Carla Fernandez On Navigating ‘The Wild Ride’ of Grief
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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal.

Grief. It's messy. It hits in unpredictable, kind of painful waves, and it usually lasts much longer than we want. But what if we didn't want it to stop and just go away? What if it didn't have to be so isolating? Carla Fernandez offers an easier path in her new book, Renegade Grief.

She gives tangible steps to ensure a loss can inspire community, create rituals, even spark joy. We will talk to her about how to find our way through the hard stuff. And maybe she'll even guide us through steps that can put some of the pieces back together. All that right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal. And over this past Christmas, unfortunately, my cousin died of brain cancer. It was sudden. It was heartbreaking. He was only 61 years old.

And not surprisingly, his mom is often swallowed by grief, and so is his husband of 20-plus years. I so wish I could do something for them, make some of their pain go away, or at least help them make sense of the loss. I love that, honestly, for myself as well. That's what we're going to talk about today with Carla Fernandez. She's the author of the new book, Renegade Grief, A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. Welcome, Carla.

Thanks for having me, Leslie. So you begin the book with your dad's passing, also of brain cancer. How did that experience at only 21 plant the seeds for this book?

Well, do you mind if I ask first what your cousin's name was? Jared Hammond. Jared Hammond. I wonder if we'll get to talk about him at all on this call. I can tell you a little bit about my dad's passing, also of brain cancer, and how that kind of planted the seed for this work. I was a senior in college when he was diagnosed with glioblastoma. Is that what your cousin had, too? Yeah.

He had some long name. I imagine it could have been. I need to ask my aunt again. Some long, some medical jargon. Exactly. But I was, you know, in my kind of college student club rat era when my dad was diagnosed. And instead of doing the things I might imagine one would do at 21, I ended up moving home with him. He lived in San Francisco at the time and became one of his caretakers. And he had about a year from early symptoms and diagnosis until he died. And

And I kind of quickly realized that we're really quite good for, you know, the first 40 days. We know what to do to prepare for the funeral. We know to send the fruit baskets. We know to send the condolence cards. But after that 40 days passed, I felt this pressure to kind of merge back into the ongoing traffic of other young adults my age. It felt like I'd had this

transformative experience that I wanted to be able to process and talk about and have friends who could really understand. And yet I was the first person in my friend group who'd experienced a significant loss. And a lot of the different, more official support groups that I reached out to, I found were filled with people that were older and had maybe lost a parent at a more natural time in life.

And we're too often, you know, in a sort of circle of metal folding chairs in the basement of the hospital where he'd gotten his treatment, kind of the last place I wanted to be to talk about healing and my life moving forward.

So I was sort of struck with what felt like a void at the time for a kind of space to tend to grief that felt warm and human and that was reminiscent of, you know, stories I heard of different eras of humanity where grief wasn't something that we resisted or denied or rejected, but something that we gathered around and cheersed about and feasted for.

You also felt, I think, a pressure externally to move on. I think we all feel that in our culture to just sort of like focus on the future. Tell us about that experience and sort of how that also fueled this book. Yeah, I think that in the culture that I found myself in at the time, you know, a part of a loving family, a lot of privilege, you know, everything other than the fact that my dad had just dropped dead was going great.

And yet there was sort of this, yeah, this kind of question of what's next and who, where is my life going? And I felt like I couldn't fully step into that question without honoring where I had just been and the experience that I had just been through. Yeah.

But I also found that, you know, I was longing for companionship with other people who could say that me too about a grief experience, not because I wanted to get stuck in the story of loss or the cancer or the diagnosis or the treatment, but because I was curious about how my dad's absence was going to impact my present and impact my future. So I was...

I met a friend, Lennon Flowers, who is an amazing human who became my co-founder and the executive director of The Dinner Party, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And I invited her and a few other people over for dinner one night to do just that, to dig into our stories of loss and allow it to be the main course of the meal, so to speak, and not a topic that we kind of quickly segued out of, afraid that we would make somebody uncomfortable talking about our grief. Tell us about that first dinner.

It was a beautiful evening. It was a little nerve-wracking. It had a little bit of the energy of a blind date, which we all know can go in a lot of different directions. I had been living in San Francisco caring for my dad when he was ill. He was getting treatment at UCSF, and then I defected and became a Southern Californian and moved down to Los Angeles. And that first dinner was on the back deck of the house that I was renting at the time.

And, you know, people one by one arrived and there was a sort of sense that we all were there for a reason, but nobody wanted to go first. There was a little bit of a moment of conversational chicken that happened.

But everybody had brought a dish that somehow represented the person that they were grieving and allowed them to introduce that person, not through the story of the accident or the diagnosis, but through the story of what life had tasted like when they were alive. And I remember toasting to my dad and passing around the dish that I had made that represented him, some Spanish food that he loved. And we were kind of off to the races, and we were able to talk about life

all of these conversations that had been like right at the tip of our tongues. And yet we hadn't yet found the space or the community where we could really go there. You know, not just the death, but dating while grieving or working while grieving or navigating roommate dynamics while grieving. Everything at that intersection of being sort of someone in their 20s who had loss as a part of their story. And it was really powerful. And we, at the end of that first night, we're like, huh, let's go on another date, so to speak. Let's do it again. Yeah.

And it grew immensely. Tell us about that. And I'm also curious how it grew. But then how do you initiate a meal like that? It sounds like, hey, you're coming over, come over and let's talk about death. It's gonna be great. We're gonna eat some steak and, you know, cheers to the people we lost.

I know it's – some folks are like, that sounds so depressing. And the reality is that I've never laughed harder in my entire life than around the dinner party table. I feel like it's kind of a if you know, you know about the dark humor that can come up when we're recounting tales of someone's ending or reflecting on a life. But –

To your question around, like, what happened from there, folks started to hear about it because everyone around that original table suddenly felt a little bit more confident talking about the fact that they'd experienced a loss because they could lead not just with the story of the person's absence, but the fact that we were all kind of a part of this, like, cool underground fight club thing that was starting. And, you know, no, I can't come over on Thursday night because I'm going to my grief dinner party group. Right.

And, you know, as so many good ideas begin, I think the beginning of the organization was not like a business plan. It was slow word of mouth spreading. And Lennon at a certain point was like, quit her job and dug in full time as our executive director to grow the organization. And the question really became,

What is happening around this table? How do we recreate the magic of that first night in rooms where we will never be with people that likely we will never meet? So the work of the last, it's been 15 years since that first dinner has been figuring out how to recruit and train volunteer hosts who are the

people that kick off the conversation, and then helping to connect that host with five to 12 people in their area physically, if they're doing an in-person dinner, or on the internet, if they're doing a virtual dinner, and giving them the tools that they need for that to not just be a special one-off evening, but actually to be the beginning of a group of friends, a circle of companions who can co-journey with one another through their experience with loss.

In addition to feasting or gathering around food to create community, one of the other suggestions that you make, sort of a tangible thing people can do, is to create an altar. And you create this physical space in San Francisco even before your dad passed. Will you read a passage talking about the creation of that altar? I sure will. I'll jump right in.

In my grief, I didn't seek out to build an altar, but found myself drawn to a place that over time became that for me. Mine began taking root even before my dad died, in the months preceding his passing. During that time...

I would take the stairs three floors up to the roof of our apartment building after he went to bed, bringing along a tote bag of books and journals, colored pencils and watercolors. It was my Mary Poppins sack full of tools that I thought might help tend to the wild array of emotions inside me. Sadness and fatigue, adrenaline and anger, sentimentality and the slapstick humor of how shit this year had become.

Sitting in a folding chair on his roof, I would always orient myself toward the lights of Coit Tower, the memorial for San Francisco's firefighters, a glowing white cylinder on one of the city's tallest hills. To me, as it does to many others, it resembles the nozzle of a fire hose, although that wasn't the architect's intent.

Over the months of caring for my dad, Coit Tower became my new Grange, my room of terracotta soldiers, or in other words, the physical place where I could deeply honor his life in the context of his death. Sitting on the roof, I felt relief when I set my eyes on Coit Tower, unflinching and solid in the midst of so much change. I wished that the fire hose-looking tower would rain down on my family to lessen the burning feeling of being with someone as they're dying.

Somehow, sitting under the glow of its presence, it did. Under its glow, I would unpack my supplies and spend an hour decompressing, painting or writing bad poems, texting with friends or reading a book, soft gazing at the tower on the hill while my brain caught up with what was happening downstairs in my dad's rented hospital bed.

Those times on the roof, the tower acted as my altar. It was a fixed point, a lighthouse in the distance from which I could orient and study myself, exhale and unpack what had happened.

Beautiful.

What is a suggestion? How would you tell someone to start an alter? They have no idea. What's your directions in terms of creating a similar experience for someone who's going through loss right now? My suggestion, the thing that really clicked for me was reading an incredible book by Mary Frances O'Connor, who is a neuroscientist, and she's really studied how grief impacts the brain.

And her findings is that it kind of creates this spinning wheel of death symptom inside of ourselves, this destabilization where we're constantly trying to find our person on the map, but we can't locate them.

And her advice is considering an altar as the place where you can tell your brain, I can find them now. Whether it's a beautiful thing you're setting up or a place that you go, really any place can be your altar as long as it makes you feel like grounded and that you can locate them on the map.

We're talking with Carla Fernandez. She's co-founder of The Dinner Party. She's also the author of the new book, Renegade Grief, A Guide to the Wild Ride of Loss. Life after loss. We'll continue the conversation right after this break. That you'll keep returning always and evermore. Into my arms, oh Lord. Into my arms, into my arms. Oh Lord, into my arms.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

Each morning, it's a new opportunity, a chance to start fresh. Up First from NPR makes each morning an opportunity to learn and to understand. Choose to join the world every morning with Up First, a podcast that hands you everything going on across the globe and down the street, all in 15 minutes or less. Start your day informed and anew with Up First by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal, and we are talking with Carla Fernandez. She's the co-founder of The Dinner Party, which we just talked about. Those are dinner parties to talk about people you've lost. She's also the author of the book Renegade Grief, A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. We'd love to hear about how grief has changed your life, maybe what has been helpful for you to process grief, such as a ritual, a tradition, maybe an object.

has it helped you connect with others or have you connected with others around loss? Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. You can also email your comments, maybe your questions to forum at kqed.org. You can also find us on all kinds of social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. We're at KQED Forum, or you can join our Discord community. Like our, in

Engineer just said, Carla, he needed that dinner party a long time ago. I also feel that I think we kind of store up grief. Is it ever too late? I mean, if someone lost someone a long time ago, is it still time? Is it not too late to start a dinner party or have these conversations? It's not too late. You know, I think it's misinformation, actually, that the grief kind of occurs starting on day one and concludes on day 365. And if you didn't get the support you needed in that first year, then like,

You miss the boat. In fact, a lot of people come to our community who experienced loss as a child, as an adolescent, and are finally in a place in their life where they are ready to unpack it and to reflect on it. Maybe they're going through a life milestone that is making them realize that there's another chapter of their grief ahead and they don't want to go it alone. So I don't think it's... I mean, I think we will grieve a loss for the rest of our lives. And I don't say that to be depressing, but it's just the grief to me is...

Liliana asks, the two-year anniversary of my brother's passing is coming up in two weeks, and he was only 31 when he passed away. What do you think of the process of having a conversation with your brother?

But I feel like I lost him twice. He was hit by a drunk driver and left for dead at only 23. He was in a coma and survived. But the eight years after was hell, filled with traumatic brain injury and schizophrenia. I want to develop a ritual to honor him on his death anniversary. Do you have any suggestions? Liliana, thank you for writing in. And I'm so sorry to hear about your brother, Liliana.

You know, the first thing that comes to mind for me is what are the rituals that you do to recognize his passing at 31, but also the part of your brother that you're still grieving that you haven't seen since he was 23? And can you create just as much space for that moment where there was a major loss and something for you to grieve just the same way that you would honor him sort of physically leaving? My brother unfortunately lost his best friend in an avalanche earlier this year, and he's, I think, been really grappling with grief around it.

And recently he told me that, you know, he's just decided he's going to he needs to be strong. He needs to be positive. He has a seven year old daughter and he needs to just focus, you know, positively for her. What do you think of that approach? I think that there's a real pressure and sort of cultural assumption that intending to our grief, we will get stuck there or be like the sad sack at the party that nobody wants to talk to us.

But I think it takes tremendous courage to tend to the grief and actually through it is where we can actually find the relief as opposed to hiding from it or running from it. I also think that there are times in life where we got to kind of hunker down and take care of our kids and put food on the table. And it might not be the season of your life where you can, you know, show up for the proverbial or the literal dinner party table and reflect. But when that time comes, I think it's deeply important to

I also think there's a lot of cultural pressure for grief to look a certain way. You know, we Google image search grief and it's sort of a one note response reported back to us from the algorithm that grief looks simply sad, like someone hanging their head in their hands. But to me and through the thousands of conversations that I've had with dinner partiers who've gathered to share their stories of grief, people grieve in such wide variety.

variety of ways. It can be such a technicolor experience. And while you might not think that someone's grieving, they could be doing exactly the thing that is right for them to care for themselves in that moment. I also know during my own divorce, my mom really pushed me to put on a positive attitude for my daughter, and it was really hard for me. Do you think we need to be happy for our children or show that it's not as hard as it is for our kids?

Um, what did you and can I ask you what you ended up doing? I couldn't fake it. There's no way. That's not in my blood. I mean, I think that that's such important modeling, like so much of the reason why I do the work that I do is trying to look for and create role models and what it means to not ignore or pretend or deny the fact that impermanence is tough and that loss is real and it rocks us.

And I think that that it's that spirit of like slapping on the happy face that has kind of been part of the paradigm that is meaning there's so much stagnant, stuck emotion that we're seeing shooting out in all kinds of challenging directions as a nation right now. You know,

This is me being like a real grief nerd, but Freud, bless his heart, in 1917 released this treatise called Mourning and Melancholia. And in it, he basically reported that anyone that shows lingering signs of being attached to somebody who is dead is unwell, paraphrasing. And it sort of set this domino effect into motion where that became like the psychological paradigm that we're now still sort of living within the muscle memory of today.

And it wasn't until his own daughter died a few years later and he had his own experience with the significant loss that he realized that he was never going to get over it. And that that didn't mean that he was unwell or that he had needed a diagnosis, but rather that he was a human being.

And I feel like so much of the work that the dinner party is doing is creating spaces where people can come together and have that realization of like, there isn't anything wrong with me. It is normal to grieve. And now the work is to find how do we care for ourselves and care for one another as we make sense of it and move forward.

We're talking with Carla Fernandez. She's the co-founder of The Dinner Party. She's also the author of a new book that just came out a few days ago, Renegade Grief, A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. We'd love to hear from you. Has grief changed your life and experience with grief or loss? Maybe there was a process around grief, maybe a ritual, a tradition, an object that kind of helped you move through it. We'd love to hear about it.

Or maybe it helped you connect with others. Tell us your stories. Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can also email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media. We're on Blue Sky or Instagram. Just look for KQED Forum. You can also find us on Discord. A listener writes, my cousin recently lost her husband to brain cancer, and I've been at a loss with how to support her as a mom, as a grieving wife.

from far away. Are there things you'd recommend for supporting loved ones when we can't be as present as we'd like day to day? I always think about the scrambling that we do to figure out what is the right gift to give, the kind of Googling bereavement care packages. The advice that I give, which is what I try to practice, and I don't get it right every time, that's for sure, is to consider the individual person and what are specific things that you think would charm them or lift their spirits or take the

the load off of their plate? Like, what are their preferences? Use it as a moment to show that intimately you see them as opposed to the generic Harry and David pairs or whatever the search result might be for gifts for the bereaved. And then the second thing is don't make it about you. Don't expect that there's going to be some sort of heartfelt text message that you're going to receive to confirm receipt of the DoorDash gift card or whatever it is that you end up giving.

I think too often we're looking for like the confirmation and it's really important to make sure that this is not the time to have it be about you. Why do you think people really isolate themselves? They really withdraw when they grieve. And there's some part of me that I know with my family is like, oh, I want to give them space to do that. I don't want to interrupt their process. I don't want to burden them by calling. I feel like we do it on both sides. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I think there's times for many people in grief where that kind of solitude is actually deeply needed and important. And I'm not here to make that withdrawing wrong so long as the withdrawing is happening, not because that person is afraid of being the downer or afraid that if they don't have good news to report or a happy update, they're going to somehow be letting other people down.

So I'm really interested in how do we create spaces where people can show up and without judgment be wherever they are, whether it's, you know, sad or angry or numb or enthusiastic and excited. And that's so much of what ends up happening around the dinner party table is being normalized with whatever part of the technicolor rainbow of grief emotion you might be in.

How do you suggest people start a conversation in a healthy way rather than sort of dumping, maybe trauma dumping, either for themselves or for the other person?

One of the early on in the dinner party we had, they had this incredible host. Her name's Lindsay, and she actually lived in Berkeley. And she noticed that the conversations would sometimes kick off and everybody would go around the table and tell their what one might describe as particular trauma dump of like the accident or the diagnosis.

But after the second or third time that same group had gathered, it was like, we don't need to revisit that. The question that Lindsay guided us to ask, that's now sort of a part of nationwide dinner party protocol, is asking, where are you at with your grief right now? Like really bringing the story into the present tense. And when you ask that question, it can kind of drop the automated response, the rehearsed verbiage around whatever happened. And you can kind of reflect on how grief is happening.

touching your life this week or this day or this holiday season or whatever might be coming up for you in your in your world and I think when we can get out of that sort of rehearsed or practiced talking points about our loss really surprising and beautiful conversations and stories can emerge what about how to respond after someone does share something really hard what's the right response

Is there a right response? Well, definitely not. But what should someone do? Because they're probably too nervous to ask because they're worried of how they're going to have to respond afterwards. Right. I mean, what I've learned is like there isn't anything that you're going to say that is going to save or fix or stop someone's grief. In fact, like that's not what we can do with grief. It is just something that has to move through our systems. So I think just like...

telling them thank you for sharing and giving them an honest response that gets away from the platitudes that we see emblazoned on the Hallmark cards and being as real as you can, even if the thing that comes out of your mouth is like, oh my gosh, I don't even know what to say or I really can't imagine. Better that than the deer in headlights that we've all experienced where someone's, you can tell they're racking their brains for the thing to say to change the conversation.

Let's go to the phones. Michael in Mountain View, you're on the air.

Oh, hi there. Good morning. Thanks for the topic today. So my question is for family who has the immediate loss of family members, how do you kind of react or how do you behave in front of a very young kid? So the context of my question is that I've experienced that. We lost a family member recently.

late last year and I also have a six-year-old son, right? So sometimes people bring this up, say, "Hey, you know, remember like last year we were doing something together?" So whenever that happens, you know, I'm kind of, you know, I just don't know what to react. So yeah, that's my question.

The advice that I would give is to connect with the people who are real experts in adolescent and youth bereavement. I want to recommend the Dougie Center in Portland, Judy's Place in Denver. Whenever anybody approaches me with a child loss question or situation, I always direct them to the Dougie Center or to Judy's house, actually. They're really the people who know the best thing to do in the case of a young person's grief experience.

Liz writes, "My brother has been missing since 1971. He was in the military during the Vietnam War, stationed in Honolulu as a data computer processor. The U.S. Army waited two weeks to call my mother asking her for his location. Every year I get depressed on his birthday, in major holidays, or when I hear about other missing people, especially those reunited with their missing loved ones.

I am happy for them and sad for myself. You talk about what to do on anniversaries, on birthdays. Talk about that. Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear about that, the lack of closure. And I hear that kind of relief and happiness for other people that are being reunited and each one of those moments being, you know, not this person getting the news that they're longing for.

There's a chapter in the book about navigating big days, and that's a common conversation around the dinner party table of how are people honoring death anniversaries or birthdays or big milestones in their life where the person isn't present.

And there's lots of different ways to do it. And fortunately or unfortunately, we have a death anniversary every year, so you can try different things out. But I've heard stories of people recreating the traditions or the rituals that they used to share with the person who's no longer physically present as best as they can. I've heard of people remixing those days and maintaining some of the similarities but trying new things.

And I also love the stories that I've heard where people just full-on revolt and, you know, pretend like it's not actually Christmas and do something totally off-the-wall and different because it might be too painful to try to recreate a holiday as it used to be. And all of those are right, and none of those are wrong. And the work of Renegade Grief, as I've been relating to it, is really an experimental practice of seeing what feels right, knowing that we are changing as our grief is changing over time.

You recently wrote an article in The Guardian about Dungeons and Dragons and how that game helped you and your siblings with the passage of your father. So is it okay to just check out and maybe just play a game or get behind your screen or other activities that are, you know, maybe not so grief engaging, but help you distract yourself?

Totally. So the article you're referencing is a chapter excerpt from the book about escapism. And I have two siblings who both live in the Bay, who I love very, very much. And

The three of us had absolute opposite reactions to our dad's death and have turned to very different care practices. I went to this sort of, let's start a community movement and have dinner parties to talk about this. My brother was like, no thanks. I'm going to music festivals and partying with my friends. And my younger sibling, Claire, who lives in Alameda, really turned to at

fantastical realms, which on the surface might seem like escapism. Claire was writing fan fiction and playing Dungeons and Dragons. But when I finally got to play Dungeons and Dragons with them, I realized that within the context of the game, there were so many opportunities to process the storylines happening in the default world, but in this interesting, creative way.

So what we thought was maybe an escape actually ended up being one of the most healthy, healing, connecting things we were able to do as siblings. And there's some really interesting research about the dual process model of grief, just to nerd out again for a second, which is

It's actually not healthy to be full on, full bore, 100% in the grief groove all of the time. What we need to learn how to do is titrate in and out to tend to the grief and then to change the channel and then to return and then to change the channel again.

And I love that that's kind of like official academic advice is, yes, like face the story, work with it, find people with whom you can be in deep conversation about your experience with loss. But then go play Dungeons and Dragons and have fun. And there's there's real virtue in that.

MK writes, today is the 17th anniversary of the death of my brother Steve's death, who was killed in Iraq in 2007. Stephen Matthew Kowalasik, something like that. Each year I worry about whether and how to publicly acknowledge and celebrate my brother on this date because it's also my son's birthday. I can't stomach anything less than a full-hearted and meaningful remembrance. Also, our dad had died on the day before my 16th birthday and two days before Steve's 9th birthday.

Absolutely.

We have just a minute before we go into a break. Carla, any final thoughts before we go into a break in relation to this comment?

I'm thinking of the Bermuda Triangle of these back-to-back grief holidays for you, and it sounds like you have your eye on it, and that we can hold both the fact that it is your son's birthday and someone's anniversary, and that that's sort of the totality of life is being able to celebrate despite the fact that people that we love are no longer here.

We're talking with Carla Fernandez about her new book, Renegade Grief, a guide to the wild ride of life after loss. We'll be right back right after this break. On their vacancy signs. If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark. I'll follow you into the dark.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal, and we are talking with Carla Fernandez. She's the co-founder of The Dinner Party, where folks talk about grief and loss, and also the author of the new book, Renegade Grief, A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. Let's go straight to the phones. Brandon in Foster City, you're on the air. Good morning, everyone. First, my first question is, where are there any of these in the Bay Area? My

My second point would be I just want to espouse exercise. And I think not just walking around your neighborhood. I really think there's something cathartic about going to levels of exercise where you really push yourself in your extremes. That's what really brings about hormonal cascades that are really, really positive. I feel briefly I just lost my mother really suddenly when I was in my early 30s. Our family was, you know, just distraught.

destroyed through political divide and fight over inheritance, where once I just

did something terrible to take the whole thing. So, and I just really want to say that, yeah, I'd like to find out where the dinner parties are and, and it's about exercise. And, and I think just turning to your children, I have a seven-year-old daughter and I think just focusing on children, children are just completely brand new and they're, you know, they're a way for you to have fresh eyes in this world. So they'll take my comment off the air. I'm so sorry for your loss, Brandon. Thank you for sharing your,

thoughts on where he can find a dinner party? Carla? So there are a few thousand dinner partiers across the Bay Area, and you can go to our website, thedinnerparty.org. You can sign up for a table or you can raise your hand as a volunteer to host a table of your own. One caveat, there is an age range that our community is really designed for, and it's for folks kind of in the

Not yet, still not a child, but maybe not fully in their adult era. So we're really serving the 18 to 45-year-old age range. If you're outside of that, still come to our website on our resources page. We have a bunch of links to partners and friends and organizations that we admire that serve other ages and experiences. But we're always looking for more hosts. So if you're listening to this and you're like, wait a second, I might be interested in starting a table, you can

start a table hosted at your home. You can start a table virtually. You can start a table specific to the type of loss you've experienced. I was just talking to someone earlier today who is a member of a brain cancer loss table. There are tables in the Bay. Actually, our first LGBTQ specific table was launched in the Bay by the amazing Eva Silverman.

And yeah, we hope that you come and check out thedinnerparty.org. And if you are feeling inspired by this, we are also a 501c3 nonprofit and always accepting donations to keep our work running. He talked about exercise there, and it sounds like going to the max, you can really feel that release. You also talk about destroying can be a good way to move through your grief, you know, maybe breaking something, burning things, tearing things apart. Why is that therapeutic?

I think that if you look across time and space and cultures, there's always... There has often been the sort of act of destruction as a part of honoring the dead, whether it's funeral pyre or whether it's sky burials in Tibet where someone's body is eaten by vultures. It's like so epic. And I think that in the kind of...

A prim and proper pull-it-together feeling that we can sometimes associate around how we should handle a loss and the lack of outlets, especially for women and people of color, to express very legitimate rage. It can be really important after a loss to find your own outlet, whether you're going to a rage room, which now exists as a whole business, or if you're getting a bunch of Goodwill plates and smashing them with a hammer in your backyard.

Lennon tells this amazing story of her aunt bringing a carton of eggs over to her backyard and getting her little brother and her to throw eggs at the fence in the days after her mom died of cancer. So it's

That sounds relieving. Doesn't it sound so good? I know that eggs, it's like a tender time to talk about wasting an egg. And yet it is. It's like throwing those little orbs and watching them explode on the fence might be exactly what the doctor ordered. A good catharsis. Let's go back to the phones. Susan in Alameda, you're on the air.

Hello. My mother died in 1997. Then my father died somewhere in there. My sister died. And my husband died when I was 59 years old after a seven-week illness. And I moved from New York to here to get a job. But I had a delay going because one of my other brothers died. So I'm down to two brothers left.

My children do not accept my grief. It's been going on for a long time. And I am very functional. It's just things trigger the grief, for example. And I do all the rituals. I am Jewish. I do the Yerksite candles. I do remembrances.

But I feel I have no family anymore because brothers aren't good at making family. And one is single and the other one's wife is divorcing him and he's over 80. So sorry to hear about all that loss. Thoughts or advice for Susan, Carla? Susan, are you still on the line?

Oh, I am on the line. I'm just in my car, but I am legal. Okay, well, please drive safe. Susan, I'm curious, what's been most helpful to you? You mentioned the yard site candle. I wonder if you can describe that and tell us anything else that's been useful for you as what I'm hearing is like a veteran of the grief experience. As if behavior is what's most useful for me. So...

When my husband died, I made lots of rules. One was I was not allowed to drink alone. One was I had to go out every day, even if it was a snowstorm. And I made myself talk to two people every day. Those are great, Susan. I love those examples. Those are really great. Yeah.

Yeah, I think keeping ourselves on sort of a, I don't know, is it good to have like a to-do list or, you know, keep yourself accountable? I know I've watched Friends, including myself, you know, you can just sort of sink back into the despair. Well, one thing that Susan brought up that I think is really important is how when a loss happens, it impacts the whole family ecosystem. And for many people who come to the dinner party table, they've

Yeah.

That can be isolating when we're used to reaching for those people for support, but everyone's sort of reeling. So this is why I so deeply, deeply endorse the power of peer support and whether you're finding it through your faith community or through the dinner party or through a different type of support group, how important it is to find companionship when we're going through a loss. Good advice.

Alex writes, my dad loved to cook. Before he died, he requested a dish of scrambled eggs. He sat at the kitchen table and instructed me on how he wanted them prepared and his egg cracking technique. After he died, I illustrated the dish I prepared for him. Part of our family's Thanksgiving tradition is watching my mom release her cranberry gelatin from the mold. Some years it collapses upon release, others it stands firm.

My mom died this year. Her last gelatin release held firm. It was a joyous occasion. These food memories helped me blunt the edges of my grief. Stunning. Beautiful. And what was the egg cracking technique? I'm on the edge of my seat. The heck? I know, especially after we're chatting about eggs. Jacqueline writes, my dad died a month into my first semester of grad school in September of 2023.

I'm in a three-year intensive program, but every semester when I have to come back to school, I'm immediately sucked into a grief vortex and I can't focus. I have a negative association with the start of the semester. What can I do to protect myself from these overwhelming periods while staying present in school and also honoring my grief?

I wonder if there's someone in your life that can be your buddy in those moments, not that they are going to have a fix or a solve or a save, but just that you can send the text to that's like, that's happening. The grief vortex is opening again.

I often feel that by just having someone that you can name that experience with, it can kind of lessen the isolation that you feel around it. You know, it's not that the grief is wrong. I think grief is this incredible technology that our bodies have been perfecting over many thousands of years to help us face impermanence. I think the thing that is a problem is the isolation we feel, that when we're getting sucked in the grief vortex, we have to go to class and pretend like everything's fine.

So I think my counsel to you would be who is the buddy that you find that can say back to you, oh, I get it and aren't going to try to just cheer you up for cheering you up sake, but who can help you feel seen in those moments. Let's go back to the phones. Betty in San Francisco, something helped you tell us about it.

Yes, thank you. Gosh, I'm sorry. I'm so moved by everybody's experience. My parents passed away many, many years ago. I'm actually outside your age range. I'm 80. And I live in a senior residence where I'm around death all the time. But anyway, back to my parents. When my father passed away, my mother, and I was there with her, she...

She had me meet with her. She and I met with a friend of hers who was a death counselor, and I highly recommend him. It was really supportive of me, of both of us. But one of the things I remember learning from him was that it's normal to grieve, and that we could expect that we likely would be

in and out of grief for a year and not to worry about it and not to resist it because resisting it made it stick around longer and just experience it. And, and if you're with, if you're with, he said, if you're with people, just say, Oh, I'm, I'm thinking about my mom. So I'm, I'm a little bit sad right now, but that's okay. Don't worry. That's it's great. I'm just remembering, remembering how much I love her. And, uh,

It was really empowering to meet up here with a lot of people. And I would love to have some kind of something like that dinner party here with our residents. Betty, I'll come. Invite me. I want to hang out with the 80-year-olds, please. Thank you so much, Betty, for sharing. That was really, yeah, thank you.

A listener writes,

But I also have such fondness for my childhood and how fleeting those times were with my two parents and my two siblings. It's shown me to really dive into every stage of life and appreciate it.

One thing, Carla, that I think people are often surprised by is the amount of grief they have for the thing that didn't happen. So you're grieving the life that didn't unfold with that person, you know, or maybe it's a divorce, you know, a different kind of family than you ever envisioned. So how do you make sense in those moments and sort of metabolize what is real about it and look to create a new future? Hmm.

It's such a good question. And I think that oftentimes we only allow ourselves to call grief when somebody dies. And yet I feel like we are just listening to the news segments. And between our talk here today, there's plenty of things happening in the world that the natural human reaction is a feeling of grief. And I get the sense that in 2025 and beyond, as we mark this five-year anniversary since COVID lockdowns began today,

As we watch places like Los Angeles light on fire, as we see rates of school shootings going up, there are increasing number of things that we will lose, which means ever the more important that we know how to grieve, that we know what it feels like in our body, that we, to Betty's beautiful point earlier, we kind of trust and allow and don't resist it, but let it do its thing because...

I think it's on the other side of the grief that we can actually find that sense of hope and possibility and future building. And if we try to skip over it or avoid it or go around it, we won't actually be able to, with earnest, look to an integrated future where our whole story can be present. So, yeah.

It's really, you know, I got pulled into this body of work because my dad died. It's been 15 years since he passed away. And in many ways, my grief has changed dramatically since then. I'm no longer in an acute state of grief. And yet I have seen around the dinner party table and our broader community, the power of people who are finding their own way through, finding care practices that work for them. And I'm applying those lessons to the other griefs that I'm feeling in my life. And it's been really powerful work.

Christina writes, my dad lived to be 100 and passed in 2023. I miss him intensely. But as he was a farmer, I planted an apricot tree in his honor. Today, I looked out the window and the apricot has its first blooms. Beauty sometimes accompanies sadness. So beautiful, Christina. Let's sneak in another caller. Dan in Vallejo, you're on the air.

Hi, I just want to share a reference to an article I wrote about a child I had that lasted just 24 hours and what her five years old sister, how she handled it. I wrote the article and it got published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The title is, I had a baby sister, but she only lasted one day.

It was published in, well, the reference is 1984, volume 25, number six. But it Googles. If you just do Journal of the American Medical Association and then the title, I had a baby sister, but she only lasted one day, that'll show it. Dan, how did writing that article first... I'm so sorry for your loss. Honestly, I can't even honestly face that reality as a mother anymore.

But how did that practice or how did that process help you process the loss writing that article?

My big takeaway was that you should trust kids more than we generally do in our culture. And I feel like somehow I was able just not to get in her way as it happened. She had been promised to be present at her sister's birth, and we had just gone for it a year.

eight months plus checkup and there were signs of fetal distress. And, uh, we'd left, uh, Corey at a neighbor's and called a neighbor, bring her, bring her down. She, this is happening. And, um,

So they induced and the, well, Corey had come out perfectly. This was the actual opposite. It just, it, I thought she was dead. She was very gray and responsive and she looked like a downs kid. Big shock. And, um,

So that happened. And just as the doctors were telling me to sit down before I fell down, here comes my five-year-old. And almost instantly, there's a nurse whispering in my ear, you know, like, we revived her, but she's all full of tubes. We don't know what's wrong, but, you know, we're working on it. And if you want to see her, I'll put her in the window. But I can hold her back so that maybe your daughter won't see all the tubes and stuff.

wrong. I hate to interrupt you because this is so profound, but we're about to come up against the end of the hour. Dan, just can you wrap up your thought? My apologies. Well, anyway, so she saw right through it immediately and then just through the whole process, every step, you know, she, we had a chance to say goodbye and then she wanted to see her sister dead the next day. And, you know,

The staff actually said that they were more worried about me than they worry about, you know, my daughter in handling this. And it was really. So, so. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So hard. Dan, thank you for having the courage to share on the show this morning. Final word for folks to go away from with Carla.

I would say if your interest is piqued, check out Renegade Grief wherever books are sold. And just remember that grief is not the problem. It is the isolation that we feel around the grief. Something we do, not something we have. That was something I took away from your book.

Thank you so much, Carla Fernandez. She's co-founder of The Dinner Party. Hopefully many more of those parties will be happening across the Bay Area. She's also the author, like she said, of Renegade Grief. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal. Stay with us for another hour of Forum. Come close and end the eye And I say, hey, hey, hey Leave it like we're renegades, yeah, yeah

Living like we're renegades, renegades. Renegades. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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