About Meghan
My work is personal. I was nine when a teenager beloved to my small Cape Cod community drowned while my family and I sat unknowingly nearby. Always a helper, I grew up to become first a teacher then social worker with a special interest in grief and loss.
In 2017, my father died after a yearlong battle with small cell cancer, followed two years later by my mother’s unexpected death. I was with my mother when she died, and I felt responsible. I immediately suffered from PTSD symptoms and eventually had to check myself into the same inpatient treatment center I send my own clients. I returned to work as a therapist just before the COVID-19 pandemic sent us on a trajectory of unprecedented loss, which we are all still learning to navigate.
Informed by my own profound loss and professional experience, I created The GRIEF MENTOR METHOD (R) which helps all grievers navigate loss and change, by increasing education and understanding. The GMM has helped C-Suite leadership teams, school staff and administrators, clinicians and clients navigate the challenge of identifying and understanding what constitutes loss and change, and develop personalized expertise to regulate the physical body as wells larger organizations and systems.
The Grief Mentor Method™ : Six core components to creating meaningful change in the wake of loss.
“Grief is the energy created in the body on account of loss.”
- Meghan Riordan Jarvis
A word from Meghan.
“I’ve been a daughter/sibling for over 50 years, a therapist and wife for more than 2 decades, mother for 17, an orphan since August 2019. My father died in June of 2017, one year and five days after his initial diagnosis of small cell cancer. My mother died unexpectedly in her sleep while my husband, three kids, and I visited her on summer vacation in 2019.
I have a teenage daughter and two teenage sons who are inexplicably the same height despite being two years apart. Collectively we love all the sports, musical theater, board games, mystery books and The Great British Bake-off. My husband is taller than me, smarter than me, kinder than me, and has a better accent. Raised in England, he has brought the love of tea, BBC cop shows, and Arsenal FC to our household.
Our crew spent March to June of 2020 holed up in our house, failing at sourdough bread and the plank challenge. We spent June and July alternately cleaning out the home representing thirty-five years of my parents’ lives and swimming in slightly shark invested waters off the shores of Cape Cod.
I grew up smack in the middle of three brothers, and two sisters (I literally have everything you could ever want–older brothers, AND a younger brother, an older sister, AND a younger sister), and my kids have a zillion cousins. We spend a lot of our time trying to find ways to visit them or at least get them on the phone.
I’m incredibly grateful to have a day job as a trauma therapist and grief and loss educator. I love my clients, each of whom is brave, and curious, and determined to heal. It’s a privilege to sit with them. I also adore the my colleagues—the grief experts, educators, authors and activists whose work is impaired by their own determination to shift their own loss into something filled with more hope than pain.
I was raised in the church and have spent hours kneeling in all kinds of houses of worship. I find faith really slippery, so at best, I call myself an open-hearted seeker, at worst, a skeptic. But I’m here, and you’re here, so I hope we both find comfort and company and maybe learn from each other.”
