A writing from spring of last year as we as a class were trying to process the compounding trauma of our political climate, fear, anxiety and genocide. BefriendAs we move through this period of instability— social instability, genocide and a climate crisis threatening life on earth as we know it we see more and more death. More than we can bear.
As we’re living through this period, we need new skills, we need new techniques, we need new ways of understanding our world. We seek a grief-informed approach to change.
In last week’s class we discussed our shared present and anticipatory grief about the state of our politics. And the hopelessness we felt in the midst of such overwhelm. It had me thinking on how can we find ways to navigate ourselves through such profound personal, national and global crises?
Can we turn personal grief into a politicized and radicalized grief? One that can transform loss into a shared connective outrage that has the power to forge belonging, and construct new meaning and conditions that can bring about the democracy we all deserve.
What we are doing in these burgeoning communities in the positive death movement – From the death cafes, to hospice, to rediscovering ancestral practices- is creating new narratives. Ones that are able to translate grief into meaning. This could be a powerful strategy to find a way forward.
When we gather in times of fracture and share stories of our shared grief and loss we begin to transform culture. These communities of grief are one form of the cultural phenomena that shape how we participate, how we respond, and whether we can move from a responsive protest to an organized engagement. It may not seem like it but even the simple act of showing up for our class is a form of organizing. This is the work that has the ability to transform the way grief work transforms our communities. Perhaps the work we are doing in sharing grief and befriending death is a way to help us move through the miasma of war, misinformation and polarization. And in that becomes a collective action, and ultimately an act of liberation.