SINT MAARTEN (GREAT BAY) - The Caribbean Griefology Conference 2026 takes place from 12 to 15 November at the Hilton Barbados Resort in Barbados, convened by Dr. Jaycee Mayers of Reengineering Wellbeing Consultancy.
It brings together practitioners, researchers, community leaders and advocates from across the region and the diaspora, and it is open to anyone carrying a loss, not only to those who treat it. Among the featured speakers are two St. Maarten practitioners: Dr. Nicole E. Francis Cotton and Mr. Roy Cotton, Jr.
Most of us were taught that grief only belongs to funerals. It does not. It belongs to the man who has not said his brother's name aloud in two years. To the woman whose marriage ended and whose friends quietly stopped calling. To the father whose grown child no longer answers the phone.
To the worker of twenty years told on a Friday not to return on Monday, who has not yet grieved the title, the routine, or the standing it gave him. To the diabetic nurse who lost a leg and has not yet mourned the body she used to have. To the elder who can no longer bathe himself, and who grieves the dignity more than the independence.
Each of these is a loss, and the body does not sort them into categories. Research published in Circulation found that the risk of a heart attack rises roughly twenty-one-fold in the first 24 hours after the death of someone close, and remains raised a month later. Grief is not only an emotional event. It is a cardiac, immune and metabolic one — which is why it belongs in the conversation about the chronic disease burden our region already carries.
Dr. Nicole E. Francis Cotton presents The Biology of Grief — what loss does to the brain and the body, how grief lives in the body long after the words have stopped, and what restoration looks like for a whole family. A Marriage & Family Therapist and master therapist of over twenty-five years, she is founder and president of the Victorious Living Foundation and co-developed the grief course for the University of the West Indies' BSc in Social Work.
Mr. Roy Cotton, Jr. presents Break the Silence — Caribbean men and grief, speaking and connection, and collective healing. Host of the syndicated radio program Love & Inspiration with Roy Cotton, Jr., he works as a perinatal coach and co-therapist in marriage counselling at the Victorious Living Foundation. He asserts, “A man who speaks his grief gives other men permission to speak theirs. And that is exactly what many of us as men in the Caribbean need at this time.”
Some of this grief is older than anyone living. Africans were brought to these islands in chains, stripped of their names and their languages, and in many colonies forbidden the drums and the funeral rites by which they had always mourned. That loss was never permitted its mourning — and what one generation cannot mourn, the next inherits.
“Our communities are containers of grief — grief that has too often been dismissed, ostracised, even vilified,” said Dr. Francis Cotton. “And yet those same communities hold some of the strongest healing rituals we have: the funeral, the wake, the gathering where we sit together and celebrate a life. Those rituals are not a detour from healing. They are part of the journey.”
The conference runs across four days, closing with a Grief Experience Day on 15 November. Registration is open at victoriouslivingfoundation.com — click Learn More & Register. A range of ticket options is available, including day passes.
