Grief has a way of changing not only how we understand loss, but also how we understand the people around us. For Molly Bitton, founder of Have You Met? Events, one of the most important lessons to emerge from the years following her husband’s death was how profoundly community can matter when life no longer feels familiar.
Bitton recently joined KUTV 2News Salt Lake City to talk about that experience in a segment titled Finding Your Community Through Grief. The conversation followed another recent telling of her story on the podcast A New Shade of Me, where she spoke in greater depth about losing her husband, Derek, to suicide and raising their two children in the aftermath.
The KUTV conversation focused on something that became central to Bitton’s life in the years that followed: finding a place where she could belong without first having to be okay.
For her, that place was a running community.
When Community Becomes More Than Company
After Derek’s death, Bitton’s first priority was helping her children, who were 11 and 13 at the time, navigate a loss that had changed their family overnight. At the same time, she was trying to understand her own grief.
There was no simple path through it. Eventually, however, Bitton began returning to running and to the people she had known through the sport. What she found there wasn’t a solution to grief, but something perhaps more realistic and enduring: people willing to make room for her exactly as she was.
She could arrive on a difficult day without having to pretend otherwise. She could talk when she wanted to talk and remain quiet when she didn’t. She could experience moments of happiness without needing to explain how joy and grief could exist alongside one another.
Over time, the consistency of that community became an important part of rebuilding her life.
Molly Bitton with her husband, Derek, and their two children. Years later, Molly shares how losing Derek to suicide changed their family and how community became an important part of finding her way through grief.
That experience also changed the way Bitton came to think about belonging. Community isn’t necessarily created through profound conversations or dramatic gestures. Often it develops almost imperceptibly through repetition: returning to the same running group, seeing familiar faces, sharing experiences and gradually moving from being someone who attends to someone who belongs.
The Importance of Showing Up
The idea of “showing up” has become an important theme in Bitton’s work today, but it began as something much more personal.
Finding community requires participation, particularly as an adult. The friendships and social structures that once developed naturally through school, children, marriage, neighborhoods or workplaces can change. Divorce, widowhood, relocation and other life transitions can leave people realizing that they need to intentionally rebuild a social world they once took for granted.
That can be especially difficult at the exact moment connection is needed most.
Walking into a running group, social gathering or community event alone requires a certain amount of vulnerability. The first experience may feel uncomfortable. The second may not feel entirely natural either. But familiarity has to begin somewhere.
Bitton’s experience taught her that showing up consistently gives relationships the opportunity to develop beyond introductions. People learn one another’s names. Conversations become easier. Someone notices when a familiar face is missing. Eventually, a group of people who once happened to be in the same place can become a genuine community.
It was a lesson she would carry into an unexpected next chapter.
From Finding Community to Creating It
Years after Derek’s death, Bitton began facilitating social events for singles in Utah. What initially seemed separate from her experience with grief eventually revealed a much deeper connection.
The running community had given her somewhere to go when she needed connection without expectation. Now she was creating environments where other adults could have opportunities to form connections of their own.
That idea has become part of the foundation of Have You Met? Events and its Utah-based Singles Mingle Events.
The events themselves vary widely. Participants may meet while hiking, running, playing volleyball or pickleball, painting, attending a game night or trying something entirely new. But behind the different activities is a consistent philosophy: give people a comfortable reason to be in the same place, make starting a conversation easier and create opportunities for them to return.
For Bitton, the purpose extends beyond dating.
Romantic relationships may develop at singles events, but so can friendships, running partners, hiking groups, professional connections and the simple familiarity of recognizing people the next time you walk into a room. Those relationships can be particularly meaningful for adults who are rebuilding their lives or social circles.
The work has now grown beyond individual events in Utah. In March 2027, Have We Met? Live will bring single adults together in Las Vegas for a three-day national experience built around connection, personal discovery, activities and shared experiences.
The scale is considerably larger than a neighborhood running group, but the principle behind it remains surprisingly similar.
People need places where they can show up.
What Grief Taught Me About Connection
There is an important distinction between saying community can help someone through grief and suggesting that community can somehow eliminate it.
It can’t.
The people around Bitton couldn’t change what happened to Derek or remove the loss her family experienced. What they could do was make sure she didn’t have to carry every part of that experience in isolation.
That distinction continues to influence how she thinks about connection today.
Loneliness isn’t always visible. A person can have a full calendar, coworkers, neighbors, family members and hundreds of online connections and still lack a place where they feel genuinely known. Likewise, someone who appears independent may still benefit enormously from receiving an invitation, being remembered or simply knowing that someone expects to see them.
Sometimes community begins with something as ordinary as asking someone to come along.
And sometimes it begins with deciding to go, even when you’re going alone.
The KUTV conversation offered an opportunity to talk about grief, but also about what can happen in the years that follow it. Bitton’s story didn’t move in a straight line from tragedy to purpose, and community didn’t erase what her family experienced. Instead, connection became one of the things that helped make room for life alongside loss.
Thirteen years later, there is a certain symmetry in that journey. At one point, Bitton needed a community willing to keep welcoming her back.
Today, much of her work is about creating places where someone else can walk through the door and begin finding theirs.
Watch: Finding Your Community Through Grief
Molly Bitton joined KUTV 2News Salt Lake City to discuss losing her husband to suicide, finding support through her running community and how those experiences eventually influenced her work bringing people together.
Watch “Finding Your Community Through Grief” on KUTV 2News
If you or someone you know is struggling or experiencing a mental health crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
