dance plays a role in my grief, visit thegriefgallery.com and the Red Ribbon Dance online exhibition.

When my mom died, I found boxes of paperwork in her garage and house. Neatly filed: Bank statements from the 1980s, immigration paperwork from the 1970s.

As a grieving daughter, I was overwhelmed and frustrated by all this physical stuff I had to sort through. Why did she keep all this?!

But, of course she did. She was an immigrant. Had jumped through immigration hoops in multiple countries. As an immigrant, you never knew when you might need to prove you have the right, moral character, funds, history, etc to be in a country … and these days, to just exist and be treated humanely, apparently.

(To be clear, my family members did it the “right way” but everyone deserves to be treated with respect and humanity.)

I’m grieving for the reality of what is. I’m grieving for the reality of what was. I’m grieving with the realization that some things never were.

Please take care of yourselves and each other 💖