Carla Fernandez: On Renegade Grief

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Gary Quan: Good evening, Carla. It's nice to talk with you again.

Carla Fernandez: Hi, Gary. Happy to spend the next hour chatting.

Gary: Yes, it's really, really, I just feel like I'm around great company by talking with you again. And so, I'll have a series of questions this evening, and I may jump around a little bit, but I've really enjoyed bringing your book everywhere to dinner. And it's, it struck up some rather interesting conversations around these fancier places in Las Vegas that I've been eating at. So.

Carla: Amazing.

Gary: Yeah. First question that I think, actually, every, waitresses, waitstaff, attendants have asked. How did the concept of renegade grief come about?

Carla: Amazing. Okay. So for folks listening, Gary and I had a chat earlier in the week just to vibe, to use a professional term. And he shared with me that he recently finished his own book, which is such a huge accomplishment. And as a celebration for himself, decided to go to Vegas for a few days and in that had this one homework assignment of reading Renegade Grief to prep for this, which at the time I was like, “Oh, I wish you were reading some sort of romantic fiction by the pool.” But I'm happy that Renegade Grief provided good company and sparked up conversations with waitstaff, and hopefully a few more people there now know about Renegade Grief. So thank you for your service, your advocacy. So the concept of Renegade Grief, and it might be helpful for me to kind of define how I understand this phrase. I have found, and many others have found, that we live in a culture, speaking of, you know, Western culture in the year 2025, that is relatively uncomfortable or illiterate or ill-equipped to tend to grief, to talk about grief, to support those who are going through it, to normalize it, etc. So in order to actually grieve well, to be in relationship with your grief in a way that's not part of the death-denying culture that we live in, you have to be a little bit of an outlaw, a little bit of a rebel. You have to swim against the stream a little bit. So that's where this idea of Renegade Grief came forward for me and in the community organizing work I do through the Dinner Party. I heard story after story after story of young adults who maybe felt like they didn't have the tools or the social scaffolding or the permission to be in relationship to their grief, but figured it out anyways. And I see that as being this beautiful spirit of Renegade Grief.

Gary: In line with that, I glommed onto the term social scaffolding because that's a lot of the work I do in private practice, like helping people reconstruct the building sets of their relationships. I do wonder what you think of the correlation between, let's say, some serious deficits in that scaffolding and then perhaps the inability, or perhaps the lack of capacity to process grief. I'm keeping grief as a general concept, but what do you make of that? And I'm making an assertion right away, but what do you make of that relationship between the scaffolding perhaps not being as there compared to the inability to process grief?

Carla: Yeah, I think it's so, as you know, it's so individual based on the cultural context that people are coming out of and the type of loss and the age of loss, etc. And yet to just make it really simple, I think about where do we learn how to grieve? We learn from our parents and how. It was the death of my father that brought me into this work. And I had four living grandparents when my dad died, so I'd never seen my parent grieve their parent before. And I think, yeah, in that kind of paradigm of like we learn how to grieve at home, I think we're emerging from a generation that kind of had, the breaking bonds model was the primary psychological best practice. So maybe there wasn't a lot of positive modeling around what it looked like to not get away from your grief as quickly as possible, but actually turn towards it and be in relationship to it. So, yeah, I think that the. I don't know if that answers the heart of your question, but that's been an important way for me to think about like, why don't we have the muscle memory that maybe cultures had and other times and places where grief was tended to in the collective, in communities, within faith communities, etc.

Gary: Sure. I'm thinking about the conversation you and I are having existentially but I'm also being conscientious of our, of our audience like you said it's, it's unique and individual. And yet I think about this quote from Dr. Rob Neimeyer, this is going to be question number nine but I pushed it up.

Clara: Let’s go.

Gary: Dr. Rob Neimeyer states that we are creatures, I think you use the term creatures, that crave attachment in a world of impermanence. And so that, that was, that's been something that stuck with me, given that I think grief has affected both of us, and in normal ways but also such devastating way. And so, what do you think of that statement, and, and where can someone go with that?

Carla: I really think that grief is sort of our spirit, body, beings, technology that we have to process impermanence, given that we attach. And I think that when we don't have spaces where we can actually slow down and be in conversation with others around our grief we miss that, that technology that we have access to and it's such yeah. And I love that quote that such like simple beauty in it, I think it really rings really true.

Gary: Sure, sure. And I hear I hear more and more of this in my offices, “I cried, I cried,” not I myself but I actually, I actually did when I lost my dog. But, “I cried more from my pet or my lost,” you and I might call it our attachment object, “as opposed to the parent that or caregiver that brought us into the world.” What do you make of that? What do you, what's your sense of that?

Carla: It's interesting so the Dinner Party is the organization that I co-founded that is started as a sort of an art project in 2010, and is now a nationwide nonprofit community of over 20,000 young adult-ish grievers. So 18-45, sort of the age frame that we work within, and very early on when we were starting to prototype what this work looked like, we got some, we got some in bounds from folks that wanted to start a pet loss table. And we supported them and give them the resources and. And at the time, my co-founder and I were like, “Pet loss, really?” Until I got a dog, and I feel like, you know, knock on wood, God forbid, God forbid my dog is actually mortal like she someday will also cross the rainbow bridge. I imagine it will feel devastating and that she is a more consistent companion to me than almost anybody else in my life save my husband. And I probably spend more time with my dog than I do my husband. Love him, but we're both busy people. I think there is something about the disruption of the daily routine the kind of like compassionate all loving connection that we can have and there's actually a chapter in the book about the importance of finding interspecies friendships, and some of the ways in which relationships animals, whether domesticated animals like our cats and dogs, etc., or animals in the wild, can be such a master class in what does it look like to let our kind of animal bodies lead when it when we grieve.

Gary: I resonated heavily, heavily with that. My family and I are going to be visiting a wolf dog sanctuary in Canada, this summer so it's a privilege to be able to go visit Canada but one of the first things we're going to show the kids is a wolf dog sanctuary and the ability to be with these beautiful creatures, but a lot of them have been dumped off as former pets and into these sanctuaries so it's, it'll be interesting to see how the kids, kids react. I did want to go back to the Dinner Party. Was going to be my second or third question. Can you walk us through the lifecycle of the Dinner Party and the various forms it's taken? You mentioned the, the pet loss table maybe being like an additive piece but actually it ended up being maybe a critical piece. Like what, what has that journey been like for you?

Carla: Well I, it's interesting because I'm not an alumni of CIIS and yet CIIS played a big role in the early formation of the Dinner Party, in that my long term therapist and spiritual director is an alum. And it was really in her office in San Francisco, as I was processing the loss of my dad asking, talking through where I might find peer support that she, you know, in many ways kind of coached me towards hosting what was the original Dinner Party table and what I found around that time was, you know, I loved therapy and yet I wanted to be able to talk for more than 45 minutes with someone who was like a little bit less professional and boundaried, which is, you know, obviously it's an incredible, important resource and the toolkit to have the therapy space and also I wanted people with whom I could pop open a bottle of wine and like unbutton my top button and kind of like sit awhile. I had traditional grief support but the ones that I had access to at the time all happened within the kind of medical institution that I had just recently clawed my way out of after caring for my dad who had brain cancer for a year, and it was kind of like the last place I wanted to spend time despite the fact that there was like incredible people and resources going into creating that kind of caretaker care space as a 21 year old. I was 21 when my dad died. It was like the basement of the hospital was not where I wanted to go on a Thursday night. And I was the first person in my peer group to experience the loss of a parent so I couldn't necessarily turn to the friends that I had gone through every other life milestone with up until that point. You know they were more concerned, rightly so, with like graduating college and “are they going to text me back,” regarding the romantic partner, and roommate issues. And I was really hungry to talk about all of that and also you know these big questions about life and death and grief and etc. So my dad was really into food and the family dinner table was like our church and the conversations that we got to have around that table are some of my fondest memories, and it's also the place where I acutely missed him the most. Like I remember the night before his, we buried him, listening to the sound of my family gathering around the dinner table and having this like extreme wave of grief that was like, “Oh, he's never going to get to do this with us again.” And so, it felt like through the guidance of my therapist, it felt like the place that I actually, while it was a place I experienced the most acute grief, it was also where I thought my healing was going to come. So, I hosted a dinner and gathered other people who were in my age group who I knew had experienced a loss even though like we'd never really had a time to talk about it before. And one of those people was a co-worker of mine at the time named Lennon Flowers, who is later, became my co-founder and our executive director and so much at the Dinner Party is because of her incredible effort and brilliance. But this first evening was, you know, six folks sitting around a table eating dishes that helped us introduce the story of the person who died based on the fact that they had once been alive and had loved food and had recipes that could transmute stories in the way that food can. And we finally found a space where we could talk not just about the diagnosis or the death or the accident but like how are you navigating life as a young person with a loss experience as such a big part of your story. And that original dinner met, started to meet monthly, and then folks started to hear about it and want to join and over time my incredible therapist in a very professionally sanctioned way signaled some of her other clients who were also sitting in the same leather chair at other times over the course of the week or asking for the exact same thing. She finally did some professionally vetted networking of us, and that's kicked off our first table in the Bay Area, and it's been this labor of love. But also this, you know, it's always been, there's always been more demand for seats around our tables than we've ever been able to accommodate because I think in the end, it's not that we don't want to have these conversations, we very much do, we just haven't had the environments and the places or the connections between folks to actually go there in a way that feels comfortable and warm and human.

Gary: Excellent. I want to go in two different directions but the one I'll go in first, I resonate so heavily and personally with what you just shared. You know my grandmother died on my birthday in 2000. 25 years ago, almost last week. The food thing matters so much. I think one of the last meals or probably the last meal we fed her was chicken feet, which is a big, you know, big delicacy in our culture and of course we knew that she couldn't possibly even finish like a fifth of it but the gratitude that my grandmother had and being able to share, and share a meal with us in the hospital room. I still, that still occupies the front part of my load most days, just to be able to like, say, say goodbye without doing the formal talking through it, right, because we were not like. I, even though I’m a therapist, that's been the experience for a while. We're not a talking family, it's often doing around the table. And then I think too, I discovered you and I are San Antonio Spurs fans for good obvious reasons. And so, after 2013, they lost a devastating game six against Miami in the finals. And I think one of the stories they talked about was Coach Popovich literally pulling everyone out of the showers and getting them to like his favorite restaurant in Miami, and then going around each table and hugging each family member and each player. And his whole thing was about refueling the emotional tank. And I get it for some of us who are not basketball fans in the room, like this may feel like we're talking a foreign language, but it was really something that hit home with me because they were doing it around a dinner table, and the coach is known as like a kind tough, you know tough guy was actually crying with and hugging and holding his players. And of course that you know, it would have worked out if they won game seven but as you might know, Carla, they lost game seven by seven points but still one of the more brave efforts I could, they could do given how devastating the loss was.

Carla: Wow. And I have so many questions about both of those stories I'm curious to know what your grandma's name was.

Gary: Oh, Suling Tang.

Carla: Suling Tang. And do you eat chicken feet now and think of her? What's your relationship to that dish?

Gary: So, I, Dinner Party, as awkward as it sounds, I do, what I do is, my wife and I cater Chinese food for our classes at the end of the semester. So whether that’s sanctioned by the school or not, or by whichever school I teach at, it's just something that I do, given how awkwardly dysfunctional my own family is. But also too, it's my way of being kind of like a sharing figure with, with my students. But to your question. No, I'm actually, I don't eat chicken, I don't eat traditional Chinese food, so that's why it was really interesting for me to go out and score the best chicken feet in the neighborhood, and then bring it to the hospital room for my grandmother, knowing that she wouldn't have it, but I just wanted to honor her memory. And so the way I've done it, and I'm proud to this day of having done this. So, I inherited her broken down TV. I guess they expected me to fix it or something like that which is not my specialty. But I actually inherited a bamboo plant that was dying, because she spent quite a bit of time in the hospital in her last days. And so I helped refurb, refurb or whatever revived that plant and kept it alive for about 12 or 13 years and then it slowly made its way to my in-laws place. I don't know how it ended up there. And then it got folded into the garden somehow so I feel like it's made its new home there. But I did, I did feel like I honored my grandmother particularly not letting the plant die. And then, you know, I'm not ashamed to admit it I commune with her and I'll be speaking English and she'll speak in Chinese to me and, you know, I recall those conversations very fondly because of course they're one-way, but I always felt the most loved generally by this person that loved me dearly. And so to this day, not that I'm looking up and talking to Grandma but I'll think about how she might have responded if I made a joke or like messed up or something like that because she really was very loving and accepting.

Carla: Beautiful. Okay, I'm being called to introduce you to a store in Oakland called Planter Day, and it is owned by a host of the Dinner Party. And they are incredible. It's Asian American owned and a lot of their work is around the relationship between tending to plants and mental health. And they've done some programming for the Dinner Party inside their really sweet shop in Oakland. So, put it, put it on the weekend putzing around to-do list to go get some more bamboo plants.

Gary: Yeah.

Carla: Nice.

Gary: Did you have any more questions? I'm pretty sure no one wants to hear about the Spurs 2013 finals run but.

Carla: We'll, I'll just notice that. Cool that you notice this coach and their ability to create a space around food to process the ending of something, and that you offer that to your students in the same way so I see you.

Gary: Yes, I appreciate it. So on a more serious note. This is my original question number two. Is renegade grief. And I say this with with sort of a warning for our viewing audience I was pretty stern on the language mainly because I was on the plane earlier, but is renegade grief an indictment of how we as a society have come to treat grief and loss or is it more kind of like a call to arms of a sort to adjust or improve the way we grieve? So it feels very sort of polar ish, but I didn't intend for that to be that way. But is it more like an indictment on how we treat grief and loss societally, or is it more of a call to arms of a sort to adjust or improve the way we grieve?

Carla: I think it’s both. Is that a cop out answer? And then it's a third. This. The third definition which I will, I will say I think it's both a naming the fact that we live in a culture where in order to tend to our grief, we have to be a little bit of a renegade, which I mentioned. I think it's also a bit of this call to arms of like, okay, we are all in this club that we would never hope to be in and yet will end up in eventually. And how do we see this as like an invitation into a life of depth and connection and authenticity and realness with the gravity that is grief. And then, I think the third way that I've come to understand the phrase renegade grief is that grief itself is an ultimate, is the ultimate renegade, and that it's like always defying norms it's shape shifting as soon as you think you kind of got a handle on it, some new milestone comes up and suddenly there's like a new layer to your grief so that that that framing came up in my interviews with some of my subjects and it's one of my favorite ways to think about what renegade grief means. Grief itself is the renegade.

Gary: One of the interesting things I had the privilege to do, and I can't say I take any credit for, it just happened to happen this way. When I was working in the county jails. Santa Clara County during the holidays. Real brief, I'll keep it to the brief, but like oftentimes if you get arrested or incarcerated closer to like Thanksgiving, Christmas, because people take that time off and sort of law related, courts and things like that. Oftentimes our people would be stuck in jail. Well past Christmas and New Year, and so they would be there until January and February. And so, in the unit I worked in, I worked primarily with medium security, female inmates. And so, that, that was sort of like my, my vibe. But also I guess my specialty there. And so, what we would do in December is just do. Instead of doing process groups, we do grief groups. And one of the fun things. And this is mainly just to tell you like how much I resonate with this, you know, looking at grief with our patients, is that we would have these stations. So imagine doing a grief group in the middle of a jail holding area and having big, big group there to process like our moods and our mood scores and things like that. But then, we'd have these stations where I actually got to sneak in stuffed animals because, really can't bring in. You can't sneak in stuff inside the stuffed animals because of x-ray machines. And so, I could bring in stuffed animals into the jail. And so, we had a co regulation station where people need to. See these tough women that could probably beat me and you up, but they'd be, their maternal instincts would kick in when holding a teddy bear so they'd be holding the bear or the kitty cat or the dog, and you'd see them soften up at a side table and that was really, really. Not invigorating, but it was really heartening for me to see that. And then I had a letter writing station where people could write letters to people at home, because these are often mothers, grandmothers, daughters that really missed being with their people during the holidays. And then there was a meditation station so I often give them like little scripts or templates to work off for meditation. And then the best part and I think this is more of a homage to the dinner parties, like, I'd have an invitation to the whole dorm and saying, you know, Carla needs some support today would two or three people mind coming together with Carla and going off into the corner and just providing any support Carla needs, and you'd see people from different walks of life be able to comfort each other outside of jail charges, outside of past maybe gang enhancement, those sort of things, like you'd see people comfort each other and, and. So, to me, like that was one of the real reminders about how grief brings out our humanity. And so, that was something I was very proud of and sort of bringing to the jails that. Every December, knowing these people would not have their next court date until mid Jan, mid Feb, just sad to see. So that's one I wanted to mention.

Carla: Yeah, listen, I would have written about that in the book if only we'd met a little bit sooner. I wonder what you learned about the nature of grief, knowing that we grieve when people die, but we also grieve when we miss important life milestones or when our life is going in a way that we didn't expect or we're losing control or agency. I wonder what you learned about grief and that powerful experience with those women.

Gary: That essentially, you know, because again I'm cis hetero male. I have little to nothing in common with most of them. And so there is that ability that, that perception that maybe I am someone that's not trustworthy because I'm coming in and trying to do these nice process groups. But one of the interesting things is we would do these. During that month we do a coloring contest too. So the first, for the women that didn't want to do the process groups, they could do it, they could submit an entry into the coloring contest so long as they, whatever they got on their entry, if they won first or fifth or 20th prize, but they had to send it home to their kid if they had a kiddo. So, so the idea is that, what I learned was once they made it less about the prize getting. Because there was some people that would like. I'm not a good coloring person so like I would probably be dead last. But when it made it about their mom or their children, the care and the love they put into it and so my job was to affirm that for them. But I find myself often weeping inside because of my own, you know, strange relationship with, with sometimes my parents as well as my loved ones. And so, it was a real learning lesson that no matter what we determine on the outside of how people look or act. We had something really good going there until COVID, right, and then COVID is its own sort of grief mountain, but we had a pretty good thing going there for like three years of just knowing that I could get to be with my, my, my inmate population. We do group, we do individual, but that December timeframe was really special for a lot of us because we often didn’t get a chance to do that.

Carla: Beautiful.

Gary: This is an interesting pivot too. So what is your professional, personal opinion on Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross's stages of grief? And sort of polar looking, has it stood the test of time? Has it outlasted its purpose, or do you feel like it's the next step towards something like a renegade grief, or like my chapter on grief in my book? Like what what what what what what's going to be, historically, how people see Kubler Ross?

Carla: I hope that she is forever celebrated as the badass that she is and the field builder and the, you know, she was one of the first, how I understand her story is she was one of the first people to actually ask people who are dying like what is it like to be dying versus you know, watching people through a glass window or approaching it purely more clinically. And, you know my gripe, as many people have griped, is that like the five stages that she distilled based on observing people who are preparing for their death and later extrapolated to like I think also this works for people who are grieving, and yet they're quite different, I would imagine I don't know. I've never been preparing from my own death and in an acute way. Thank all the gods. And yet, that's been the kind of cultural criticism is like, is it really one to one or is it more apples to oranges to prepare for death versus grieve. I'm a huge fan of David Kessler, who's her co author in the book Finding Meaning, and I love that addition of like, it's not just about acceptance but then there's sort of this moment of, like, now what and how might I use my grief experience to be the kind of jet fuel to become the activist that I always knew I could be or to find some sort of, you know, calling that feels aligned. And yeah, I think that her work is complex and we live in a culture that is, like, so desperate to create a top five list and a checkbox and complete like a linear 12345. Can I get on with it? That I think you know it's her thinking got sort of diluted and oversimplified and distorted. And you Google grief now, and that's Google image search grief, and there's like two images that come up immediately. It is women looking really sad, often crying, or it is like the five stages of grief and sort of like a checkbox format and oftentimes that's the only kind of like science that people can speak to. She's a revolutionary. Her contributions are amazing. Some of her later work I'm obsessed with. Where she's talking about like multi dimensional mystical relationships to her patients from the other side. If that's your thing, I would definitely check it out, and she later kind of got disqualified or discredited because of some of the ways some of her, her later works were kind of out there, I think you could say. But yeah, big fan of hers. Not a big fan of the way that her work has been kind of like squashed into this oversimplified five step thing and, and yet like, it's cool to see the continuing evolution of sort of grief science, bereavement science. I think about like a dual process model and there's so many. As students and fans and faculty of CIIS know, probably just as well or better than me, there's like ever evolving research around what is this thing that we are doing as humans and how do we get out of the Freudian breaking bonds paradigm that I think really screwed us up for decades.

Gary: I think that will be the legacy for a lot of the. Not, not to indict sort of the psychoanalytic realm, but I do think you know. Example I will share is, two examples, you know, I showed to my classroom, I won't say which school it was, but I showed them a talk from Carl Rogers from 1961 and a student brought up to me privately like, I can't believe this guy came up with all this wisdom. I'm like well that's because that's when we talk of Rogerian like we're literally talking about what this guy did. You know for a living and I think that's the same reverence that that you and I carry for for Dr. Kielber Ross. And the irony is like that model made its way into, I think you and I have similar senses of humor, but it made its way into this South Park adjacent cartoon called Robot Chicken. And if you, if you all look up on YouTube. Five stages of grief Robot Chicken. There's a hilarious but also very poignant thing about a dinosaur basically getting stuck in quicksand and going through the stages of grief. And if that makes no sense, I realize it's dinner time, but it makes sense if you understand your own grief and how that tends to work. It's weird to see that it's made such a huge impact in the societal realm, and yet any number of things can happen at the end of a person's career, and good or neutral or negative. Along that line. So I imagine our viewing audience or and our, your reading audience, they might want some applications on how to impart or imparting knowledge, some applications from your book in terms of their own dealings with grief and so could summarize things that have been helpful to your patients and your readers.

Carla: Totally. So, you know, renegade grief is sort of the wrapper. W-R-A-P-P-E-R not. There's not a rapper renegade grief at least yet. It's not my alter ego. And then within the book itself the meat of it are care practices so each chapter is an exploration of a different care practice and I leaned in that direction because it was around these original Dinner Party tables where folks would come and say, listen. No one in my family is really leading by example and yet I'm having this longing to fill in the blank, whether it's write a letter and put it in a bottle and throw it in the river, whether it's build a fort in my backyard where I can go to be away from my dad who's struggling with drinking after my mom died, whether it's training for a marathon in honor of a cause, whether it's, you know, over and over and over again these incredible stories of resilience of agency and creativity of finding ways to not just like busy yourself but really let your grief move through metabolize process be in relationship to it as opposed to the like. Let me, you know, never talk about this person ever again or let me maybe post something on Father's Day on Instagram and then kind of not mention him for the rest of the year. So the meat of the book was really like. Great. Once we've decided that we want to be or are attempting to be renegade in our grief and deviating from the status quo that would have us ignore our grief. What does it actually look like? What do we do now? So folks that read the book will be presented with these like three big chunks, the kind of three acts and there's a, there are practices within that that are about honoring your past, honoring that person, honoring the relationship you had with them, honoring the person that you were in relationship with them. There's a whole chunk around being with your present. So what does it look like to actually kind of to use a technical term raw dog your experience of grief and like be in it. And how do we build the personal tools and practices that allow us to not run. And then the third act is creating your future and really looking at different ways that we can weave not like, you know, the silver lining wisdom of grief. Like some of that language is just nauseating because it's heartbreaking and hard and none of this is about like finding the silver lining. And yet I have heard a story and story and story of people who have found ways in which their experience with loss is actually having them think differently about their vocation or think differently about what it feels like to be home in the world, given the person that was home is no longer here or what the causes are that they want to fight for or how important celebration is for them. So that's kind of the scaffolding of the book is this past present future framework and within each of those there's about eight different care practices to dig into and within the chapters there's anthropology and science and a little bit of my personal story to lead in but mostly stories of people who I have met who I'm like how did you think of that like how cool are you who told you that you could do that oh nobody you figured it out yourself or through peer support like Bravo and please let me share your story with the world.

Gary: Very cool. Very cool to hear about I mean. Cool is not a clinical word but very very very cool to hear.

Carla: We can be cool.

Gary: See, I'm debating between number six and seven but so number six. What, what's your take on the role spirituality if any on processing and working through grief and loss?

Carla: There's like, I have a few different answers to that. I have and the Dinner Party has always remained a very sort of agnostic point of view, and that like all are welcome. And there's no proselytizing there's no like home court advantage towards any kind of spiritual belief. And regardless of whether someone is raised in a faith tradition that they still have a healthy relationship with, raised in a faith tradition that they no longer have a healthy relationship with, are totally unmoored from any kind of faith tradition, inevitably conversations about grief. Talk about or lead into conversations about the spirit, whether it's our living person, human spirit and what is kind of moving through us whether it's the spirit or the memory or however you want to refer to the relationship that you have with the person that's no longer here. And even when I was working on this book, that, one of the publishers I was talking to was like so is this a spiritual book, and I was like, Nah, it's not, but it is about matters of the spirit. And that felt like a important distinction for me to make, you know, in, we, we, we talk meditation, we talk about my relationship to Catholic, Catholic lore, we talk about Buddhism, there's all these different threads that I pulled on in creating this book. And there's a chapter on tending to your sacred, whatever that might mean to you. But I think that. And there's interesting research that I cite that's like people who have a spiritual relationship or sort of a sense that there's something greater than what's presents what, what meets the eye have are able to cope differently with a grief experience than people who maybe think it's like lights out at the end. So it's interesting to kind of look at that data, but I think grief is for many people, the gateway drug into asking these big questions of the mystery, the unknown. What happens when we die? Where did they go, how do I want to live now that I don't know about now that I know that this is like, very impermanent. And, you know, it's, it's very cool to be in a secular and yet sacred space like a Dinner Party table to be able to talk about those big questions.

Gary: Yeah, I'm processing a lot of that I'm also thinking about grief being the gateway drug, it's the cannabis to, to be able to think about. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Carla: And I mean that very complimentary. I know gateway drug is like usually a bad thing but I'm like it's what's the, maybe we should just call it the gateway, maybe we don't have to make it a drug.

Gary: Yeah. I'll just say a little bit of trigger warning. I'm a Cis hetero male and so I wanted to leave you the most controversial question before I get to more of the, more stuff that I really want to ask, but I think to like how much our society. I've seen particularly from other Cis hetero men. And so, I did this little psychological experiment in Vegas, so I wanted to save this for our conversation today. I just out of my introversion, just started greeting everyone on the elevators, and can you guess to what percentage people greeted me back? So I would just be like good morning or hello. What percentage do you think of the people greeted me back, Carla?

Carla: I would imagine that after like some, the sun went down and the drinks started flowing it would go up to like half, but probably less than that. Maybe one out of 10.

Gary: Actually you're in line with, I was probably more closer to two out of 10 or one in five. And, and for me like the, the humanity in me was saddened, you know, that the part that still thinks a lot of hope for humanity which is still there. But what I noticed from, from other men in particular was either like dismissive glances, or, and I don't know what it is. I don't have an answer today. Like this is all anecdotal, but I do wonder if some of this is. I mean I'll just name some of this you know you have a particular political party that's now in charge, you've got the propensity of more of these male initiated violence activity, and I can't think of a better way to say but male initiated violence actions towards people, I wonder how much of that for you as a, as an expert I think both you and I are experts in grief but like, what do you attribute that to like, and can grief be not not an excusable reason. I want to be, I want to be very careful in the way I'm saying that but can grief be a part of that consideration for someone that's doing an assessment, the mental health assessment for this. It's usually a cis hetero male. I can't think of any other type, you know, personality type in that way. So what do you think of all that?

Carla: It's, it feels like I think about the surgeon general of the United States, who's the person who's. Reminds us that cigarette smoking is bad for us is now the person that's like actually the biggest health crisis of our era social isolation. And the fact that you can be in a shared elevator with someone and greet them good morning, and we've lost the kind of social network and I don't mean the Facebook social network, but like our ability to connect with others and losing the social skills to be able to like turn to sweet Professor Gary and say, top of the morning to you. And I think about, you know, COVID is an experience that eroded so much of our ability to connect. I think about I don't know the stats off the top of my head but the cis hetero male suicide rate is steadily increasing. There's, you know, lack of spaces to go where people aren't just the worker at work or the head of the household at family, you know, I think about Robert Putnam's incredible book bowling alone which came out in 2000 where he's like, listen, guys, we don't have the social capital anymore that we used to have. We don't have the bowling clubs, we don't have the rotary we don't have the places where we can be in community, and sometimes you know you might think that like grief and social capital are disconnected but actually the reason the Dinner Party has to exist is because people are craving spaces to come together and connect around these conversations and we don't have those third places anymore in the same way or we're having to recreate them in this new era. There was an incredible article in the Times around the election that the New York Times that talked about at the root of so much of the polarization that we're experiencing is actually latent, untended to grief related to the pandemic. And like, how many times have you heard the phrase hurt people hurt people, you know there's there's so much unprocessed grief at the root of pretty much every kind of social infraction. So, you know, in the ways in which someone could look at my work and be like, oh, that's nice it's individuals caring for their own loss experiences, I'm like, it's so much bigger than that it is, it is a political process to train people to build the skill that is taking care of their grief, tending to it being in relationship to it being able to let things go, being able to talk to people who are unlike them but are grieving just like them and not close up, within ourselves within our communities within like the broader civilization that we're living in so there's lots to say about this but but my, my call to action for the kind of professional community, that may or may not be listening, is how do we think about grief as a bigger aperture, not just the thing that happens when an individual dies but as a critical life skill we all need to be building to make it through the rest of 2025 and beyond.

Gary: Powerfully shared, and I appreciate the vulnerability and bringing that up. It's not an easy topic and it's oftentimes the type of question that might get me shut down in a casino or, you know, like in a public place like that.

Carla: Yeah, and this is like we have to stay in conversation it's interesting my co-founder Lennon Flowers and dear friend. She's taken this work in the direction for herself that's all about. It’s under a banner called Trust Labs and it's all about creating conditions for repair in places and communities that have had an experience of rupture. And I encourage folks who are interested in looking at this how do we bridge the divide, body of work to trust out to check check out Trust Labs.

Gary: So the similar concept is I promise this is the last question related to like sort of male grief, but in the in the movie Avengers endgame. So I'm a big pop culture person. It seemed like so many of the characters went about grieving in just a multitude of ways. The character played by Jeremy Renner ended up going to Japan and destroying criminals like that was his one thing. Thor, you know, Thor ended up going to go seek out Thanos and lopping off his head, and then Captain America starts a support group and ends up talking through most of it without letting the other people talk from from the movie. So I guess what would you say is an appropriate or self compassionate honoring way to go about even just in the first days or even the first hours or days or weeks of a grief episode, and you're right like I don't think it has to be someone leaving the planet or ascending to a different plane but it could be. I'll share my case like I really loved my church fellowship in high school and then I went five hours away to college and had nothing for two years, and not nothing but I think I didn't know how to translate those wonderful lessons learned and sort of this spiritual cocoon. And yeah, I guess spiritual spiritual bubble and then go out to a place where like I wanted to explore my identity and also do it with other people that felt safe and I lost my way for a couple years. So like we'll be like, this could be the dinner parties but also maybe in terms of individual grief work. How, how you might, how might you go about it?

Carla: Well I want to just put a book on your radar which is Superhero Grief. Have you heard about this?

Gary: Yes. Yeah.

Carla: Okay, it's Bob, you mentioned Bob Neimeyer earlier. I love it. It's basically they look at the kind of the pantheon of Marvel etc and map different grief psychology work against each of them. So okay good. Glad that's on your radar. So your question is like how do you what like, what do you do, how do you sit with it like what is what is the kind of.

Gary: First one week look like for someone if it's, I got laid off from my job because again, work rejection mimics attachment rejection or is worse. I'm not sure like what are they doing that first week?

Carla: I wish there was a like 123 I could give you, and I and there is there is some version of that of like, reach out to people that care about you so they know that what you're going through. Listen to yourself as best as you can. Because what you need might be totally different than what somebody else needs and any kind of prescription that anyone could give you might not work for you and work for someone else. So like reaching out for support. Being your own best expert. And then like the third thing, trying to sleep. And, you know, it's interesting I have a good friend of mine just found out this week that her brother died from suicide and it's each time I'm get the message or get the call that like another person in my inner circle is suddenly going through this fresh and new. There's always a moment where I freeze up and I'm like, what do I do, because what I actually want to do is fix it for them or solve it or take the pain away as I'm sure you do all the time. And then I like breathe and realize, this is going to be a long haul, and while this friend of mine has you know someone staying with her and has gotten lots of door dash gift cards for the first week and it's moving through it day by day. I like to remind myself that like it's a long tail, and I'm gonna put the death anniversary on my Google Calendar and I'm gonna make sure I check in on month one on month three on year one on year three, and just like be in it together and. Yeah, I think so much of this work is about how do we recreate the social norms that allow us to show up for ourselves better but also to show up for others who are going through it.

Gary: I love be in it together. And one of the things I'm trying to do in faith based communities is to actually. I'm going in the direction of like let's not do thoughts and prayers but let's actually check in with our folks and actually be with them for, you know, even if we keep it pragmatically an hour, an hour and a half or do it over a meal but sit in the back like I'm always thinking I'm always thinking of pragmatic ways that that people could be there for each other, because the thoughts and prayers component often feels like, like a drive by like you're just like hey I'll think about you and I'm gonna, I gotta go take care of my wife, you know, and yes, those could all often be true or I've got work. But for the griever that they're often, you know, bereft of having the people nearby, or even beyond the first let's say seven days or 10 days or 21 days. There's not an assurance that they'll have that that be be in a together component going forward.

Carla: Yeah.

Gary: I want to do a hard pivot. I wanted to talk about climate change, and I wanted to leave you a wide berth of like, where are we, and I think to like things, you know, in these modern times where things are not working as prominently as perhaps they did before and that sounds like very first world privilegey type of things to say. What's climate change and grief. I want you to see if you can make like a margarita pizza out of that together. What are you seeing from your perch?

Carla: Totally, um, that we are actively grieving. The ultimate mother, which is Earth and while that might sound like. I'm in, I'm with my people here in Northern California I grew up in Monterey I feel like I can say it how it is. I did some experimentation a couple years ago with taking the format of the salon style dinners that we have and actually gathering people to talk about ecological grief and one of them was specific to the Columbia River Gorge fires that happened in the Pacific Northwest And it was a very precious beautiful piece of land that burned and the other gathering was on the eve of a climate summit before a group of people are about to go in and talk like hard facts and index like indexes and carbon sequestration numbers like how do we create space to also breathe and talk about the emotional reality that is trying to stop species from going extinct. And all of the things that are supporting life being threatened. And I'm so happy to see more people and training and like cultural awareness emerging around the fact that like oh right I am grieving the fact that my favorite neighborhood in Los Angeles including my cousin's home burnt to the ground. Or like I'm grieving the fact that the my favorite season in California in late summer is now like this nervous system ratcheted up fire season threat. And you know I'm grieving the fact that all of these nations around the world that have contributed the least amount to climate change will suffer the greatest amount because of the repercussions of it and just like the heartbreaking injustice that is inherent in that. And I really sit in a place of like we can't actually do the work until we've grieved it and if we don't tend to the grief around it chances are we will ostrich our heads in the ground, paralyze around it not talk about it. I'm reading a Joanna Macy book right now that I'm really loving called Active Hope and she talks a lot about the importance of creating containers where we can come to terms with the fact that there's a lot of despair. But if we ignore the despair we can't then move through to the other side which is the repair and so I'm appreciating that and I hope that and when I look down the trajectory of my life I hope to take the work that I've been doing and apply it more to the ecological grief side of the house because I feel like I need it and other people need it too and there's incredible leaders working in this space already on that.

Gary: That feels like for from what I know of you so far that that's going to be the legacy project or projects for you.

Carla: I like that premonition.

Gary: And well for me like I never in a million I thought I'd be doing criminal justice reform my whole career and then I ended up with my own people, you know, and so I do think like there's maybe maybe our legacies come to us in that way.

Carla: Yeah, and an invitation for folks to reach out who are interested in that work or are in a place where they can fund and support the evolution of that work so I'm easy to find on the internet.

Gary: Last question. And this is an amalgam of the last two questions but some wisdom that you might have, Carla, to share with you know burgeoning and or struggling therapists or burgeoning could be like they're doing awesomely or or therapists that are struggling like for instance like I have, I'd say a fair amount of my students are probably struggling with either early onset burnout or just burnout running into these systems that may not be in their best interest as they're, you know, as they're expiring themselves to serve our patient populations and so I think about those things oftentimes before I lecture. And so just some hope or encouragement you might have for the audience but also students or people that might encounter your career or your book. Yeah, that was a run on sentence.

Carla: Um, Yeah, the thing that comes to mind is like, regardless of what you're working on or who you're working with or the depths of despair that you might sit in as you empathize with someone is to maintain space in your life for joy, pleasure, togetherness, your own friendships. I feel like it's so easy when we hear the call to be in a healing profession or a caring profession to just give it all. I'm not the first person to make the like put your oxygen mask on first joke and I don't even know if that's the right metaphor to use anymore but I feel like in order to show up in a healing profession we have to be as close to whole as we can possibly be and while it can be hard to practice what I'm preaching right now that's sort of the thing that I consistently have to remind myself.

Gary: Excellent. I have one more question. How, how do you see your career playing out. We're talking about legacy like what do you see the next two to three to five to seven to 10 years looking like for you like what what what are your passion plays and what what do you want to see happen in our field?

Carla: Thanks for asking, I, you know I'm asking ChatGBT the same thing for myself. What do you think? I am. You know I think that this book will be. Well, I'll ride the wave of this book as long as it decides to move. I'm on the board of the Dinner Party now I like to refer to myself as the fairy godmother, and I will continue to support the organization and a lot of my role is in fundraising, and just bringing the resources and to keep the team staffed so that they can do the matching and the training etc. So, always looking for supporters in that way. A lot of the work that I do outside of my work in grief is around bringing groups of people together who are committed to solve some sort of social problem and figure out what are the conditions within which we can form the coalition or create the impact network or make the roadmap or action plan such that we can actually move some of the move the needle forward on some of the issues we're working on. That might all sound vague but it's because I thematically am sort of an interstitial role that moves between different organizing groups to help design and facilitate that sort of coalition building work. So I'm really excited to continue doing more of that. And I'm really excited to have a chill summer. That's I'm, I live in upstate New York in the woods and I'm, I'm after kind of being stressed out for five years working on a book as I'm sure you can appreciate I'm ready to like drink a beer in the creek and hanging out with friends, and then back to school season I feel like all, you know, get some new school supplies and figure out the five year plan, but for now the three month plan is be present for renegade grief and see where it wants to take me.

Gary: And I understand that you just had a book tour and so I want to applaud you for, for being being participatory in that and showcasing your book because it's something that definitely I feel like you're you're an instant hero of mine for being able to accomplish such a short amount of time.

Carla: Right back at you I'm excited to read your book and I'm glad that we're we're in touch now and excited to follow your path forward to.

Gary: Excellent. Well, Miss Carla Fernandez. Thank you so much. I feel like both of our conversations, I think our Monday one was also just as fun if if not funny. I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate as as your moderator today and I'm really excited to see where, where you go from here and, and where the book goes, but also the the Dinner Party as, as the. I forgot the term you used earlier but like sort of like the lead, lead, cheerleader or the lead songstress for for the dinner parties, and I just want to just express my gratitude for you and the viewing audience that, that you came here today.

Carla: Thank you and I have so many friends and mentors who've gone through CIIS and I've had such respect for it as an institution and I'm grateful to get to hang out with you in in this kind of way so big fan over here.

Gary: Thank you. Well, I wish you all a great evening and look forward to hearing feedback as you see fit. Thank you everyone. Have a great evening.

Carla: Thank you.  

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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