From Loss to Legacy: Myra Sack is Changing the Conversation About Grief

Imagine, for a moment, the heart-wrenching experience of losing a child; it is a pain that would pierce through the very essence of our being. This was the reality that Myra and Matt Sack were forced to confront as they grappled with the loss of their young daughter, Havi Lev, in 2021.

In the wake of their devastating loss, Myra embarked on a profound journey of courage and dedication to reshape the collective dialogue surrounding grief. She founded E-MOTION, a not-for-profit organisation that provides support, healing, and educational training to those navigating grief and loss.

In just two years, E-MOTION has touched countless lives. Through innovative programs such as the E-Motion Running Community, Myra and her team have shown the transformative power of community, movement, and ritual to guide healing.

But the impact doesn’t end there. Through comprehensive training and grief literacy education, E-MOTION equips organisations and individuals alike with the tools and understanding necessary to navigate the complexities of grief with grace and compassion.

Myra Sack’s journey helps us to understand that light and purpose can be found through the pain and darkness of grief. She serves as a beacon of hope for all those who have lost loved ones to death.

Let’s see what Myra has to say.

Kim: Myra, can you tell us about yourself?

Myra: I’m a mother of three. I have two living children and one daughter who died in January 2021. I am an athlete, a writer, a devoted partner, a sibling, and a daughter. I love and am sustained by community and have always been in spaces where community is in the spotlight in terms of its capacity to lift people. So, both in my professional world and personally, that is always a priority of mine.

Kim: What was your background before founding E-MOTION and writing your book “FIFTY-SEVEN FRIDAYS: Losing Our Daughter Finding Our Way?”

Myra: I was a nonprofit leader and a chief program and strategy officer for a small nonprofit organisation in Boston. The organisation was focused on community sports and was part of an international network of other sports for good organisations.

I was on a path to stay and lead in that space when Havi was diagnosed.

Kim: Can you tell us about your journey in founding E-MOTION? The loss of your daughter obviously had a lot to do with that.

Myra: E-MOTION is a nonprofit organisation I founded about a year ago. The organisation’s anchoring elements are three key healing elements that I found to be sustaining, life-enhancing, and, to some extent, healing: movement, community, and ritual.

E-MOTION was founded on the premise that we can move with, rather than moving on from or moving past. We can move with the hardest, most painful things if we turn towards loss, pain, and uncertainty and do it with this foundation of movement, community, and ritual.

Each of those anchoring programmatic elements has nourished me as a bereaved mum. My daughter Havi died of a neurodegenerative disease in January of 2021. She was diagnosed on December 17th, 2019, and it was really through her life, her diagnosis, her death and into the present that I came to appreciate the power of each of those elements in a different dimension and texture than I had ever known before.

So, E-MOTION is now an organization focused on supporting grieving people. We run direct programming for grieving people through a model called a Movement Community. It’s a 10-week, gently guided, movement-based grief experience that takes a group of grieving people through a very integrated journey that allows them to publicly and privately acknowledge and integrate their loss and emotions.

The second program focuses on those of us trying to support grieving people. How do we educate and train people trying to show up for others who have endured or are enduring a loss? How do we equip them with language, skills, and frameworks for being there for people in a way that is accessible, digestible and not scary?

Kim: I love that E-MOTION is two-sided. You are helping people in their grief and training the people who are here to help people in their grief. That’s fantastic.

Myra: My orientation and philosophy on grief are that a lot of times, we talk about it as an intimate and personal experience that is unique, which it is. However, I think we sometimes undervalue the social element of grief. It is so important for people to be surrounded and lifted up, and I think that’s the power of educating and equipping communities with ways that we can all show up better for each other.

Kim: Absolutely. Let’s talk about your memoir “Fifty-Seven Fridays”. What was the most challenging aspect of writing it? I can only imagine it would have been a really raw experience.

Myra: The process of writing started from a space that was organic and almost cellular. It started because our daughter could not speak, so from the moment of her diagnosis, my husband Matt and I knew that we had to reorient around how we were going to communicate with someone who couldn’t speak a word. We started writing these letters to her, and each letter would begin with Dear Beauty. It was a way of communicating and being in conversation with Havi that felt beautiful and connected. We established this ritual that we named “Shabbirthdays”, a combination of a birthday and Shabbat, and that is where the “Fifty-Seven Fridays” title came from.

As a mother, I couldn’t wrap my head and heart around the fact that Havi would only have two birthdays on this Earth.

We decided to anchor each week in these celebrations where we’d honour her, and we combined Shabbat with birthday because, in the Jewish tradition, Shabbat happens every Friday evening at sundown. Havi loved challah, the egg-based bread we eat on Shabbat. So, we used those evenings to honour her and to be in conversation about what was most meaningful. And to be with the people who mattered most and those who could see her as sacred and not scary.

Matt and I would alternate at the end of each of those Shabbirthdays, and one of us would write to her and chronicle the week. This was a way of accessing our own pain, emotions and love and also a way of connecting as partners. To know what was impacting each of us and how we were holding all of it, and to make sure Havi knew we were as present as possible in her life.

Those entries then turned into what became this book, and it became clear to me that I wanted to dissolve this sort of intimacy barrier that I think can sometimes exist where we don’t have enough companions or real-time raw moments of love and loss. So, if and when someone is in that moment themselves, they feel seen. I wanted people to open this book and feel like their loss, pain, love, and immensity could be honoured and seen.

I think both the beautiful elements of writing it and the most difficult ones were, in some ways, the same. It was the reality that she and our relationship had to exist in this way. I never wanted it to; I still don’t. And yet, that’s also what makes it beautiful.

Kim: Thank you for sharing that. I could feel the depth of your journey. It’s no easy feat to share ourselves like that in public spaces. How has doing that impacted your healing and personal grief process?

Myra: Every day is an opportunity to be a parent to be her parent, and that feels really good. I wish I could be taking her to school, bringing her to soccer practice, or attending a parent-teacher conference. Instead, our relationship exists in both a private and public way that enables me to stay in relationship to her, which is the only thing that I can do and want to do.

I think the healing comes from that integration, and the acts of integration are ultimately, for me, so life-sustaining; they enable me to stay whole even though I’m shattered.

Kim: How do you cope with your difficult days and support others through their grief?

Myra: It’s a constant experience of learning and relearning who I am, what I’m feeling and being as specific as possible about it at any given moment. That specificity allows me to trust myself enough to move in the world in a way that allows me to feel strength and courage, as opposed to being knocked around by potentially harmful comments or being in spaces that are not supportive of a griever. So, the work I’m always doing on myself is “Am I aware of how I’m feeling? Can I trust that and express it in ways that enable me to exist?” And then, “How do I find moments of community and connection to ensure that I don’t feel that isolation?” that can be so incredibly debilitating for grieving people.

The work I do and redo every day allows me to show up in spaces for others where I can be my full self, connect with others at their level of pain, and honour their pain in a way that makes them feel seen. It is an everyday act of work and grace.

Kim: Has this changed your perspective on life and loss?

Myra: Jon Kabat-Zinn, who’s sort of father of mindfulness-based stress reduction, says that life-altering moments are a rotation of Consciousness or rotation in Consciousness. I think that my experience of losing my oldest daughter has certainly done that. It has been a rotation in my Consciousness, which means that I have been transfigured by this experience, and I think the way that I have been transfigured is that I have this knowing that we have no control.

There is this fragility to life that is both unsettling and inspiring and that learning to be present.

There’s a poem by Malka Tussman in which she says, “Today is forever and forever is right now.” That notion of the power of presence is a new perspective. I may have cognitively and intellectually appreciated it before, but now there is a deep understanding and knowing that makes it hard to live the way I had prior.

Kim: In what ways do you hope that E-MOTION continues evolving the conversation around grief and loss?

Myra: I want E-MOTION to provide communities that are accessible and integrated into everyday spaces where grief and loss aren’t sidelined. You can show up in a running store or restaurant, and a movement community could exist right there. Where grieving people can say the names of the people who have died, and they can hear those names back, and public spaces can honour that and not be afraid of it. I want E-MOTION to be a space where this near-peer communalistic healing model can become the gold standard. We value and appreciate the voices and hearts of lived experience and that those people get to show up for others in a profound and powerful way.

I think I want E-MOTION to be one of the reasons why grief work gets taken on and why people don’t say no to training on grief and loss. That people see it as something everyone can connect to and benefit from.

Kim: What advice would you give to individuals experiencing grief and loss? Or what else do you feel would be important to share with those who resonate with your journey somehow?

Myra: I think honouring your feelings, trusting that the depths of the despair and the heightened sense of love, connection, and joy are real and deserve to be honoured. There is tremendous strength in naming that, which is impossibly painful.

I think I would also add that there are so many broken-hearted people who are looking for sources of comfort and connection. I hope we can all find our way to each other.