Every New Yearâs Day at 3 a.m., when many people are either drunk or sleeping, Alyssa Warmland, an artist and activist based in Port Hope, Ont., takes a moment to remember her mother.
âItâs kind of a special time for me to pause,â she told CTVNews.ca. âI usually like to wander off and spend a little time alone.â
Warmlandâs mother died from cancer on Jan. 1, 2007 â at 3 a.m., in a hospice in Burlington, Ont.
âNew Year's [Day], for me, is forever a grief time,â Warmland said. âItâs been a long time now, and I still really, really miss her on holidays.â
For many others like Warmland, New Yearâs Day is marked by annual grief thatâs hidden beneath a cloak of customary celebration -- which often makes emotional turmoil harder to reconcile.
âThe thing about the holidays and death is that everythingâs a reminder, right?â she said. âLike, you can't escape the holidays, you canât go into the store without there being festive songs on the PA system. You canât go anywhere without there being decorations on the street outside of my apartment. Thereâs always constant reminders.â
Warmlandâs pain is complicated by other tragedies. Years after losing her mother, she had three miscarriages within the span of 12 months. It put her in a dark place, she said.
âDuring all this time, I was doing a lot of writing. And a lot of reprocessing my grief about my mom,â she said.
Through exploring means of artistically expressing her pain, and working with various charity organizations, Warmland encountered a multi-media support website that offers a wide range of content for people experiencing grief. The non-profit organization provides short videos, podcasts and blog posts that aim to inform and unify grievers during difficult times. All content is vetted by health-care experts.
According to the website, Grief Stories offers âa range of resources to help grievers explore and express their own grief stories, and to connect with the stories of others, making them feel less alone.â
âPrivately accessible anywhere, anytime, this library is a community health resource for people facing grief and loneliness,â the "About" page reads.
Grief Stories was started by a Toronto filmmaker named Sean Danby, whose wife died from breast cancer in 2012. After losing her, Danby would often lie awake late at night, staring at the ceiling, questioning her death and his own life. Turning to his tablet for videos that could make him feel less alone, he found a lack of content. He decided to build a database of stories that could give people -- like Warmland -- have resources to turn to when most people are sleeping.
Warmland is now the executive director of Grief Stories, helping cater content to specific types of grief -- whether itâs the death of a parent or death of a child, she explained.
âWe also have sections on suicide loss, and losing people to drug poisoning and overdose. We recently have just been working on a section for people with intellectual disabilities, which I'm really proud of, because there really isnât a lot of content [on that].â
Warmland, who is now a mother of a three-year-old son, is also working on curating content for people who have lost loved ones to drug overdose during the pandemic.
To her, Grief Stories is an antidote to a culture that avoids talking about death.
â[Culturally], we really try to not go there. But I think we need to go there. For me, Grief Stories has allowed me to get comfortable talking about grief and making the time and space for just sitting with [it],â she said.
âEveryone has a unique story. And everyone has a way that theyâre surviving.â