Grief Needs a Witness: What Rob Reider and Sad Dads Club Taught Me

I recently sat down with Rob Reider around a fire in the woods behind my parents' house. Rob and I are both Bowdoin grads, which is how this started. He is the co-founder of Sad Dads Club, a nonprofit that supports fathers who have lost a child.

Rob started it after he and his wife lost their daughter, Lila. When he went looking for support, he found plenty built for grieving mothers and almost nothing for dads. So he built the thing that didn't exist.

What stayed with me most was something Rob borrowed from Dr. Kathy Shear, who founded the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University. Grief needs a witness. Not someone to fix it. Someone to just witness it.

I keep thinking about how much that reframes. We're taught, especially as men, that grief is a problem to solve or a weakness to hide. The culture hands men one acceptable emotion, and it isn't sadness. It's anger. But Rob told me that when he built a room where grief was finally allowed, the anger mostly disappeared. What showed up instead was openness, compassion, and vulnerability.

Grief doesn't evaporate because a man was told to be tough. It waits. And it comes out somewhere, usually sideways. Rob's whole approach is to give it a door instead.

He left me with one more thing, for anyone who freezes up around a grieving friend. It's okay not to know what to say. It's not okay to say nothing. Ask about their child. Say the name. Even if they can't go there in that moment, they will remember that you cared enough to ask.

Read the full piece on Substack.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org