For years, Constance Alberts watched the same painful pattern repeat itself. Someone she knew would lose a loved one to a drug overdose. The funeral would come and go. Then life would demand that everyone move on, even when the wound underneath never closed.
“It takes a lot to share grief,” Alberts said. “And it takes a lot to listen to grief. And we realized that there was no avenue for that in our community.”
This August, that gap will start to close. Samad’s House, in partnership with Alberts, is launching a chapter of Grief After Substance Passing (GRASP), a national healing community with chapters across the country. Samad’s House will be providing an eight-week grief counseling program designed for people navigating the loss of someone to a drug overdose.
The Milwaukee program is structured as eight weekly sessions, each one guiding participants through a different stage of understanding and living with their loss. The program doesn’t rush people toward “getting over it.” Instead, it gives grief a place to breathe.
The eight sessions walk participants through:
- Introducing Our Love Ways to the Group — sharing who was lost and what they meant
- Discussing the Stages of Grief — understanding what grief actually looks like
- Connecting with Our Loved Ones — keeping a bond that endures
- Items That Remind Us of Our Loved Ones — using objects to hold memory
- How Music Can Bring Memories of Our Loved Ones — the power of sound and song
- Even Though They Are Gone, They Are Still With Us — carrying presence forward
- How Do We Encourage Ourselves and Others — building resilience together
- Growing Out of Our Grief — finding a path ahead without forgetting
The program will begin with adults, but the vision reaches further. “The goal is also to work with the kids that are affected by it, too,” Alberts explained. “But we really wanted to start with the adults so that then, as time went on, we could provide support for children who have been affected by the loss of a sibling, a parent, or a friend, through drug addiction.”
Grief counseling is increasingly recognized as a vital part of harm reduction, which aims to meet people where they are and reduce the physical and emotional impacts of substance use, supporting overall community health.
“The reality is that sometimes people use drugs to numb or cope with unresolved grief,” she said. “Providing counseling gives them alternative ways to process pain without relying on substances. Overdose deaths take a toll on the harm reduction community as well as those who knew and loved the victims. Grief counseling helps people navigate what can be stigmatizing trauma from overdose deaths.”
Samad’s House, founded five years ago by Malik, operates a network of three sober living homes and a behavioral health clinic in Milwaukee and serves as a hub for harm reduction materials and approaches. Since 2024, Samad’s House has distributed over 2,300 naloxone packages and fentanyl test strips to the community. Malik is clear that GRASP is much more than addressing the sadness associated with overdose deaths.
“Its goal is to help people process their emotions, learn to go forward, and to thrive in this altered environment, while still honoring the memory of the person who is lost,” she said.
That framing shapes the program. Grief counseling creates space to process intense emotions like anger, guilt, and deep sadness, helping community members feel seen and supported in their healing process.
For Alberts, the need is personal. “I’ve had several family members who have passed due to addiction, which means there are family members who are still dealing with the grief,” she said. “If it’s been 15 years, 10 years, four years, it doesn’t really matter. They’re still dealing with that.”
She’s seen what happens when that pain stays buried. “One of the things that we notice is that if you don’t deal with it, it repeats itself,” she said.
Alberts sees a direct line between unresolved grief and the cycles of substance abuse that follow. To her, grief counseling isn’t separate from harm reduction — it’s a core part of it.
The insight came into focus during a trauma-informed money workshop she led for Malik. “We were able to pull off the mask and talk about the reason why people have gone down a certain road,” she said. “Some of that had to do with the loss that they felt, but also how they coped with that loss.”
Alberts maintained that substance is rarely the whole story. “I don’t want to say that drugs are not the issue, but I think it’s the coping mechanism that you use to be able to do day-to-day life, even when it’s bad. It’s familiar. And a lot of us will do familiar things even though it’s bad.”
That’s where the harm reduction connection lives. “You can get down to the why and the what,” she said.
She points to a simple but powerful shift in how we talk to people who are struggling. “So often people will say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ as opposed to saying, ‘What happened to you?'” Alberts said. “And those are two different things.”
Alberts is careful about her role. “I’m not a therapist. Sometimes I get questions as if I am, but I am not,” she said. “The goal is really to get people in the room where they can start having these conversations. Because if they’re not having the conversation in the open, I guarantee you they’re not having it in private.”
She worries most about the generations watching. “Kids and grandkids and great grands, they watch what you do. They listen to a fraction of what you say. But they watch what you do,” she said. “Unless we’re able to stand and make a divide, some will be strong enough to do something else to cope. And some will not be.”
Through her volunteer work, Alberts recalled working with someone who had spent 10 years in prison, was released, had a place to live, and a job. But he died of a drug overdose. She said he was overwhelmed; he had difficulty dealing with “the other stuff,” everything a job and a roof can’t fix. “People coming back to a world that is so different than when they left,” she said. “If I’ve spent the majority of my formative years in a prison system, how well am I able to cope? And if I’ve used any substance to cope with life situations, that’s the only thing I know how to use to cope.”
Without addressing those roots, she said, people return to what’s familiar. “No one ever talked about behavior modification and what that looks like.”
She describes the problem with an image that’s hard to forget. “It’s almost like if you put a Band-Aid on it, eventually the outer part will heal. But then something else happened that made the skin turn a different color. And no one deals with what happened to make it turn a different color because the outside looked healed.”
The idea for grief counseling grew from a relationship that stretches back years. Alberts and Malik have known each other for a long time — Malik has been friends with Alberts’ oldest daughter for years.
Alberts serves as director of Bank On Milwaukee, part of a national coalition focused on safe and affordable banking. Her volunteer work keeps her close to people society often forgets. Outreach for GRASP has been deliberate. The program was announced at the last Black Balloon Day, an occasion that honors those lost to overdose. Beyond that, growth has come almost entirely through word of mouth.
“I meet a lot of people in a lot of different situations just because of the work that I do,” Alberts said, noting that not everyone is ready to discuss their grief.
When GRASP opens its doors in August, it will offer something Milwaukee hasn’t had before — a room where grief from overdose death can finally be spoken aloud, where “what happened to you” replaces “what’s wrong with you,” and where healing goes deeper than the surface.
