Grief can leave us shattered, but Alexandra Vassilaros proves it can also be the spark for healing and creative rebirth through meaning-making. In this moving conversation, Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright and founder of the Make Meaning Workshop shares how the devastating loss of her husband became a gateway to deeper purpose, community connection, and radical self-expression. From her transformative end-of-life experience with her partner, to how she now helps others process their grief through writing, Alexandra walks us through the raw, messy, and ultimately beautiful process of meaning-making. Discover how grief and love are two sides of the same truth—and how honoring one can elevate the other.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Creating space for meaningful conversations around death and transition
- The profound power of writing prompts in healing
- Reframing grief as a gateway to rebirth
- Lessons from end-of-life caregiving and how to surrender to change
- How silence, vulnerability, and deep listening foster transformation
- Starting a workshop rooted in compassion, creativity, and honesty
- The importance of nonjudgmental, ego-free spaces for processing grief
- Building a connection with those we’ve lost—through ritual, writing, and intention
- Letting go of resistance and opening to love
- Supporting caregivers and the isolated with empathy and community
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS ALEXANDRA:
- How did you prepare for this experience?
- How did you come up with the concept of a Make Meaning Workshop to help people?
- What is your current relationship with him?
- What is the wonderful Alex message about the importance of healing?
- What is your trip for finding joy in life?
Ready to Move from Loss to Found?
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GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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Transforming Grief and Healing Into a Legacy of Meaning-Making
I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Alexandra Vassilaros, a distinguished playwright and compassionate workshop leader who has turned personal loss into a powerful force for healing.
Alexandra’s remarkable career in theater has been defined by deep creativity and critical acclaim, including a co-finalist nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for drama for her compelling dramatic comedy Omnium Gatherum. In 2016, a year after the devastating loss of her beloved husband of 23 years, she shifted her focus from playwriting to something deeply personal.
Drawing from her own journey through grief, she founded the Make Meaning Workshop. In her raw moments of loss when words felt scattered and elusive, Alex began collecting the fragments, shaping them into something real and restorative. From this deeply personal exploration, the Make Meaning Workshop was born, a space for others to find their own path to healing through words.
Since then, Alex has led workshops for esteemed organizations, including the Bowery Mission, the New York Zen Center, the Brooklyn VA, and the Harlem Wellness Center. Through her work, she has guided hundreds of women and men facing the inevitable challenges of loss, crisis, and grief, helping them to find meaning, stability, and hope.
I’m looking forward to talking with Alex, who will be speaking to us from Manhattan, about the ongoing connection she shares with her late husband, how loss can serve as a gateway to rebirth, and the transformative path that led her to establish the Make Meaning Workshop. We’ll explore the heart of meaning-making, which is the foundation of her work, her bi-weekly Care for Caregivers Group, and more, for a conversation that will surely be insightful, inspiring, and highly transformative.
Alex, what a pleasure. A warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
I’m so inspired to be here. Thank you.
The Love Story: A Journey with John
We’re so in sync. I know this is going to be a wonderful interview for everyone. They’re going to get a lot out of it. You’re very special to me. Let’s share the beginnings of your journey. Give us a glimpse into your marriage, the love you shared with John, the journey through his illness, which must have been so hard. I know you have a caregivers group. I can only imagine. Give us a glimpse of the profound impact of his passing, which led you to embrace the path you’re on.
I can only say that it’s a wonderful invitation to speak about the love I shared with my husband, because I feel very blessed in this lifetime to have had a soulmate in my husband. He was a sweet, generous-hearted man whose favorite word was yes, who taught me how to say yes less reluctantly, and who also ignited and inspired a lot of adventure in my life. He was my fourth cousin on the Greek side of my family.
I’m half Jewish and half Greek. I was raised within a Greek American family. In that family, I had a grandmother, a yia-yia who was profoundly spiritual and religious, my mom, and my aunt. I grew up with all these women. In the background of our lives, in most of our lives, there was a cup of coffee. There’s always coffee.
I first met my husband at a Greek American function for people from the island of Icaria who had settled in the United States. It was a forum or a group that gathered in the thousands to celebrate their heritage. This was at the Marriott Marquis. My grandmother wanted me to go because she was hoping that I would meet a husband, but from my point of view, it was absurd. I was like, “I’m not going to meet a husband at a Greek American function in Manhattan.”
I was an actress at the time, beginning to make a transition into playwriting. Someone introduced me to my husband. His name was John Vassilaros. In the world of coffee in the Greek community, Vassilaros is a little bit like Maxwell House. It’s a very common name because it’s a cup of coffee that all Greeks typically know of, at least Greeks in the United States. His grandfather was one of the first people to provide diners with not only loans, but with coffee.
I meet him, and I look at him. He says, “I’m John Vassilaros.” He’s extremely handsome and dashing. I thought, “I could be in a lot of trouble. I have to be careful and get myself a little bit intact. Take a deep breath.” He told me that he had been a Green Beret. I was like, “Oh my God.” He was suave to a point of danger. He had that kind of beauty and confidence.
He told me his name, John Vassilaros, and I said, “I know that name. It’s like the coffee.” He said, “I make coffee.” I said, “I make coffee, too.” He said, “I actually make the coffee.” The first thing that flashed on was when I was a little girl in my grandmother’s apartment in Astoria, Queens. I went to the bathroom, and in a can of coffee was a plunger. It was Vassilaros coffee. I said to my husband right away, “I’m having such a flash,” but I didn’t want to tell him what it was because I thought it might be rude. Everybody in my Greek side of my family was very happy. We all went to our ancestral home in Icaria to visit, and we fell in love there.
That’s beautiful.
I allowed myself to grow with my grief. Share on X
Icaria is one of the Blue Zones. It’s one of the places on the planet where people live to be in their 90s or 100s.
It must be from their habits and from all that great coffee.
Thanks for that. We make a lot of great coffee. My husband and I, without knowing it, and we didn’t know this until after we were married, had the same great great great-grandfather.
A Soulmate’s Illness and Its Profound Impact
How fascinating. How long were you married to him before he got ill?
We were married for 20 years before he got ill, and then he was ill for three years.
If you don’t mind, please tell us about that journey, the impact of his passing, and how it affected the path you’re on.
He was an older father. He embraced fatherhood. We had three children. When he was diagnosed, one was 12, the other was 15, and the other was 17. That was a shock, to say the least. He was misdiagnosed. He had colon cancer, and he died of colon cancer. It metastasized to the fourth stage. When they discovered the cancer, it was already all over the place.
He had a colonoscopy. I’ll only tell this story for our audience because it’s important for people to know. What we discovered is that the person or the doctor who did the colonoscopy two years before did not go high enough in the colon. It was so big. It breached the borders of the colon and went everywhere. Had he gone high and slow enough, they would have hit it. We take for granted that all doctors know exactly what to do. Maybe they want to, but sometimes, they go too fast. If they don’t see anything there, they don’t settle down and look carefully. That’s what I’ve learned.
That’s a great tip for people. First of all, it’s such an unpleasant experience to go for a colonoscopy anyway. You want to get put out and get it over with. You don’t think about the quality of the person who’s taking a view or who’s doing his thing up there. That’s very good advice.
I do this, too. In addition to saying a little prayer before I have my colonoscopy, I also remind the doctor of my own experience. I say, “Please go slow and go all the way high up to the top of the colon.”
The Shattering Truth: Preparing for Loss
That’s good advice. He passes. Do you want to talk to us about that?
It was a complete shattering of everything. Our life was so full, so enriched by family and friends. We were the house that everybody came to. We celebrated life. John and I matched each other in our joy for life, our sense of adventure, and our willingness to laugh and make fun of ourselves and each other, which is something all my sons have inherited. Also, we love to gossip about each other and other people sometimes, too. We celebrated. It’s also a degree of our Greek side. We love to dance. We love to go to Greece. We love to swim. We love to jump. We love to leap in the water, which I use in my own workshops of leaping into life even after death.
Naturally, his diagnosis was a huge earthquake. I even remember holding onto the arms of the chair in the doctor’s office where I got the information that it had breached the colon, and he was in a stage four diagnosis. I think I left my body. I cried so much. I felt something get very stiff. I’ll reference that later about what I could do about that kind of energetic stiffness, like a black brick.
You feel like you’re suffocating. The emotion is so big.
His treatment was very rugged. We started out being a little bit hopeful, even though they said, “This is a chronic cancer diagnosis. You’re going to be treated for a long time, or it may interrupt your life.” They were very honest with us. We were on all kinds of journeys looking for doctors. For anybody, those moments are sudden pivots in a person’s life. You have to surrender to the pivot. It has a lot of information. As the three years passed, he became sicker. It was obvious that soon, he was going to go.
You also talk about how there were special end-of-life preparations planned for his passing that helped you and others. It created a very intimate experience with him.
I also love that you use the word intimate, because every part of it is an invitation to intimacy. You’re confronting something you don’t want to confront. You want to resist, but it’s irresistible. You cannot. If you do, you almost abstain from the flow of life. You resist it to the point where you’re going to guarantee suffering, not only for the person you’re caring for or with, but for yourself and your family.
The stiffness of resistance is nothing I want to encourage. I encouraged myself a way to find language that could meet the drama of the situation, which was his apparent leaving. Especially for my children, my husband was so embarrassed to be sick. He was such a hero in life. He showed up for everybody tenfold, especially for us. He was such a man of integrity that he felt like he had disappointed all of us.
Navigating End-of-Life: Acceptance and Surrender
I can relate to that because when I had the car accident, I was there for everybody. I was the same way. I had four surgeries. It was very hard for me to accept that I needed help from people. That was a huge leap for him and a big challenge, I can imagine. How did you prepare for this experience? How did you do this? A few people who are reading may want to take notes. There was a lot of acceptance you had to go through to even get to that point where you could say, “This is happening. We have to prepare for this.”
Acceptance was something that was fluid. I would accept, and then I wouldn’t accept it. I want to say that acceptance isn’t a destination. Once you land there, you’re in acceptance. It’s as natural and as fluid as the coming and going of the tide. I would accept, and I would not accept. When there was new news, I wouldn’t accept it.
As he was passing, though, I felt we needed a framework to begin to talk about what was going on. He seemed to be resisting talking about it. We didn’t have the language for it. I reached out through a friend who had made a recommendation to contact the Zen Center in New York City. They provide incredible, copious amounts of care for any end-of-life question or consideration, including preparing people for their own death, their families, tutoring or mentoring about how to approach end-of-life care, and how compassion is such an element that you can offer those that you love and offer yourself.
I called the Zen Center, and I was put in touch with Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell. He came for a visit. He said, “Has your husband talked about dying yet?” I said, “No, we haven’t talked about it. He and I have, but we don’t have language for the teenagers, the three boys, who all looked up to him.” They almost couldn’t enter the room because he was so frail. He was wasting so elementally that it was even frightening for them to come into the room to be with him sometimes.
It was so traumatic.
He was so embarrassed that he didn’t always know how to invite them into the room, which was a small ache in my heart because I knew they needed to speak. I didn’t know how many days we had left. Sensei Campbell came to speak with John. He spoke to me briefly and went to speak to John. Within fifteen minutes, he had us all in bed with John talking about his imminent death.
He had language. He apparently said to John, “What do you know about what’s happening right now?” John said, “I know it’s not good.” Chodo said, “You know you’re dying.” John said, “Yes.” He said, “Can we discuss it with your family? They also know this, but nobody has talked about it.” It was this big, scary thing that everyone is afraid of.
We all spoke. We talked about some things that John wanted and hoped for. We talked about the facts of “Do you want to be cremated? Do you want to be buried?” None of this was something he wanted to discuss at all. He also invited the boys into the room to speak with him, so he could tell them things, talk with them, and cry with them.
We can hold beauty and horror, love and loss, side by side. Share on X
For a couple of my kids, that was very hard, especially for the littlest. To see my husband that vulnerable was also a new thing. My sons almost felt like, “I’m betraying him even to see him this vulnerable.” We had to move through all those things. I’ll tell you a little bit about the actual death experience, which was very healing for all of us.
We talked about what we needed to discuss. To say that it was bittersweet is an understatement. It was shatteringly beautiful and hard at the same time. At that time, in my awareness, I realized we could hold opposites. We could have a horrible and beautiful side by side. We could have love and an impossible loss side by side. That was a gift of consideration that I gave myself, and I talked about it with the boys. It was Chodo who helped prepare us for the end.
What a beautiful thing. The fact that he was there, he was almost like a buffer for the different emotions swirling around and structuring the conversation.
He changed the energy in the room a lot. He has a breadth of generosity, spirit, and experience that makes him a guide for us.
Do you want to talk to us about the death experience? I know shortly after that, you were sitting with a grief therapist, and she asked you what stage of grief you think you were in.
One of the great experiences I had around his death that put me a little bit at ease was that there was a vigil, and there were about 25 people who were there with him. We were outside. There was a bonfire. My sons had a lot of their friends there. There was a real community there. It was anything I’ve ever wanted. People were eating. People were talking. He was going through stages of dying. He had asked for morphine. He was in a lot of pain. When I was out, he asked the people around him if they could give him morphine. He said, “I can’t do this when Alex is there.” He was right.
When I got home from shopping that day, they said they had given him morphine as per his request. It was not a lot, but enough to get him to sleep, and sleep deeply, and then he passed. I have to say that when my friends called me to say, “He asked for this, and we delivered,” I got so angry at them. There was a nurse for one day who came. She held my hand and said, “What is it you wish for?” I said, “I wish for him to have peace, but I didn’t want it to be this fast.” She said, “Let’s stay with your first wish. You wanted him to have peace. Now, he’s getting peaceful.” I was like, “All right.” I had to let my ego go.
What lessons were there for you in all this? I found it in my experience, too. It’s about letting go. It’s so challenging because we all hold on so tightly to control whatever we can.
If we can let go, then we start to begin to practice the muscle of letting go. She spoke to me so sweetly, this nurse, and she understood. Her name was Doreen. She held my hand. She helped create context for me and a willingness to surrender to what was happening. Surrender isn’t a place you go, and you always surrender. It’s always an invitation to think about surrendering. I did. I had no choice in the matter, but I had a choice to suffer or not.
The Peaceful Transition: Love Beyond Life
You also were lucky and fortunate in this situation because there were special people who lent you support and had the wisdom to help you. Not everyone gets that. That’s wonderful. You took care of yourself. You went to the Zen Center.
This is the beautiful part. After he passed, a group of his favorite male friends were with him. We were outside. We didn’t know when it was coming. Suddenly, they brought me in, and he passed. Here’s what we did, which was so beautiful. My kids spontaneously started hugging him and kissing him. They kissed him in ways that I had never seen them do in life. They kissed his mouth. They kissed his eyes. This is a 15-year-old, a 17-year-old, and a 19-year-old.
They held him, and then they switched positions. The one who was at his feet went to his head and did the same thing. He was holding his bony, beautiful face that had become almost unrecognizable, but with the courage that love brings, they were addressing their love. They copiously thanked him. They were saying, “Thank you,” and repeating those phrases.
What a beautiful thing.
They said, “I love you.” I thought as a mother right then and there, “They’re good. They know how to love. They’re going to be okay.”
The other thing that they didn’t know was that he was hearing as a soul. He knew everything that was going on. He was present too. What a beautiful thing, as he’s transitioning, that he’s aware of everything. People think it’s over. It’s not. He just left his body.
I’ve never approached death as the end. I’ve never thought of it that way. How could it be when the life we’ve lived is so alive, and it’s just the soul that is making a transition? The body is getting ready to let go.
From Grief to Purpose: The Genesis of Make Meaning
We lose our Earth suits. You’re in therapy. You’re bleeding your heart out.
A bunch of weeks or months later, I’m disembodied, having trouble sleeping, and crying a lot, but I also have to say, I have a lot of friends around. This togetherness is so important. We’d cook together. We’d eat together. We’d talk about memories together. I did go to see a counselor, and the counselor asked me very plaintively, “What stage of grief are you in, dutifully?” Good question.
I said, “Stage of grief?” as though there were those five stages that have been misappropriated. They’re from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. They’re supposed to be, as I understand it, related to people who get a terminal diagnosis. They go through these stages of resistance, acceptance, and then anger. I said, “Stage of grief?” I thought about it, and I said, “I’m in all stages all the time.”
I thought she probably wouldn’t have asked me that question if she had had a primary loss herself. I thought, “This probably isn’t the place I belong.” I quickly wondered what it is that I could do to create a space where we could explore the positives, negatives, love, loss, beauty, and horror of all these things that I had experienced, and I know so many people experience. I’m certainly not alone in that. I wondered what it is that I could do to have a community around the truth of this kind of struggle.
I know that you were self-calming. It helped you to stabilize and grow because you started writing.
When he died, there were so many little miracles happening, not only the way I was watching the kids, who had probably never in life expressed that much open-hearted gushing love.
What a beautiful thing.
I saw that, and I thought, “Take note.” There were so many little things. I noticed nests and birds nesting in a nest right outside the window. I had so many little awarenesses, but I couldn’t write full sentences because I was in too much grief. I have a book that I created. I made this book. I’ve kept journals my whole life. I’m a writer. I write full sentences most of the time. I called it Fragments. I thought, “I need permission to write things down, but I don’t want the pressure of having to make it pretty, nice, or perfect. I want to write what I see or what I’m noticing.” That was a great freedom. That began as a seminal part of what I thought I might be able to bring to others in some kind of forum.
Connecting Beyond: Dreams and Mediumship
You were not even quite aware of this yet, but you were planting your seeds.
It was starting to begin to coalesce.
Surrender isn't a place you go to always surrender. It's always an invitation to think about surrendering. Share on X
It was starting to happen. You also connected with John through this gifted medium named Melissa Boyd. You used some other modalities to communicate with him. He has visited you in dreams. Tell us about that.
I want to say one thing. When he died, I ran upstairs to my rock collection in our house, and I pulled a rock. This is important. I encourage people to do this because it was a living memento that meant something to me. I put it in his hand after he died. While we were all keening, kissing, and loving around him, he had this in his hand. I knew it was going to be my memento for me to him and him to me. I carry it with me even on planes. I almost haven’t gone anywhere without it. It means so many different things. It’s got a path. The rock comes from Greece. Whenever I hold it in my hand, I’m very aware that his presence is called.
You could almost feel his energy in it.
I feel his energy so much that I never question that somewhere, he’s there. He’s there, perhaps in a different form, but his energy is with me. Sometimes, only my grief can get in my way. I did reach out to a medium named Melissa Boyd, whom I highly recommend. That was certainly some contact that was meaningful to me because there were so many aspects of what she brought to the fore that I cried my way through the whole session. She seemed to hear him. He thanked me for a lot of things. Without being too specific, I’ll say it was an important part of my discovery recovery.
I can relate. It’s so special and important. He’s visited you in dreams, too. You’ve had some very vivid dreams with him, which is how spirit often also communicates with us.
It’s so private, but he seemed to ask me in a dream, “Don’t stare at death. Look at me now.” In the dream, I was in a home for the aged. I was staring at what appeared to be a friend who was looking like she was moving on out of here, getting ready to leave. I was staring at her like, “My friend is leaving us.” He showed up looking swell. He said, “Look at me. Do I look like what you’re staring at? Don’t be so distracted.” He was full of life. I thought, “Good idea.” He’s come in other dreams. He came to me once in a dream, and it seemed that he was saying, “Move along. There’s life in you yet.”
He’s watching what’s going on. He made an extraordinary appearance on the sixth anniversary of his passing. You’ve got a great story that left everyone in awe. Inspire our audience. What happened?
It was the sixth anniversary of his death on July 10th. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. He always played backgammon. He was a very good backgammon player. I was brushing my teeth, and I looked down into the drain. Held at the bottom of the drain was a dice, and the dice was set on the number six deep in the drain. It was a single dice. When I went back to the backgammon set, there was one die in the set, and there was one in the drain. Who puts a dice in a drain? It’s not like it tumbled into the drain. We all took pictures of it. We were pretty astounded.
What is your relationship with him now? Are you talking to him? Do you feel him around you? Do you still communicate with him through mediums at all? What is that about?
I inherited a business, also. I wanted to be respectful of that business.
Wait a minute. You inherited a coffee business?
Yes, I inherited a coffee business that I shared with the rest of his family. There were many decisions that we all had to make, and I wanted to make them respectfully. The business was also like a member of the family to me. For better or for worse, I thought I would want to communicate with him the best I could. He did come to me, and he thanked me. He said, “You did good. I’m proud of you. Thank you for respecting my legacy and the legacy of our name.” I talk to him a lot. Nothing is sacred. I talk to him.
I’m the same way. I talk to Saul, too. Do you use any aids, like a pendulum or anything like that?
I use the rock. I don’t use a pendulum. I always light a candle. The rock became the way in for me. Also, I feel like we’re so connected.
Rebirth Through Writing: The Make Meaning Workshop
You know he’s around you. You don’t have to work hard. He’s there. You started this Make Meaning Workshop. To talk about grief and rebirth, this loss became a gateway for you to rebirth yourself. This was a transformative journey for you. How did you come up with the concept of the Make Meaning Workshop to help people? You’ve got your fragments of information that you’ve been putting together for yourself. What was this process like for you?
When John was sick, I asked if I could volunteer at the Bowery Mission. I had an idea that I would write with them. We wrote together. I only did it because I thought, “I’m so in deep in the experience of my own suffering. Let me get out of it a little bit and learn about what other people are going through.” Many of these women are in not just one crisis, but 3 or 4 compiled on top of each other or sitting on top of each other. They were so eager to write. They were writing, and I was writing.
We didn’t talk much. We only wrote. When you’re writing and not talking, you are not leaning on your presentational self. You are exploring a deeper self that has language waiting for you. If you don’t go there often, you won’t reveal it to yourself. Inevitably, when people die, you’re wondering, “Where are they? Why did this happen? What is life? What is death?” You’re asking beautiful, important questions. If you just sit with somebody who says, “How are you feeling?” you can get very mundane.
There’s all this beautiful mystery waiting for us. What I discovered working with the women was that the mystery is something they touched upon very freely and intuitively on paper. It was not when they were talking, but when they were writing. We wrote on prompts. The prompts are special invitations to our deeper self, the one that wants to talk to us and that wants us to listen to us. We’re human beings, but I believe we all have the capacity to mediate and live with the interruption that death may bring us, instead of leaving it way over there and saying, “I don’t want to touch it.”
That is what you were doing before you went to the Zen Center to get help. You all were not addressing it.
My husband, too. We were taking a lead from him. I think of the moment when Chodo gave us language. It was the beginning of language for what we’re going through. It was deep, resourceful opportunities for resilience and innate knowing. We have an innate knowing. How do we invite our knowing to get larger? For me, that’s where resilience is. Mystery has value. It isn’t there to confound us. It’s there to invite us in. Once we open the gate, there are more opportunities for us.
That’s so fascinating. You have worked with so many people. Do you have any good stories? It feels like you’re inspired by them, but it must also be overwhelming sometimes because you hear stories and the layers of what they’ve dealt with and how they’re dealing with their grief.
I love that you asked that. A little smile comes to my face. What I discovered pretty quickly is that when people said, “Isn’t it too much to hear everybody’s grief story?” I was so moved by people’s vulnerability and by everyone, to a fault, having to deal with life and death, feeling fragmented, feeling interrupted, but also carrying on and then doing the next thing. Everybody was, “I’m in hell. I’m in grief. I’m in frustration and sorrow, but I also made a perfect cup of coffee. I made a meal for my kids. I went to school. I picked up the phone. I pet my dog.”
There are functional things that we’re doing constantly, but if people don’t notice that we’re doing them, we forget to notice ourselves. We don’t notice how functional we are. We don’t always notice that we have great capacity, I believe, to hold these contradictions and live through them. Everyone in every session brought my heart alive. They brought me alive.
I feel that way about interviewing you. This is what it’s all about. It feels to me that as you encourage people and help them to get into their emotions, their pain, what they’re feeling, and what they’re going through, they are more authentic when they’re writing it than when they’re speaking it and having to make a certain impression or whatever. Am I right about that?
That’s exactly right. I say to people, “Our presentational self normally wants to be liked, appreciated, and understood. We have a practice self that we meet others with. Do you get me? Do you understand?” What’s an opportunity with grief is that we’re so vulnerable that we can stop faking it. I found that I couldn’t fake it. People would say, “How are you?” and I’d say, “I’m a mess. I’m disoriented. I don’t know who I am. I’ve lost my identity. I need to touch someone.”
The Impact of Detachment: Scaring People Off
Did you put people off? Did you scare people? Did some people want to detach from you and run from the emotion?
When you're writing, you're not leaning on your presentational self. You're exploring a deeper self that has language just waiting for you, but if you don't go there often, you don't reveal it to yourself. Share on X
Of course. One of the prompts that I use in my workshops is things people say, or things I say to people. People have so many experiences with what people say to them routinely. It is so hackneyed. It doesn’t exchange meaning when you want it the most. I would say sometimes, “Can you sit close to me? I need to feel your skin against mine,” and they would look shocked.
To tell you the truth, because I’m a dramatist and because I love to surprise an audience, I loved being surprised by my own self. I was even entertained, not that I was doing it on purpose, by people’s response to my honesty. I thought, “I want to live like this a little bit more. I want to live in honesty. I want to say things like, “I felt John move through the space.”
It’s a woman who wants to rebirth herself, become more authentic, and give up some of the drama that she’s been presenting to the world.
Everybody would say, “You’re feeling this.” I’d say, “Also, I’m feeling incredible awe for the love I’ve lived.” They’re like, “Don’t you also feel terrible?” I say, “I feel sad, but I also feel very blessed.” All this honesty that I found within myself began to be something I noticed that people did when they wrote themselves down. In our groups, we don’t talk. I’m talking a lot now, but we don’t talk.
This is so important for people to know. This is important for the people tuning in who have a problem expressing their feelings and getting in touch with themselves to know that they can come to one of your workshops and get into their deep feelings and their process. It’s very healing.
I didn’t know how much people knew about mystery. They didn’t seem to either until they read their own writing. Magically, they revealed parts of themselves, like fragments of a prism or aspects of a diamond. There was so much to explore. There was so much depth there that sometimes, you could feel, “How do we bring more of that depth right into life? Why should we leave it there while we experience these more mundane aspects when there’s so much mystery that death baptized us with, and love?” I took opportunities to speak in the name of love.
You’re so articulate.
I don’t think one time I’ve ever not thought, “People are writing.” They’re not trying to be poetic. I give them a prompt, and they get to choose from the prompt. They write for ten minutes, and then they read. There’s no interruption, no crosstalk, and no criticism. They’re already unburdened by having to write well.
Do they read it to themselves, or do they read it to the group?
They’re invited and encouraged to read it to the group so they can experience that kind of vulnerability and honesty without worrying that somebody is going to respond. It is a wholly energetic circle. We hold the energy for each other, but we don’t interrupt them. The other thing that we practice, which is super important and has given me a lot of opportunities to practice this with my family and my sons, is deep listening. You’re not asked to speak.
When we used to meet in person, I would ask people, “When somebody is reading, don’t clap. Don’t respond with little things. Resist the impulse to interrupt them in any way because it pulls them right back into their presentational self. The next person may wonder, “Why didn’t they clap for me? Why didn’t they do that?” The ego gets a little worried. We want to leave the ego there while we explore this poetic, honest unfolding. It’s also to be with listening, not with, “What am I going to say? I have to say the right thing right now.” You don’t have that concern. You can feel their energy.
Do you know what I love about it? It feels like you take away all judgment.
We do.
They write down what they need to write down. They say it or they don’t say it, but no one is judging. It probably comforts other people who are hearing the stories. I thought I had the worst story in the world, and I’m like, “Look what this person’s going through.”
It’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s like a compassionate machine. You start feeling compassion and a sense of, “They went through that, too. I’m not alone here. This is the human experience? I forgot. This happens to us all.” In the workshop, sometimes, there’s a young person who’s lost a parent, and an older person, maybe an 80-year-old or 85-year-old, who lost a partner or even a child. Suddenly, they have such an exchange of information to give.
It gives us an arc of information through this honest communication that’s not forced. The prompts are a little left of center. I’m not saying, “How did you feel when the inevitable happened?” I’m saying prompts like things people say, things you wish people would tell you, things I forgot to remember, things I can hear out my bedroom window, and things like that. It’s what my soul wants me to know. Often, they write their own anthem to what’s important to them.
I’ll bet relationships are formed in the groups, also. I’ll bet friendships are formed there.
Sometimes, there are. People are allowed to reach out to each other if they give permission. I have to say it. It surprises even me. I feel invited into life.
Nurturing the Next Generation: Healing for Sons
It’s uplifting. I get it. I am so impressed that you did the Care for Caregivers Group. Talk about a needed thing in this world, which you got to understand better than anyone because of what you went through with John. Let’s talk about your three boys first. After that, how has each one of them processed what happened? How is he doing with that? The meaning-making. What does that mean to him? Then, let’s get into your biweekly Care for Caregivers Group because I want people to know about that. You also have virtual private writing sessions.
I love working privately with people. We write together. They write, and I write. They can bring what we’ve written, and I encourage people to do this in groups or privately, to their therapists, their counselors, or their coaches. Often, they’ll write something so worth sharing with people they love. Instead of waiting and not sharing this beautiful aspect, dimension, or perspective that they may not have even known existed, and not keeping it in a journal for nobody to see, perhaps they send it to somebody else who gets to know more about this person than they ever imagined they would know. It’s always a gift to me.
I say this to all mothers who are concerned that their sons are suddenly bravely trying to manage the world. I would say that for my sons, one of them struggled in the world and was fractured. Drugs became a way for him to escape. That was a great emergency for our family. We’re on the other side of it because he has been many years clean, sober, and also eager to help other people. We have a new language for our pain, our frustration, our loss, and our love. He was an initiator of even more consciousness for us. All the boys rose to the occasion in an elemental and even heroic way. They met their own heartache, and they made love from it.
That’s beautiful. I have to give you credit, too, because it’s not easy as a mother raising three boys. I have three grandsons, and I have a son. I can identify. Instead of being even more devastated and never dealing with it, they came out of the experience as more compassionate and empathetic human beings. They have a wisdom that other kids don’t have.
That’s right. I say that to them, and I say that to other young people. I say, “It’s an invitation to your own depth. How cool is that?” They’ll often talk to other kids. When Johnny died, my youngest son was getting emails. He was getting emails that were addressing school issues, or, “Would Mr. and Mrs. Vassilaros come to this event?” They were sending them to my husband, and my son could see that. He’d say, “Mom, this is killing me.”
They were also inviting him to do book reports on books that were not appropriate for him in early, fresh grief. I went to the school and I said, “Do you have a protocol for kids who are going through primary loss?” They said, “No.” I said, “You need to get one because there are other kids here who are losing parents, and you don’t even have a way to address it at school. He’s seeing emails addressed to his father two years after his father passed. That’s not right.” There were other things that happened that would show the reluctance to deal with it.
They couldn’t deal with it either. Here you are, helping all these people in your groups and everything, to deal with it, but most people are in such denial. It’s too close for them.
Even coaches wouldn’t broach the subject with my son. Here he was, armoring himself to get through a day, especially the first year. There was no person. Even the therapists and the counselors at school didn’t know and didn’t have a protocol. I did go, and anybody should encourage their schools to refine or design a protocol for kids dealing with death.
Mystery isn't here to confuse us—it’s here to invite us in. Share on X
Supporting the Supporters: Care for Caregivers
I want to hear about your biweekly Care for Caregivers Group. What brought that on? Let’s then talk about your virtual private writing sessions.
The Zen Center. I can’t recommend enough the New York Zen Center. We were speaking together, Chodo and I. He’s one of the founders of the Zen Center. He was asking what else we could do. They must ask that every day because they do so much for so many. We thought of this together. They have many different programs for people dealing with loss, but one of the things we noticed is the isolation that caregivers can get in. There’s so much isolation.
We wondered if it wouldn’t be helpful to start a caregiver group. It’s about a year old. We inevitably have between 20 and 30 people in every single group. There’s a sliding scale to join. Everything goes to the Zen Center and then back to people who need it. It’s a remarkable group of people of all ages. There are parents taking care of children who need special care over a lifetime.
There are spouses between 40 and 80, taking care of their partners. There are many people dealing with dementia, Parkinson’s, and advanced illness. There is such an exhaustion and almost agonizing loneliness and caretaking, especially as you watch your beloved leaving in stages. We have a place to go with all of that, where we meet biweekly. All that information is on the Zen Center.
That’s wonderful and so needed. People who are caring for others who are going through all this need support. They don’t have the time, or they don’t know where to go. That’s so great. Tell us about your virtual private writing sessions, and then I want to ask you about the offers you’ve got for all our eager readers in the audience. I know you’ve got some special offers for them.
I also want to thank you for this opportunity, what you’re bringing to people, and the opportunity for them to think about death and rebirth in a different way. Part of my rebirth is being able to offer these workshops and find another path for myself. You asked about the private sessions.
Your private writing sessions, so people can work with you about honing their skills or learning to express themselves better.
They might want to do even deeper work than they can do in the group. They might want to do pointed work, or they discover something in the group, and they want to go deep. I love that opportunity. Sometimes, people also feel a little embarrassed or shy about working in a group setting. The thing is that I also always write in the group, so I’m never the teacher. I’m a participant.
I’m also equally vulnerable. That is the same thing that happens in our private sessions. Usually, we might speak a little bit more about what I discover in their work and what they might bring to other counselors and therapists, so they can dimensionalize or even grow the awareness that they are mining in the work they’re doing.
That’s beautiful. Tell us about your special offers.
We have a 20% discount on two workshops that are coming up. One is called I LOVE YOU BUT BE ELSEWHERE, which is a little bit more about people struggling in relationships that they may want to get out of, but are reluctant to do it.
That’s fabulous. That would probably solve half the problems in the universe if people could know how to break up with people and what to do.
I have to say that my experience in letting go of my husband helped me learn about letting go of a lot of things, including relationships that didn’t work anymore. It helped me learn about letting myself be more in the flow of life, where everything in nature comes and goes, comes to pass, comes again to pass again, and comes again to pass yet again. Nothing is here to stay, even big feelings or agony. We do that in I LOVE YOU BUT BE ELSEWHERE. A lot of people in relationships that seem to be or want to be over come to that workshop. That’s great. We have another one coming up, MOVING FROM LOSS TO FOUND. That is coming up at the New York Zen Center. You can find out about those workshops.
That’s a great one for someone who is looking to grapple with the holidays. We are in July 2025. We’re moving into the holidays. I would think that someone who is struggling with the holidays and thinking, “How am I going to handle that?” That would be a great workshop to go to, and prepare them for that.
We have special workshops always being announced. If you mention that you came from this show and used the code REBIRTH20, you’ll get a 20% discount.
That’s great. What is the wonderful Alex message about the importance of healing? Why should people heal? Why should they go through it through writing or whatever? What does that do for you instead of staying with all your pain?
It opens your heart. It makes the impossible possible. It makes your concern for others that much greater and your opportunity to reach out to others who are hurting that much more satisfying. I have to say, I do find joy in this work. I find people’s vulnerability and their humanity moving and inspiring.
That’s beautiful. You answered my last question. What is your tip for finding joy in life?
One of my big tips for finding joy is to ask great questions. Ask beautiful questions. Don’t be afraid of asking questions. Discover yourself on paper and then share it with another person. It brings them alive, and it brings you alive, too.
I would contribute to that. Some people are a little shy to share. They need to learn. I would imagine your workshops help them to learn that they’re as precious as anyone else, and their experience is as important as anyone else’s. People can learn from that.
I love that you used the word shy. Shy is such a beautiful word. You’re shy. You want to invite yourself to the party of life, which has a lot of concentrated challenges in it, but it also has so much connectivity to others. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?
That’s why we’re here. That’s exactly what this conversation is all about. Alex, your journey from grief to rebirth has shown that even in life’s darkest moments, purpose, presence, and hope can emerge that light the way forward. Through your Make Meaning Workshops, you are helping the grieving to explore how writing, reading, and deep listening can ground their wisdom, grow their perspective, and discover more about themselves, which helps them transform their own hardships into meaningful growth and healing. My deep gratitude to you for the wisdom and compassion you continue to share, which guides others towards healing, strength, and new meaning in their lives. What an extraordinary gift you’re bringing to the world. Thank you from my heart, truly. Many blessings.
Thank you so much. Thank you for the mercy that you provide for so many.
Thank you. As I like to say, to be continued.
Guest’s Links:
- Make Meaning Workshop
- Care for Caregivers Group
- New York Zen Center
- I LOVE YOU BUT BE ELSEWHERE – Use code REBIRTH20 for 20% off!
- MOVING FROM LOSS TO FOUND – Code REBIRTH20 gets you 20% off!
- Check out the Make Meaning Workshop on Instagram
- Connect with Alexandra Vassilaros on LinkedIn
About Alexandra Vassilaros
In 2016, one year after the passing of her husband of 23 years, Alexandra pivoted from writing for the theater and founded the Make Meaning Workshop. Her work as a playwright is extensive. She was a co-finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2004 for the play Omnium Gatherum.
She has led workshops for many notable organizations, including NYC’s The Bowery Mission, New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, ARTYARD, The Brooklyn VA, Harlem Wellness Center, and Bevival. Alexandra continues to work with hundreds of women and men facing the challenges that loss, crisis, and grief inevitably bring. She is the mother of 3 wonderful young men.
