Got a broken heart? Let's ride.

5 questions for grief expert Carla Fernandez

Thanks, as always, for supporting this newsletter, which has been such an oasis in the midst of my grief—a place to share and learn and share some more with you, and be met with such compassion and recognition. I feel so grateful, accompanied, and encouraged by the community of readers and deep thinkers here.

I am lucky enough to get sent many nonfiction books from many publishers. Real talk? Many times, I open one and think a) this person is not actually a writer, but probably has some other amazing gift where this content could have been channeled and/or b) there isn’t enough content for this to constitute a book one needs to read every word of. It could have been a pamphlet or a chapbook or some other short and wonderful thing.

Reading Carla Fernandez’s Renegade Grief felt like the opposite of that. I’ve never met Carla, though we have people in common. This book is beautifully written, fresh, original, moving. This book was meant to be written by this person, and I wanted to read, no savor, every word. I’m sure part of this feeling is that I really need this book right now, but it’s also a testament to the rightness of the project. What a gift.

Carla is many things—cofounder of an organization that has transformed how the country thinks about grief, called The Dinner Party, designer, gatherer, daughter, and now author. Without further ado, meet this talented human…

Courtney Martin: You write, “While grief itself is hard, the culture we live in makes it even harder.” If you had a magic wand, what is the first thing you would change about our culture to make it easier on people to feel and be transformed by their grief? 

Carla Fernandez: Love an invitation to waggle an imaginary magic wand!

My answer would address two sides of the same coin—at the root of so much of the loneliness and isolation felt by grievers and by those of us trying to show up for them.

The two-sided spell I’d cast with said wand would first wipe out the learned instinct to lean out when someone we care about is grieving. It would dissolve the social anxiety so many of us feel when we worry we’ll say the wrong thing to a grieving friend, neighbor, or coworker. Too often, that worry leads us to say nothing at all. I’ve heard from so many folks who’ve hemmed and hawed about sending a simple “thinking about you” text, worried it’ll be poorly received or will “remind” someone of their grief—as if it’s not already at the top of that person’s mind. This spell would give us all more confidence, comfort, and literacy when it comes to being in conversation with those who are grieving—and help us remember that support is needed long after the window between death and funeral has closed.

In the same breath—because everything related to grief seems to be a paradox of two truths—the other side of this particular spell would grant us grievers the knowledge that we are not alone. It would give us the agency to find people who get it, and the grace to appreciate those who are showing up as best they can. It would help reverse the instinct to self-isolate precisely in the moments when we need our people most.

It might be a tall order for one wand waggle, but so much of the magic The Dinner Party works on—day and night—is just this. And the two sides go hand in hand: removing the barriers to being there for one another, in the moments we need each other most, on both sides of the equation.

I found it so fascinating that you wrote about how death is first experienced as a “system glitch” -- our brains literally trying to find our person or pet and insert them back into life. To grieve, in this way, is to update your entire system of reality in a way. Can you say more about the neurological and physical experience of grieving? What surprised you the most, in either your own experience or your research/reporting? 

There’s a cultural misconception that grief is just a mood we can shake off; that it shouldn’t affect our ability to do our job, require extra support, and certainly shouldn’t leave us weeping in the grocery aisle after year one.

But ask anyone who’s experienced a significant loss, and they’ll tell you grief is far more than a “feeling.” They’ll tell you about the brain fog that makes them forget passwords; the sleepless nights; the loss of appetite; the sensitivity to loud sounds or large groups of people yucking it up as if we’re not all destined to drop dead someday. Grief is not just emotional—it’s physical, financial, spiritual, relational, and more.

I want to shout out Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, whose books The Grieving Brain and The Grieving Body are must-reads on my grief shelf. She’s one of the first (that I know of) to strap neural imaging sensors onto grieving people’s brains, proving that our whole beings go through an essential process in loss.

One of her findings is about the “system glitch” that happens as we subconsciously search for our person on the mental map we keep of where our people are in the world. When someone dies, our brains keep refreshing the map, trying to find them, to no avail. My chapter on altar-building—creating a place where you connect with your person—is inspired by her suggestion to physically locate them in some way. Even if it’s just a photo on your bedside table or the coffee shop you used to frequent, it gives your mind a place to find them.

While it might seem unrelated, I’m currently pregnant and experiencing the beginning of life, which has given me such empathy for the other end of the life spectrum. Until you’ve lived through weeks of morning sickness, the exhaustion of trimester one, or the hormonal rollercoaster that has you (and by “you,” I mean me) weeping at stupid television commercials, it’s hard to relate. I’m finding some moments in pregnancy that seem to rhyme, or resonate, with adjusting to life without a person. I find that understanding the science of what our bodies are up to—whether in birth, death, or any major milestone—helps us find solid footing during times of profound change.

I found the distinction between accepting and acceptance to be a revelation. Can you explain that for us? 

For most of us, if we think of a popular framework for understanding grief, it’s usually Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages, which famously end with “acceptance.” She was a badass, and I have deep reverence for her contribution and legacy. And yet, the Western mind’s desire to oversimplify complex human experiences has left us with a cultural shorthand that says: at some point, you accept that the person is gone and get on with life. For those of us still feeling waves of grief on the five-, fifteen-, or fifty-year anniversaries of their passing, that norm can make us feel like we’re doing it wrong—like we missed the offramp to Acceptance Town miles back.

That’s why I was so moved by a distinction Mary-Frances O’Connor makes in The Grieving Brain: acceptance vs. accepting. Acceptance implies “a permanent change in how a situation is viewed”—as if the grief of my dad’s death is complete, case closed. Accepting, on the other hand, is more like a mindful relationship with our grief. It’s a mode that interrupts the part of us that wants to ruminate—What happened? Where did they go? How could it have been different? Why me?!—and instead says: in this moment, I am simply allowing what is. Not problem-solving. Not bargaining. Not protesting. Just being with it. Very Zen.

I think about those moments when a grief wave rises and our instinct is to fix it, stop it, or outrun it. But often the only thing to do is let it break over us. To take the walk and let the tears fall. To step outside the party and breathe in the quiet of the parking lot. To call a friend and ask if they have a minute to sit with you in the heaviness. In accepting our grief’s presence—without ignoring, avoiding, or trying to problem-solve it away—we allow it to move through us. And eventually, we find ourselves back on the dance floor, at our desk, or in the grocery aisle… until the next wave comes, and we meet it again, not as a failure to “move on,” but as part of the ongoing rhythm of love, loss, and human beingness. [Sounds an awful lot like birth contractions! Get ready, Carla! -CM]

You explore SO much in this book, but one thing that I didn’t feel like you delved into much was what Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous loss” - grief without closure. In some ways, I guess, all grief lacks closure (particularly as part of what you champion in the book is a continued relationship of your own making with those who are dead). In any case, for people like me, mourning a person who is still physically alive but metaphysically transformed through dementia, what does renegade grief look like? 

The fascinating and excruciating part about writing this book was that grief is this ever kaleidoscoping topic and at a certain point I had to put some blinders on around some of those places of expansion. Grief related to climate change. Collective grief related to the death of someone you might not ever meet, but feel the pain of nonetheless. Ambiguous or anticipatory loss, all the way. 

That being said, the principles still apply. I had a year of caretaking for my dying dad, and in that time was when my relationship to “renegade grief” began. That year was marked by so many  “is this the last?” moments.  The last time we were together as a family without the BIG C word entered the room; the last time he saw his sister, the last time we went outside together, the last words we exchanged. Those were the months where my grief was baptism by fire - this grappling we do to make sense of impermanence. And he was still very much with us. 

If you boil down the core principles in the book, they apply. In Renegade Grief, we normalize our experience despite a culture that would have us deny it; we find our people; we experiment with care practices to help us honor our past, be in the present, and create a future woven with this moment’s lessons; and finally, we become the grief ally we wish we’d had. All of these are things we can start tending to as we anticipate someone’s departure. 

You write: “For too long, grief has been discussed with cozy pity, something misunderstood as simply sad, to be moved on from and forgotten. But when I close my eyes and think of what it looks like to experience real grief, after spending the last decade in conversation with people in the thick of it, it's much more badass than that. For me, becoming a griever looks like instant membership in some kind of cosmic motorcycle club.” I love that so much. Can you please describe the sensory world of this motorcycle club in more depth? What are we wearing? Where are we stopping? What are our nicknames and favorite greetings? 

So very glad that resonated.

For folks who haven’t read the book, part of the introduction dives into Hubble’s Law—the theory that we live in an ever-expanding universe. The horizon line keeps receding, no matter how hard we chase it. To me, it’s the perfect metaphor for grief. We never cross a finish line and reach “the other side”—though over time, it does get less acute, less of a mindfuck.

So, how do we handle floating in the void? In cosmic motorcycle terms: we crew up and we learn to ride. We find companions in loss—people who’ve lived it too—and we experiment with care practices and rituals that help us stay in a personally-defined “right relationship” with our grief, despite the cultural pressure to sweep it under the rug.

Picture the motorcycle club: weathered leather (or a vegan alternative), maybe some glitter, tattoos—temporary or not. We stop at outer space gas stations for Slurpees and hot dogs. At first, we wobble on the bikes. But over time, we ride long stretches, pop the occasional wheelie, fix a flat, recover from a wipeout—because we’ve learned from each other, and we’ve got each other’s backs.

For the record, I’m not a motorcycle person in real life. I once spent a glorious day on the back of a Ducati from Tucson to the Mexican border and back, then kissed the ground when I got off alive—feeling VERY done with motorcycles. Bucket list, check. Zero tattoos for me. Lots of sunscreen. But in the cosmic motorcycle grief gang? I feel right at home.

This little fantasy led me down a rabbit hole of feminist motorcycle history and I landed on this! Did you know about Bessie Stringfield, motorcycle queen of the 1930s? Neither did I.

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Don’t you just love that. Thanks Carla. This is gold, as is the book. Buy it here.

So tell us readers, who is in your cosmic motorcycle grief gang? What tattoos of grief are you sporting? How have you moved toward accepting?