About this Event
📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email
🧠 Lecture: "When Relationships End: Grieving the Living & the Dead"
🎤 Speaker: Dr. Megan Dowd
Some people are gone before they die. Others remain with us long after death.
Communication scholar Dr. Megan Dowd explores the conversations families avoid about dying, the losses society refuses to recognize, and the strange ways relationships continue after they end. Drawing on research about end-of-life communication, disenfranchised grief, and continuing bonds, this lecture examines death, estrangement, breakups, and friendship loss through a single question: what happens when the relationship is over, but the attachment is not?
From the wishes we fail to share to the texts, rituals, memories, and algorithms that keep absent people present, this talk offers a provocative look at who gets to grieve, who gets remembered, and why goodbye is rarely the end.
Dr. Megan Dowd is a communication scholar who studies how people build, manage, and unravel close relationships. After earning her PhD in Communication Studies, she spent more than a decade teaching courses on interpersonal, family, and dark-side communication. Now a business strategist, she translates relationship research into engaging conversations about how people actually connect.
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Agenda
6:15 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.
6:55 PM – Host introduction
7:00 PM – Lecture begins
7:45 PM – Audience Q&A
8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round
8:30 PM – Wrap up.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lincoln Park, Lincoln Park, Chicago, United States
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