The Lunar New Year celebration inside A Resting Place was much quieter than the streets of Seattle’s Chinatown on Saturday. Two dozen people gathered at the grief center, pausing at the communal altar to place mementos of their loved ones and write letters to those who have gone before them.
Nicole-Ann Rodis was one of the visitors who wanted to start the new year by connecting to her past. She first stumbled upon a pop-up version of A Resting Place at an outdoor market last spring. “I was so overwhelmed with grief,” she recalled. “It was not only grief from losing the grandfather who raised me, but the grief of trying to reconnect with my culture and language as a Filipina American.”
Derek Dizon founded A Resting Place in 2023 to challenge the isolation of grief by incorporating communal art and music practices from the Philippines. He grew up haunted by a tragedy that made national headlines: When he was 4 years old, a white man shot and killed his Filipina wife and two of her friends at their divorce proceeding. One of the friends was Dizon’s mother.
“Because no one talked about the grief I was feeling, I wasn’t able to name it,” he said. “And so it became internalized as shame, as embarrassment, as guilt.”
Asian Americans often rely on communal or spiritual support to grieve, rather than outwardly express their emotions, according to the American Psychological Association. Though collective support is effective, some in mourning may feel culturally restrained from expressing “negative” emotions, like sadness and loneliness. Dizon wanted to create a space that could bring mourners together and give them permission to grieve aloud.
“I imagined an actual physical space for Black, brown, Indigenous, people of color and immigrants to come and not have to feel shame or isolation in their grief,” Dizon said.
Over the past two years, A Resting Space has hosted dozens of events for the thousands of people who have walked through the door — grief mixtape parties, Indigenous Filipino herbal medicine classes and letter-writing after the 2023 Lahaina fires in Hawaii.
Dizon understands that grief is expansive and ever-present for people who have been displaced from their homelands or cultures. “That’s what makes A Resting Place special — it’s not just a grief center; it’s a grief and loss cultural resource center,” he said. “We know that our culture is how we make a meaning of grief, or it may be our culture itself that we’re grieving.”
Mourning in community, out loud
A Resting Place is in the heart of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, inviting visitors to write notes in dozens of languages on the communal altar and the letter wall. That was Dizon’s intention: As a lifelong social worker, he saw mental health institutions too often force mourners to leave their cultures at the door. “Scientific methodologies can erase cultural nuances and our traditional healing paths,” he said. “Because grief calls us to make new traditions and new ways of being, I invite people to bring their culture into the space.”
At a 2023 event during Undas, a season in the Philippines for celebrating the living and the dead, Filipino disco pioneer Roger Rigor and his band, the Barriotix, played traditional Filipino love songs for the crowd. He said people had tears in their eyes from the intimate reminders of their ancestors. “They remembered how their grandmothers sang some of the songs to them long ago,” he said.
Rigor also gave the audience the songs’ historical context. “The way Filipinos protested Spanish colonialism was through these songs,” he said. “They pretended like they were about love, but they were really about mourning the motherland.”
As communities of color endure various historical and traumatic events, their cumulative losses can create barriers to effective grieving. A 2024 National Institutes of Health review on migratory grief found that the loss of homeland, language and identity commonly leads to high depression, anxiety and prolonged grief in migrant adults but that this cultural bereavement has “received little attention in research.” In recent years, groups such as Brown Girl Therapy and Sweet Mango Therapy and experts like Shinhee Han have shed light on racialized grief and melancholia.
One such expert Dizon brought to A Resting Place was Phelicia Magnussen, a clinical herbalist who has trained with Indigenous healers. The theme of the event was “laying the year to rest,” where participants could build native flowers and herb bundles to reflect on their 2024 year.
Magnussen said people were also invited to bring items from loved ones to include in their bundles, which they could either treasure or burn after the event. “We let them cry in front of strangers and witness the pain in the people around them,” she said. “There are so few spaces safe enough for that to happen.”
Grieving personal and collective loss
During the Lunar New Year gathering at A Resting Place, Rabbi May Ye thought about the anticipatory grief she was harboring about a sick family member. “We don’t get to choose when grief shows up — it’s like our constant neighbor,” Ye said.
Though Ye had joined grief support groups in the past, she was surprised when she stumbled upon A Resting Place last year. “I didn’t expect to find a grief center that honored collective loss as well as personal loss, with memorials to Breonna Taylor and to the children of Gaza,” she said.
She became a regular volunteer at A Resting Place and now watches others wander in from the street, like she once did. “I’ve witnessed so many people in their grief,” she said. “People will come in here and cry and wail, because they know that we can just sit here with them.”
This year, A Resting Place is focused on expanding its partnerships with other organizations in Chinatown and offering free community dance workshops that explore grief in migration. Ye plans to create a guide for people who want to start spaces like A Resting Place in other cities. “What Derek has created is one of a kind and can’t be replicated, but what’s at the heart of this can be created anywhere,” she said. “We want to encourage people to support other grieving communities everywhere.”
