| Last month the 10.27 Healing Partnership held a training for mental health practitioners on how to support clients through grief and loss. This program was led by two practitioners; one co-leader was Gina Goth M.Ed., CAC, LPC, who is in private practice and works with the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work Continuing Education providing training in trauma, grief, loss and suicide post-intervention work. Gina was a co-chair of the physical and behavioral health action team of the Governor’s task force on trauma, HEAL PA, for three years. The other co-leader of this workshop was Naila Francis, a Philadelphia-based grief coach, death midwife and interfaith minister, a founding member of Salt Trails (a Philadelphia collective making grief public and visible through community rituals), and the co-host of Breathing Wind, a podcast about journeying introspectively through grief. I interviewed Naila for this newsletter about her role as a grief coach and death midwife (also called a death doula) and her experiences supporting others in their grief and loss journeys. Death doulas, death midwives, or end-of-life doulas provide emotional and spiritual support to those experiencing terminal illness and their families, as well as those who are grieving the loss of a loved one or experiencing anticipatory grief. How did you come to this work of being a death doula?
I never knew I would be in this work. My parents divorced when I was younger, and when I was an adult both my mother’s partner and my father died within two years of each other. When I went to be with my father through his process of dying, I saw that even though he was in a lot of pain and in less-than-ideal circumstances, we could still bring love and tenderness into the space. Ultimately, I’d like to say he had a beautiful death, surrounded by peace and those who loved him.
After walking my own grief journey, I realized how little room we make for grief and death in this culture, which led me to this work. While searching for a grief retreat for myself, I discovered grief coaching, and through workshops and trainings, I found that this work felt very aligned to me. How does our society prevent healthy grief and loss?
Many of us just don’t have models of how to grieve. We rarely see others grieve openly in a way that serves as a healthy example or receive guidance around how to navigate grief, and we’re not often supported in honoring and holding our grief. As kids we hear “don’t cry,” or “why are you making such a big deal about this?” There’s always this rush to fix something or have a solution or a replacement, and no sense of “it’s okay to just be feeling how I’m feeling right now.” Our society instead prioritizes “moving on” and “getting over it.” It’s a very western lens and also an individualistic society where we don’t see the value of connecting in community grief spaces. There’s a mindset of valuing strength, triumph, toxic positivity, and celebrating an ascension culture. Grief is subterranean, uncomfortable, sticky, and dense, not at all what we tend to culturally value in the United States. In a lot of Indigenous cultures there’s a recognition that processing grief is essential and communal, and the village will grieve with you. In this country we are often very private about grief and there’s shame around it.
Our society values resilience, but I don’t think of resilience as being “strong.” I envision resilience as being able to experience all of life’s facets and the full spectrum of emotions without being subsumed and completely overwhelmed by the fullness of that experience.
To help our society and communities view grief differently we can be honest about how we’re feeling and we can take risks to be vulnerable. Often if you share your experience of grief, someone else can relate on some level to what you’re going through, or they may have their own story of loss that they now have permission to share. How can we support ourselves when we are grieving?
You cannot out-think your grief! And yet so many people try to do that. You can research, read books and work to understand grief better, but ultimately you need to feel grief rather than just think about it. While connecting to the body can be difficult and painful for those who have experienced trauma, and should be done with support and guidance, there are many practices we can use, like yoga, meditation, walking, or drumming to help move our grief through our bodies. During these experiences we can begin to notice what comes up for us. This noticing eventually allows you to tune into the sensations in your body and to be able to identify the parts of your body that are holding certain emotions, tension or discomfort. You can ask yourself: is this sadness? Is this anger? If you can’t identify the emotion, maybe give what you’re sensing a shape, a color or sound. Start to become acquainted with your body’s emotional landscape. It’s also valuable to learn what pleasure and joy feel like in the body and to allow those feelings, too, which ultimately creates more capacity for us to be with challenging emotions.
We’re also so culturally disconnected from the earth, but in reality, the earth is not separate from us. We are the earth, and the earth can help hold our grief. How can we return to the earth as we hold our grief? It can be as simple as literally just lying down on the ground and trusting that the earth can hold us. Practices of engaging in nature in mindful and sensory ways help us, as Francis Weller says, “remember our entanglement with the living earth.” Thinking about grief feels frightening and uncomfortable. Where do I start?
During guided visualizations I remind people a lot—just be gentle and curious. What I hear incredibly often from people is that they are frightened by grief because they believe that if they let themselves go into those emotions that they’ll never come back, that they’ll be totally consumed and overwhelmed. I recommend a gentle, slow approach, and through regular practice engage with these emotions for a little while. This could be through things like journaling, sitting at your altar, therapy, or taking a walk. Tending our grief in these small ways, in pockets of time we can drop into and pop back out, makes it less of a big scary place to go. We are building the capacity to hold and express our grief and then re-enter our everyday lives.
I think that people overlook or aren’t taught that grief can also be really fertile ground. It’s not always only this dark place. We can learn a lot about ourselves, our relationships, or how we want to live differently. I’ve found grief to be an enlivening energy if you allow yourself to meet it. My life has shifted astronomically for the better through my own grief journey. Can we put grief off? Why engage with grief?
I think it’s important to think about grief. Grief is expansive—we often think that grief only exists for the death of someone we love, but there’s so much more on a personal and worldwide level that we can hold and grieve. To me, becoming grief literate is an essential skill to navigate what it is to be human. When we’re having a week where our brains are foggy, our energy is low, we’re feeling this heaviness; it’s essential to begin recognizing that these can sometimes be manifestations of grief.
I believe when we don’t process grief that’s how we get to war and violence and the other harms we cause each other and the planet. When we have all these emotions churning in us and there’s nowhere for them to go and no outlet, we cause harm to ourselves and to our loved ones.
Whether there was a shooting in our community, a report about the climate, wildfires or the war, there are so many things to grieve surrounding us all the time that I don’t think we can put off becoming acquainted with what grief is and how to grieve. Whether going through a break-up, struggling with infertility, having a pet die, realizing a part of yourself was never actualized or a dream has slipped through your fingers, there’s so many reasons in our personal lives to feel loss. When we wait until after something life-changing has happened to us to learn about grief, that’s when life is most likely to spin out of control and we become overwhelmed. We won’t know exactly how we will respond to an experience until we are there, but at least at some level we can build some awareness and faculty of how to navigate this thing called grief. |