Grief Companioning Project focuses on what happens after a drug overdose death

Support 7 marked its fifth year teaming up with the Grief Companioning Project and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health to host the annual Understanding Traumatic Grief Conference. This year’s event – held Thursday in Lynnwood – centered on “After the Overdose – The Grief No One Talks About.” The conference focused on the silent struggles that families and communities face after an overdose death.

Semi-retired University of Washington clinical psychiatrist Dr. Ted Rynearson began Thursday’s conference by interviewing Lynnwood resident Ryan Poirier, whose 25-year-old daughter Paige had died from a drug overdose nearly eight months ago.

Poirier said he coped with Paige’s passing through a combination of personal rituals and support networks. “Every once in a while, I feel like she’s sitting in my room talking to me, or I’ll wake up and think I’m seeing her on the end of the bed sitting there,” he said. “I talk to her. I start my morning like that. I keep her favorite pillow sitting in the chair at the foot of my bed. It still smells like her, so I pick it up every morning. I give it a big hug.”

Poirier expressed appreciation for the support he received from Support 7 Executive Director Shannon Sessions, Grief Companioning Project Executive Director Cindi Sinnema and other grief groups that helped him get through the early months after Paige’s death.

“Without all of these people, I really would have been just twisting in the wind,” Poirier said.

After the conversation with Poirier, Rynearson shared that he had lost his wife to suicide in 1974, one week after their infant child died from a brain hemorrhage.

“What would have happened 1,000 years ago if I had lost Julie [his wife] that way and had gone through this similar sort of syndrome?” he said.

He compared how the Tlingit people and traditional Catholics deal with death and grief. The Tlingit tradition involves communal participation and an ongoing relationship with the deceased, while the Catholic, monotheistic approach centers on judgment, moral dualism and finality.

Rynearson tied this comparison to the works of psychiatrist Jerome Frank, who had treated World War II veterans’ mental health during the postwar years. Frank’s work included four essentials for forming a therapeutic alliance in psychological support:

• The relationship must be comforting.
• It must be confidential.
• It must be collaborative.
• It must involve active listening/encouragement (an active caregiver role).

While Rynearson attended monthly grief group meetings in Seattle in the mid-1970s, he said people were dropping out because “they were overwhelmed by coming into a group and having to talk too quickly about something that was so traumatic.”

“I insisted that everybody be screened, that they spend at least half hour with somebody that knew something about what’s normative about grief,” he told My Lynnwood News. “It doesn’t make any sense for somebody to get involved in a peer-led support project if they’re psychotic or if they’ve got a chemical dependency problem.”

In 1984, Rynearson started a peer-led nonprofit grief group where he and his team developed a free, 10-session intervention that was funded by the Department of Justice’s Office of Victims of Crime. This continued until Virginia Mason Medical Center merged with CHI Franciscan in 2021, which shifted priorities toward profit and reduced support for the program. This led to staff cuts and Rynearson’s retirement.

However, he said the project continued with a focus on systematic training, screening and rigorous standards, guided by the Grief Companioning Project’s Sinnema and supported by volunteers.

After the overdose

Dr. Steve Juergens, who had worked with Rynearson at Mayo Clinic and Virginia Mason, covered the emotional toll of overdose death on families. He told the story of how his brother Mark, who was a quadriplegic and had chronic pain, had died from an overdose on fentanyl patches in 2011.

He explained the history of the U.S. opioid epidemic, starting with when n physicians began treating pain more aggressively in the early 1990s. That led to increased opioid prescriptions and the mistaken belief that patients with chronic pain were at little risk for addiction. 

“And what happened was supply went down on a prescribing basis, and so, the use of heroin started to come in, and then we saw more and more heroin-related deaths,” Juergens said. “And then in 2013, fentanyl and derivatives of fentanyl came into being in the United States, being smuggled in. And that has progressively increased over the years.”

Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, Juergens said. He pointed out that In 2023, there were about 73,000 opioid-related deaths in the U.S. with most attributed to fentanyl. By 2024 this number had dropped slightly, to about 50,000.

The majority of overdose deaths now involve fentanyl, often found mixed with other substances such as methamphetamines and cocaine. This crisis has resulted in about 1.3 million opioid overdose deaths since 1999, which is more than combined major U.S. war casualties since World War I and higher than deaths from traffic accidents in the same period.

Juergens emphasized the use of compassionate, non-judgmental language when discussing individuals affected by drug problems, such as “died from overdose” or “person who used drugs” rather than labels like “addict” or “junkie.” 

“The focus tries to be shifted from looking at the process of the overdose to mourning the person, the soul, so to speak,” Juergens said. “I remember at my brother’s funeral…a cousin of mine who was younger, she got up and talked about my brother as a skier, and she saw him ski in front of the ski lodge, and she was from a different town. She had talked to him, and then he got down and gave her a big hug, and how impressed she was about him. She said she was speaking to his daughter [telling her] that he was a champion. He had this spirit and this life to him, and it sort of focused me on remembering the vitality of my brother. And that’s what I took away.”

Hunter’s story

Historian Paula Becker and her husband Dr. Barry Brown shared their story of dealing with their son Hunter’s 10-year battle with opioid addiction, which ended in his death in 2017 when he was run over by a Greyhound bus.

Before that, Hunter became addicted to drugs when he was a sophomore at Roosevelt High School. Around that time, his parents noticed he was drinking during school hours and having run-ins with the police. Over the next two years, his behavior became more dangerous, and around April 2010, his parents discovered his gateway drug was smoking fentanyl patches.

After spending a few years living in different cities, Hunter was in a jail in Portland, Oregon, for theft. Becker said that someone in the jail told him that “You are so young, and you do not have to keep doing this.”

After he was released from jail, Hunter returned to Seattle and received help from the University District Youth Center. He later got a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, an apartment via a YMCA housing program in Seattle and a girlfriend.

After two years of being sober, Hunter relapsed back to using heroin, which cost him his employment and relationship. He then decided to go to San Francisco “to find sobriety.” 

“And so we bought him his [bus] ticket. We got some dinner for him,” Brown said. “We dropped him off at his apartment, hugged him….He was leaving the next day.”

“He said to us, ‘Goodbye, I can’t believe you guys have stuck with me’,” Becker said.

Other speakers at the conference included:

• Traumatic grief expert Dr. Jennifer R. Levin on the unspoken emotions of loss
• Physical therapist Shanon Tysland and registered dietitian and nutritionist Emily Kinlaw on how the body heals after a loss
• Marriage and family therapist Chris Chang on the silence after a loss

Grief Companioning Project Executive Director Cindi Sinnema said Rynearson had a vision throughout his career for placing peer-led grief support in a way that is accessible and free to people who need it. 

“He called me and asked me if I wanted to help,” she said. “And Shannon [Sessions] and I are good friends, and it seemed like a natural connection. So that’s when Support 7 responds to something that’s traumatic, that the family is devastated. Support 7 is on scene in the very beginning of the timeline, [and] they have a soft handoff to be able to tell people about there’s more support later. And like Ryan [Poirier], Shannon literally brought him into a support group a few weeks after Paige died. So I think it’s helpful to know that there’s care in the aftermath of something that’s hard for them to respond.”

Poirier told My Lynnwood News the importance of not being afraid to share meaningful statements rather than the generic “I’m sorry” to someone who is grieving.

“I think it should be easier for people to share their pain in any which way with a more real opening,” said Poirier. “I wouldn’t have made it through as well as I have been, I think, without these people. I’m eternally grateful and thankful, and I want people to be able to connect on a better level.”

The story will be updated when the conference video is uploaded.