Whether you’re interested in social justice or not, there’s no denying the grief simmering beneath the surface of daily life. It’s in our personal lives, it’s in the news, it’s in our communities. The thing is - we never really talk about it: just how much grief connects us.
If we learn to lean into that grief together, we might really create the beautiful world we all long for.
Malkia Devich-Cyril knows grief from the inside out. They grew up knowing their mom would die of her illness. They grew up immersed in the grief that is endemic to being Black in America. And they cared for their wife, comedian Alana Devich-Cyril through her death in 2018.
Malkia is a poet and media activist. They are the executive director of the MediaJustice, and a co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network. Their writings on media, race, justice, and grief frequently appear in national publications such as Politico, The Guardian, and The Atlantic, and in the Oscar nominated documentary film, 13th.
This episode is STUNNING. It has gifts for everyone, whether you’re grieving a personal loss, or you’re an activist of any kind.
If you ARE an activist or organizer, you need to hear what Malkia has to say about our narrative strategies, and what it really takes to make change happen.
In this episode we cover:
- The difference between sorrow and grief
- How “feelings aren’t facts” relates to grief
- Is it normal to feel like you failed to keep someone alive?
- Why do narrative strategists (aka: activists) need to understand grief?
- Are book bans a form of grief? (spoiler: yes, but maybe not for the reasons you think)
- Why death is “the ultimate boundary” - and how to find hope in that
Related episodes:
Rage Becomes Her (and by “her” I mean US) with Soraya Chemaly
Collective Grief and Communal Joy: with Baratunde Thurston
Wonder in an Age of Violence: Valarie Kaur & See No Stranger
For more on the shortage of compassion, see The Love Filled World: is there enough love to go around?
Notable quotes:
“Sadness is a critical, crucial part of acknowledging the reality of our conditions. So I believe in sorrow. The point is not to exclude sorrow, it's to include joy. It's to include anger. It's to allow ourselves the full range of what acknowledging loss means.” - Malkia Devich-Cyril
“A hurting person wants to bond with other hurting people, but they're also not gonna stay in a movement that is only dealing with pain.” - Malkia Devich-Cyril
About our guest:
Malkia Devich-Cyril is an activist, writer and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief. They are also the founding and former Executive Director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think sometimes we love to focus in and get
mesmerized by the sorrow part of it. You know, we
get mesmerized by the problem. We stay limited to what hurts.
And I'll tell you this, a hurting person wants to
bond with other hurting people. But they also they're not
(00:22):
going to stay in a movement that is only dealing
with pain. They're going to stay in a movement that
actually moves.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, And I'm
your host, Meghan Devine. This week on the show, activist
and writer Malkia Devich Cyril on grief, love, and book bands,
among other things. This episode is stunning. It has gifts
for everyone, whether you're grieving a personal loss or you're
interested in what it really takes to create a safer, kinder,
(00:56):
more beautiful world. Settle in, everybody, and grab your notebok
or some other note taking device, because you will absolutely
need it right after this first break, before we get started,
one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional
(01:17):
relational territory in each and every episode, this show is
not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental
health provider or for professional supervision related to your work.
Hey friends, Okay, I know I have said this a
bunch of times already the season, but I'm saying it again.
The guests on this show have brought so much magic
(01:40):
and medicine into my life. I hope they're doing something
special for you too. Now, whether you're interested in social
justice or not, there is no denying the grief simmering
beneath the surface of everyday life. It's in our personal lives,
it's in the news, it's in our communities. But the
thing is, we never really talk about it. We don't
(02:01):
really talk about how much grief connects us. If we
learn to lean into that grief together, we might just
create the beautiful world we all long for. We literally
cannot get to that world without talking about grief. I've
said this for a long time, but it is actually true.
Not talking about grief is killing us. I first met
(02:26):
Today's guest through their article titled Grief Belongs in Social
Justice Movements. Malka Devich Cyril is a poet and a
media activist. They are the executive director of the Center
for Media Justice and a co founder of the Media
Action Grassroots Network. Their writings on media, race, justice, and
grief frequently appear in national publications such as Politico, The Guardian,
(02:49):
The Atlantic. We're going to link to some of those
show notes. Their work was also in the Oscar nominated
documentary film Thirteenth Now Malkia Knows Grief from the Inside Out.
They cared for their spouse, the comedian and editor Alana
Debit Cyril, through their death from cancer in twenty eighteen.
We spent a lot of time in this episode talking
(03:10):
about their relationship.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
And their love.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
We actually get a well timed message from Alana herself
during our conversation, so listen for that neat little drive by.
Another relationship that figures heavily into our conversation today is
Malchia's mother, Janet Cyril. Janet was an activist in the
Black Panther Party, So Malchia grew up surrounded by and
(03:32):
immersed in justice and social action, but also grief. Some
of that grief stemmed from the deaths in her community,
but it was also ever present in her mother's chronic illness.
You're going to hear about both of these women and
their effect on Malchia's life right at the top of
the show. I mean, we get into like really complex
nuanced issues in this episode, but we started, as all
(03:55):
good stories do, talking about love friends. I am not
exaggerating when I say that meeting Malchia, getting to spend
time with them talking about grief and love and justice
and the state of the world, it was one of
the highlights of my life. We all have a part
to play in this beautiful world, and I am so
(04:17):
glad Mac is here playing theirs. I am really interested
to hear what you think of this week's show, everybody.
It was a truly magical experience for me, and I
hope you love it too. Grief, love, action and belonging
happening right now with Malchia Davitch Sira.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Akia.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I am so happy to have you here with me today.
I was just saying before we started rolling that we've
followed each other on Twitter for a long time, so
I'm really glad to have you here with me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm psyched, okay, so getting ready for our time here together.
I was drawn into what people wrote and what you've
said about your relationship with your wife, Alana. There's so
much that I want to get into today about grief
and justice, and media and collective grief.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
But I would really like to start with love.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Always a good place to start.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I mean, I know it's a good place to start
because it chokes me up when I talk about it,
like so much of what I read of you, and
I promise everybody we're going to get into the background
so you know what I'm talking about here. But so
much of your writing is about grief and justice. One
of my favorite things about you as a writer and
(05:38):
you as a leader is that no matter how far
you go, no matter what kind of rant your writing
or what you're trying to teach about grief and justice,
you always come back to your wife.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
She and my mom are definitely the angers in my life,
and my greatest teacher is about grief. For sure.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
You kind of grew up with social justice with your
mom and Black Panthers, Like there's so much grief involved
in social justice. But was that grief evident to you
as you were growing up?
Speaker 1 (06:13):
You know, my mom besides being a founding member of
the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, my mom
also had sickle cell anemia, which is a genetic and
fatal disease. It did kill her at the age of
fifty nine. But also, you know, it's something that you
have from birth, So it's something that I knew about
(06:36):
her having my entire life. So between the grief that
is endemic to growing up black in America when mortality
rates are so high and violence against black people is
also so high, to the grief that comes with being
a member of a movement that is targeted in response
(06:59):
to those cans, to the grief that comes from having
a parent with a fatal illness that is absolutely going
to kill them, there was no question about that, And
the only question was when I think that I grew
up with grief all around me, And so I don't
see my experience with grief as separate from my experience
(07:22):
as a black person, or separate from my experience as
a movement leader, or or separate from my experience as
someone child. It's all kind of connected for me.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, Was it directly spoken about when you were a child,
all of those facets of grief.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I don't know that the word grief was ever used.
I think that my mom, for example, would say things like,
it's up to you what kind of life you want
to live. You know, these are our emotions, for what
we're talking about is actions. And so, you know, she
definitely taught me and my sister that sorrow and grief
(08:02):
were not the same thing. That sorrow isn't an emotion.
Grief is a set of activities and response to lass
and one is something that you don't really control. You
don't control your emotions, you have them. And the other
is something you do have some agency around and you
can have some choice in, which is how you respond
(08:24):
to the losses in your life. So she definitely played
a hand in helping me to understand what I think
grief is, you know, helping me to have some agency
and control. Because she was so focused on having agency
and control, she had to live with anticipatory grief, as
does anyone with a fatal illness. My wife, Alana, had
(08:48):
to struggle with the same same thing. And so, speaking
of Alana, my text messages are her voice saying I
love you so sorry I turned that off.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Now No, wait, did you just get a text message
with Alana's voice saying I love you?
Speaker 1 (09:06):
I mean hear that?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Okay, great, I couldn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
But how beautiful is that?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Right? When we're talking about grief and sorrow and agency
and sovereignty and all of these things. And then we
have your wife chiming in to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Say I love you.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I mean, that could not have been I love this
like this. That couldn't have been more beautifully timed.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Thank you, Alana.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, I love this idea of the difference between sorrow
and grief. I mean, I've been doing this work for
ten years now, and I don't think I've heard that distinction.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, I mean, I think for myself it was important
for me to separate those things out because one, I
think people believe that grief is sorrow, but in fact,
you know, my wife was a comedian, and when she
was in hospice, I would say I spent the vast
(10:03):
majority of the two years that my wife was aware
of her metastatic cancer trying to make her laugh. And
there was a lot of fun times in that, you know,
And there was a lot of laughter in that. I
mean when she was in hospice, when we were trying
to lift her on the Hoyer lift to use the restroom,
she requested that we sing theme songs from an eighties
(10:26):
comedy shows like The Brady Bunch, Facts of Life, Cheers,
and we sang those songs, we belted them out. See
that's grief too, you know. And especially if we're thinking
about grief in terms of its utility for social change,
we have to I think it's incumbent upon us to
(10:47):
understand as movement leaders that sorrow melancholia as actually it's
an important emotion to understand, But it's the transformation to teams,
engagement of that emotion and the acknowledgement that joy is
also present in grief. That's what becomes a motive force,
(11:10):
that's what becomes mobilizing energy. And so if we want,
if we want people's grief to turn into action, if
we wanted to transform into agency, we can't only engage
with it as sorrow. That's not gonna work, right.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
And that's different from that like binary of you're all
healed and everything is ducky and you find the gifts
in what's happened to you versus like collapsed in a
corner in despair. I think, especially if you've just lost
somebody or you just received a devastating diagnosis, it could
be easy to hear what you just said as don't
(11:48):
stay in sorrow, don't stay sad, make something out of it,
And that's actually not what I hear you.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Say, not at all. In fact, I'm sad every day,
you know, and I will be sad for the rest
of my life. And I think that any black person
in America is sad most days. I think that you
can't be an immigrant in this country and not be sad.
You know. The sadness is a critical, crucial part of
(12:14):
acknowledging the reality of our conditions. So I believe in sorrow,
I believe in the night. I am one hundred percent
a fan of the truth. I think that the difference
is that joy is also the truth, and there's you know,
the point is not to exclude sorrow. It's to include joy,
it's to include anger. It's to allow ourselves the full
(12:37):
range of what acknowledging loss means. When I think of
my mom, she lost her life at fifty nine years old.
She was a brilliant, beautiful woman who has survived so much.
And there's nothing sadder to me except another brilliant, beautiful woman,
my wife, losing her life at forty two. And yet
(12:58):
these were funny women, are women with strength and bigor
and brilliance, And so I just want the whole story,
that's all. And I think as a as a strategist
and as a movement leader, and as the left, I
think sometimes we love to focus in and get mesmerized
(13:19):
by the sorrow part of it. You know, we get
mesmerized by the problem, you know what I mean, We
stay limited to what hurts. And I'll tell you this,
a hurting person wants to bond with other hurting people.
But they also they're not going to stay in a
movement that is only dealing with pain. They're going to
(13:42):
stay in a movement that actually moves. They need a
movement that moves. And so that's kind of what I'm
what I'm what I'm talking about is grief. That is
the full range of our responses to LASS, and not
just a limited, singular, binary response.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I want to get into a specific thing here. It's funny,
like some of my questions were about social justice and
some of them were about personal loss, and I kind
of knew coming into this that those are the same thing, right,
But I love that in just a few short minutes
you have erased many of my questions.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
That is.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
A sign of some brilliance there, and I so appreciate
the ways that you include everything in the ways that
you speak personal and collective. After your mom died, you
wrote the incongruence between working daily to heal the world
but being unable to save my mother's life was powered
by the illusion of my control over life and death,
(14:46):
an entire worldview centered on my failure. Yes, can you
tell me what you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You know from my deeply personal experience both watching my
mom sick and die and why ching my wife Alana
sick and die. You know, if I as an organizer,
you know you're trained to take action. You know, in fact,
the whole point is mobilizing your agency and developing the
(15:13):
agency of others because you believe that something can be done.
That is the entire analysis behind the strategy of organizing
something can be done to confront illness that is absolutely
going to lead to death. Nothing can be done, Nothing
(15:35):
can be done. That's the feeling anyway, It's actually not
the total reality, but the feeling is death is the
strongest boundary the world has to offer, you know, and
it cannot be violated, It will not be violated. And
so this feeling that I tried so hard, you know
(15:56):
that I that I did everything that I could to
try to extend my mom's life. My sister did too.
I did everything I could to try to extend my
wife's life and I couldn't do it. Or then again,
maybe I did do it. You know, we'll never know
what the original what the real date was supposed to
be or whatever. But that's the feeling, right that I
(16:18):
tried and failed. And that's a perspective, you know, that's
a way of thinking. I know it's not wholly true,
but it is how it feels.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
This is something that's so common I think for people,
this sense of failure. Yeah, right, that I did everything
I could and it wasn't enough and this is my fault, right,
And I love I love how you framed that, that
this is a feeling and it's real and it's not
the whole story. And I think what we tend to
(16:49):
do when we hear somebody say I failed is talk
them out of that failure.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yes, And I hate that. It doesn't want to be
talked out of my feelings period. And also it's it's respectful.
It's like, I'm intelligent, I'm very clear. It's a feeling
and not a fact. I know that, but nevertheless, it's
what's happening, you know, that's what's happening. And I prefer
to be met, and I think most people prefer to
be met in their greed then persuaded out of it.
(17:16):
And like you said, it doesn't work to be persuaded anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
It's just it makes people feel misunderstood, yes, right. And
as a support person, as somebody who cares, that feels counterintuitive, right, Like,
if you think that your job is to make somebody
feel better, basically, then you were going to talk them
out of their own truth and their own feelings. And
that's ineffective.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Think about that on a on a more global scale.
Think about that in terms of strategy, in terms of
narrative strategy. You know, if you, as a left narrative strategist,
are saying, you know, instead of acknowledging the terror that
folks are experiencing around gun violence, around crime, going to
(18:00):
only talk about the systemic aspects of that, what you're
really doing is trying to persuade people out of their grief,
out of their fear, out of their out of their
authentic emotions, and move them with that kind of persuasion.
It doesn't it doesn't. It's not effective, you know, it's
not effective. And I think ultimately we just don't understand it. Grief,
(18:23):
you know, we don't understand it, and it messes with
our strategy, It messes with our relationships, you know, and
it messes with us our inside, you know.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Okay, before we get back to my conversation with Nolkia,
I want to talk to the therapists, social workers, nurses,
and other people in the helping professions for a second.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
No matter what you focus on in your practice, you
are going to encounter grief.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Anywhere there are humans, there is grief.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Now. The problem is that most people aren't really sure
how to work with it when it shows up in
the room. I mean, the state of grief education is lacking.
Let's just say to be gentle about it. If you
want to know how to be truly helpful to people
grieving any kind of loss. Spots are still available in
my six month Grief Care Intensive training. There's even a
(19:25):
unit on grief and social change, which includes many of
the topics we explored in this episode. Today, there's a
unit on working in grief in special populations, including gun violence,
hate crimes, and natural disasters.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
If you work with.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Humans, grief is always in the room in some form,
and these are the conditions that you need to learn
how to address with skill. So come learn those skills
that you need to work with grief. This six month
training is designed for people in the helping professions, but
you don't have to be a therapist to join. This
training session begins on September fourth, twenty twenty three, So
(19:58):
if you are listening to this episode later or you
can't start with us in September, check back for it
because we're planning to run this training once a year
or so. All of the information about this six month
grief care intensive training is at the registration link in
the show notes to this episode, and you can also
find the link in my Instagram bio at Refuge in Grief. Okay,
(20:21):
let's get back to my conversation with activist Malkiya Devich. Cyril,
you bring up a really cool point here. You know,
if we just focus on gun violence for a second,
when a new public gun violence events very predictably irrupts,
and you know, people who care about.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
This issue are quick to jump on social media and.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Be like, show the pictures, do this, do that? And
like this is so important, we have to do something
and make people understand. And I feel like another casualty
in that are the people's whose kid was just shot,
whose sister was just killed, Like yes, yes, we jump
to justice, and how will we change this and make
(21:07):
it stop? And I think we leapfrog over the intimate
in those situations.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
What we're leapfrogging over is belonging, you know, And and
the issue here is this, you know, honestly, there's a
reason why in these moments, after the shooting of black
folk in Buffalo at the supermarket, or you know, after
after you know, the shooting in of Valde you know,
(21:36):
of these beautiful children, or after the millions of people
who died from COVID, you know that these very organic
parent led or survivor led actions and organizations evolved. You know,
you have these these parents now, you know, who are
very vocal in social media, very vocal on the news,
(22:00):
and yet there is a disconnect between them and social movements.
We organize social movements, and I think the disconnect is
a grief disconnect. You have these folks who are passionately responding,
and some of them are very vocal about specific policy changes.
They want to see something happen, you know, they want to,
(22:20):
as part of their own healing, protect other children and
other people from what has happened to their child or
their loved one. But there's a reason why they're not
necessarily involved in an organized social movement because the movement
is not prepared to pause and do the part that's
about belonging, do the part that's about listening, and that's
(22:42):
about building relationship and intimacy, that's about engaging in that
collective grief process, or institutionalizing even a collective grief process
into the organization. None of that is happening. What's happening
is the policy fight, you know, and then you then
you shrink, diminish, and in my view, disrespect a complex,
(23:07):
painful experience. You shrink it into a spokesperson a sound bite,
and that is not respectful and it's not appropriate. But
also it's bad strategy. It's bad narrative strategy, it's bad
organizing strategy. And I think we can do better, and
we would do better if organizationally, we had new ways
(23:30):
to embody grief as leaders and as institutions.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This is part of your your radical loss project, right,
what you're talking about. What you're describing right now is
there's the project is about giving activists and movement organizations
what we need to catalyze grief for change. That's the
work that you're doing to mobilize what you just described, right,
like bringing grief and belonging and finding new ways to
(23:58):
acknowledge that grief as a way to power change instead
of the leap to a spokesperson that we see.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I'm fascinated by this and I love you and your
work so much and I don't know nearly enough about
it what I hear you saying or the way that
I understand that in my head, the image I have
is like you're putting the wheels on the bus, right,
Like we started out talking like I think in pictures,
but this like, if we want the world that we
(24:31):
long for to come into being, we have to find
a way to grieve together strategically and humanly.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I think it boils down to this, right. Yeah, So
either as a people we lean into the truth of
our loss and we lean into grief together. Either we
do that, and what we get from that is we
get true citizenship, we get a new social contract, we
(25:05):
get new ways of being a community. We get people
who if you acknowledge loss, then you're going to think
about the criminal justice system differently. If you acknowledge loss,
you're going to think about the foster care system differently.
If you acknowledge loss, well, you're going to actually think
about the south and reparations differently. You know, like it
(25:26):
changes your entire worldview to honestly and profoundly and authentically
acknowledge loss and be in a grief process. Grief is
a political process. Grief is inherently about our ability to
govern ourselves. You know, we can only govern ourselves who
(25:47):
we're rooted in reality in the truth and loss is
the truth of the world. And so or or we
can go a different direction. We can go the direction
that the right has gone in this country, which is
that we erect monuments to maintain a fixed focus on
the past. We want to hold on to the way
things used to be. We want to hold on to
(26:10):
the status quo of power relations. Because we refuse to
engage with loss, We reject loss as a part of life.
We maintain privilege as a protection against loss, and our
whole racial hierarchy and dynamic is a fight between producing
(26:30):
loss for some and protecting from loss for others. And
so I think that if we could actually understand grief differently,
if we could learn to grieve differently, it's not just
about our personal healing and well being. We're talking about
the transformation and healing of a nation, of a world,
the transition of power relations We're talking about new ways
(26:52):
of understanding history. In fact, book Bannings are all about
ignoring grief. They're all about saying, I don't want you
to I don't want to think about that. That's a
denial of grief, is what that is. I don't want
to acknowledge that I or anyone in my ancestry participated
in the taking of life, the destroying of life. There
(27:18):
is a denial of grief. And so this is a
more spiritual journey, but it is also a political journey.
And so I just that's kind of like my work
is about understanding that relationship. It's about then transitioning that
understanding into new ways of organizing, new forms of organization,
(27:42):
new strategies. As we confront what is a growing emerging
fascism here in the United States and around the world,
we are set for extreme loss of life we are
going to see extreme loss of life. If we don't
understand grief as a part of our change strategy, we
will not be ready. We will not be ready. And
(28:03):
the kind of governing systems that emerge during extreme loss
of life can either be radically focused on living. There
will be living, after all, or they can be radically
focused on denying that living and denying that grief, and
that is fascism. So those are our choices. And grief
(28:27):
is right at is the pivot point.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I need a second because I don't know if you
noticed it, and certainly in the recording no one can tell.
But this is life saving to me that the way
that I view the world is like grief is that
pivot point. Right, Grief is that Rosetta stone that unlocks
(28:52):
the beautiful world and the just worlds, and refusing to
feel with each other creates the violent, disconnected world. And
it's interesting, like I'm preparing for another conversation later today
and this idea that we're recording, this conversation during Pride
(29:16):
Month and the hatred against the queer community and the
trans community.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Especially queer people of color. It's like you see yourself.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Reflected in someone and you hate that reflection, and it
causes emotions, It causes sensations, it causes feelings, And because
we don't have a structure within which to be tender
to ourselves, within which to listen to those swirling emotions,
(29:48):
we otherize them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
We destroy the thing that makes us feel discomfort in
our own beings. And we're like so unaware of the
mirror of the world and so ill equipped to greet
our own stew of emotions with kindness and tenderness and
(30:11):
curiosity that it's like the only option we've made available
to us is to destroy that which makes us feel it.
That's right, And we don't have those conversations, right. I
think that sometimes we say, like, oh, you know, if
you're so angry at this queer person, you're a closet
queer person. Like, okay, that may be accurate, but it's
(30:32):
also like assaultive language. How do we even begin to
build collective structures for engaging with grief our own and
the grief of the world in a way that furthers
the world that we long for?
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I mean, I think ultimately the organizing strategy is about
engaging with people at the point of pain, and many
people who believe in justice and who seek a more
just future tend to engage more at the point of
promise and like, this is what could be, and we
(31:09):
believe in that vision. And that's beautiful and I love that,
you know, and people do need alternatives and we do
need to offer new ways of seeing the world. But
you know, people go to church, they go to the doctor,
they go to these opioid clinics, they go to twelve
(31:32):
step programs. People go to places certain places because they
are in pain, and it is at those places that
the right shows up. In fact, after a natural disaster,
you know, there are many cities and towns across this
country when people are reeling from tremendous loss of life.
(31:55):
They have no water, they have no electricity. It is
right when militsia that are driving around in trucks to
deliver gas, to deliver water. Because there is something that
is understood about strategy, which is, you know, in these
moments of breakdown, this is when you can reorganize the world.
(32:18):
And grief loss, I'll say, is a moment of breakdown
when you lose someone, when your reality breaks because someone
who was in your life no longer is, they're not
in the world. They're gone. Reality breaks. There's a somatic
meltdown almost right that you go through. You are ripe
(32:41):
or human reorganization, yes, and either you can be reorganized
by your own hopes, your own dreams. You can be
reorganized by meaning that comes from a movement that is
about your greatest good, you know, that is about belonging,
(33:02):
that is about your safety, that is about your dignity.
Or you can be reorganized by profit. You can be
reorganized by privilege. You can be reorganized by rage. Organizing
at the point of pain means that you are going
to be standing in the suffering and being part of
(33:24):
the reorganization whatever that looks like. You know, for me,
that is something that that I believe we find it
difficult to do. You know, progressive movements have not always
found that easy to do. But I think that's why
doctor King went from city to city. Why you know
when he was assassinated, he was going to be organizing
(33:48):
with the garbage strike, because you go to organize at
the point of pain and engage and build the meaning
at that point, right, And that's why you know who
wrote that book about the role of meaning and I
don't remember who wrote that book. But yeah, about the
role of meaning grief, and that to me is something
(34:10):
that as an organizer I have to understand and we've
done that to some degree. You know, every time a
black person is killed by the police, there is a
set of people that goes to that city, you know,
that sits with those parents, that engages you know. But
have we built a movement of grief parents. No, we haven't.
(34:34):
And there's consequences to that. We've seen those parents picked
off move to the right. We've seen how influx of
resources can you know, create harm and and dissonance amongst
believed peoples. I guess what I'm saying is the right
knows full well that grief is a terrain for organizing,
(34:56):
that grief is a terrain for strategy. The question is
do we know it? Do we know it? Does everybody else?
Because if we knew it, I think we could use
what we know to even break down the partisan the
partisan barriers. You know, everybody grieves, we all face lost.
The question is what is our organized response to it.
(35:17):
That's what I'm trying to figure out. A lot of
my work is experimentation, some of it is responsive. I
run a grief group for activists. But it's relationship based,
you know, I don't. It's not just like anybody come
in here. You know, you know, you have to have
some love, love security so that people can be have
their full range of emotions. You know. I run something
on Sunday. It's called Pandemic Joy. It's like church, but
(35:40):
it's not church, you know, it's a secular We sing,
we meditate, We hear from people in the community, all
at the intersection of loss and leadership, joint justice, you know,
grief and gratitude. I do events. I just do them.
I'm actually I don't get paid to do any of that,
you know, starting to build resources for some future work,
(36:04):
you know, some research and writing a book. But you know,
up until this point, it's just odd just being I
just do what I want to do because I think
what's needed is what I needed, and so I figured
it's what somebody else needed to.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, there's that human at the core. Right as I'm
listening to you, I'm thinking, like this all sounds powerful
and amazing and necessary, and it is sort of looping
back to where we began our conversation. For me, it's
like we can't do any of that until we learn
(36:39):
to acknowledge the truth of somebody's grief without trying to
cheer them up or take it away from them. So
we go back to like acknowledgment as the core for me,
and that like that tender little spot at the moment
of dissolution if you are not met with somebody or
met with the skills to acknowledge the truth of your
(36:59):
own experience without being cheered up or talked out of
it or weaponized weaponizes maybe the wrong word here, but
like weaponized in service of the movement, Like there are
so many ways that that moment of loss and dissolution
can be influenced, and if we can't start from the
(37:25):
ground of everyone is sovereign in their own experience, and
our role is not to make them stop feeling it,
but to help them feel safe enough.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
To feel it like that is the work.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
The work isn't about erasing grief or using your grief
as fuel. It's how do we come to this both
intimate and universal experience and honor it in ourselves and
honor it in each other. And it's only from that
respect and acknowledgment that we can go in certain directions
(37:58):
it's true.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I want to be clear. I think grief is fuel,
whether you try to make it that or not. It
is governing you right one way or another. It's organizing
how you understand the world. It's organizing what choices you make.
The difference is when somebody tries to make it your fuel,
(38:20):
you know, when somebody tries to come in and direct
it for you, you know, it's not helpful, it's not healing
in the backfires. But but I'm really clear that every
social movement known to man has been fueled by grief.
You know, every social movement is a response to loss
of some kind, whether it's on the side of justice
(38:43):
or on the side of the status quo. And you know,
profit and privilege is still a reaction to some kind
of loss, real epacy. And so we I think for
us understanding that, understanding the role that that grief plays.
To me, it's like this, either we move toward agency
and action, or we move toward alienation and apathy. But
(39:08):
in any way you think about it, we definitely move.
Grief moves us.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Thank you for that. That's a good clarification that all
that grief is fuel in and of itself, and the
difference is do other people tell.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
You what to do with it?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
That's right?
Speaker 3 (39:21):
I mean this is like do other people tell you
what to do with your body? Do other people tell
you what to do with your that.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Like nah, manjo own damn business. But yeah, that that
you know from the outside, especially you know in these
sort of I'm going to use the word sensationalized death
and that's not really the word that I want, but
we'll roll with it.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Like these very public.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Deaths, let's put it that way, high profile, high profile.
Thank you for that phrase. That's more accurate like that
those high profile deaths, like the way that we greet
that is make meaning out of it, do something about it,
Start a movement, do a foundation, which you know, if
you if your person was killed by a drunk ever,
and a lot of the support you're going to get
(40:02):
back is like join Mothers against drunk driving, like advocate
for this. And you're like, I can't manage to bathe myself.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Can we talk about.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
That instead of like, right, push me to jump to
a movement. I think jumping to a quote unquote movement
is one of the ways that we bypass grief.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Well, let me say this, this is how I think
about it. But movements should actually be a place that
comes to your house and cleans your house, you know.
It should be a place that brings you some food.
You know, it should be a place that tastes come
take care of your kids when you are too too
broken to move about. It's not about not jumping to
(40:45):
a movement. Is that movement should be different, you know, movement, movement.
All the movement is is a community. All it is
if you're doing it right right, it's about belonging plus meaning.
That's it, you know, and then you move into action.
The thing is when we missed the belonging part. And
(41:05):
I hate when people talk about belonging because people be onesome, like, oh,
we just all need to be love each other and
blah blah blah. And I know that belonging is also
about power. I don't want to get that twisted. But
when you are trying to build power, you're trying to
build power to prevent future loss, you know, mechanized loss.
(41:26):
Loss that is the product of inequality, right, that is
the point. That's what movements are for. They are to
protect against and to prevent the kind of mass loss
that comes from inequality. They are to build something that
allows for that not to happen, and so they're necessary
(41:48):
in the grieving process. It's necessary, but it's not first.
The first thing is to be met with community. The
first thing should be, you know, I think to be
held in whatever place you're in, and that is where
we don't have infrastructure. Movements should have support groups where
(42:09):
they are, you know. In fact, that's part of the
difference between a Mother's against Drunk Driving and you know
a lot of the community organizing group says you join
Mothers against Drunk Driving, you will get a support group.
You join the you know, a lot of the fights
against gun violence, you're not going to see that. And
so like there's some interesting infrastructure that's just totally missing,
(42:30):
you know, Like I have not seen another specific support group.
I've seen very few rather support groups for activists, you know,
and I've seen very few places where activists can go
and engage with their grief. There are some places where
we are doing embodiment, which in some ways is about
(42:52):
being connecting in with authentic emotion, of authentic emotion of sorrow,
authentic experience and breed folks, who are are you in
the healing justice movement, you know, have been offering us,
you know, various ways of engaging with embodied grief, but
it still remains very individualized, you know. And how do
(43:14):
we move that into collective process? How do we move
from individual laws to individual grief, from individual grief to
collective grief, from collective grief to public mourning, from public
mourning to movement action. This is the process to me,
(43:35):
you know, But we missed the whole first part, you know,
we missed that. And that's what I hear you talked about.
That bypass is moving past the emotions, the strong emotions,
to the action. That doesn't work, But ignoring the action
also doesn't work. Right, We need both. We need both
in order for us to survive as a people. We
(43:57):
need both. I healed, I continue to heal, and I
don't even honestly believe in healing. Let me not use
that word. I move toward living. Every time I run
a group, every act of service for me helps me
move toward living. But in those acts of service, I
have to bring my wife with me. I have to
(44:17):
bring my mom with me. You know. I spent a
year after my wife died caring for my friend Siya,
who is also suffering from metastatic cancer. She died one
year after my wife. Did you know I spent the
months directly following my wife's death with partnering with my
sister and her friends to care for our god sister,
(44:39):
who also died just a few months after my wife died.
All of these are young black women, and in that
time frame, I mean, we lost so many people. None
of them to COVID or very few of them to COVID,
but we lost so many people. And the only way
to survive that is to be in community. The only
(45:03):
way to survive that is to do something, to feel
like you can do something about it, to transform the
conditions I produced it. So basically, I'm saying yes and yes,
we need to be in that space of authentic emotion.
We need to let people go through their process. We
need to meet people where they at. We need to say, yeah,
(45:24):
be sad, be everything that you are, and we need
to meet them with an opportunity for them to move
because stagnation that don't work either. You know that don't
work either. So figuring out what we can offer folks
that gives them a chance to connect to meaning as
well as a chance to connect to authentic emotion. That's
(45:45):
kind of how I engage with with that.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
I have so many things I want to talk about
with you, but I also want to be conscious of
our time. And you've kind of answered my closing question
in the course of our entire time together. But I'm
going to ask you because it's specific through your whole
life and through the inheritance of your mom and and
(46:09):
everything that you've been through, like you keep your eyes
and your heart open to things that, as we've talked
about in our time together, a lot of people like
to pretend don't exist right because it hurts too much.
Knowing what you know and living what you live the
things that you keep your eyes and your heart and
your hands in.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
What does hope look like for you?
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Well, I think it's funny because you know, my mom
named to be Malkiya Amala and that means queen of Hope.
Now I always say she got the gender wrong, but
she got the hope part right for me. You know,
we started this conversation about guilt about this feeling that
nothing can be done. Hope for me is the understanding
(46:55):
that not only can something always be done, something is
always being done. It is always being done. And I
just recently shared with folks that I love to look
at the moon. My wife loved the moon. She love
to walk in the moon and bathe in the moonlight.
And when I look at the moon, and I go
out to the ocean every full moon with some of
(47:18):
my friends that we drum and we sing. And one
of the reasons that I do that is because the
moon reminds me that life outlives me. And that is
what hope. Feels like that the understanding that life will
outlive me, and that feels good. Actually, you know, it
feels good to know both that what I do in
(47:39):
this time is significant and also insignificant both, and that
feels good to me. That feels like it's not so
important that I can, you know, destroy anything, but it's
important enough that I can't create something. I can leave
a mark and we all. My mom always used to
(48:03):
tell us like something about believing in the people. When
you ask her what her religion was, she would say,
my religion is the people. For a long time, I
didn't understand what that meant, but now I do. You know,
I don't care necessarily where I live, and I don't
(48:23):
care what issue I work on. I care about the people.
That's where my hope lives is in the is in
the ongoing nature of humanity. And I understand I'm a humanist,
but I also understand right. Power is real, privilege is real,
hierarchy is real, and we suffer under those conditions. But
at the end of it, or at the beginning of it,
(48:45):
however you want to think about it, I believe in people,
and that's where my hope lives. And that's what I
think about in terms of in terms of hope, believing
in each other, believing that that we have some thing
unique and beautiful to offer that death can't take away.
You know, our love survives us, and that's what I
(49:10):
believe in.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Thank you so much for being here. We didn't get
to talk about the Media Justice Center, but we'll link
to that in the show notes. Is there anywhere else
people should look for you or anything else you want
them to know about where to find you.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
You've mentioned Center for Media Justice, so you can find
more about that work at Media Justice dot org. I
am building a website eventually you'll find me at Radical
Loss dot org. But I'm on Twitter everywhere on social media.
I'm culture Jedi, you can find me. Find me there
and look for my book, you know, look for my books.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I cannot wait for your book. I will do my
best to not pester you every couple of weeks, like
when's your pubdate?
Speaker 3 (49:52):
When can I get it? Can I get an advant
reader copy?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
When is it coming?
Speaker 3 (49:54):
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Thank you so much for having me such a play thrilled?
Speaker 2 (50:00):
All right, everybody, stay tune for your questions to carry
with you. We'll be right back after this break and
I spend more time talking with Makiya off camera.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Be right back.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Each week. I leave you with some questions to carry
with you until we meet again. This episode, friends, I mean,
what didn't I carry with me from this episode? Everything
got to me. Everything was medicine. I wonder if it
unlocked a lot of things for some of you too.
(50:40):
You know. I always want to hear how you feel,
what you think about every episode, but for this one
in particular, I really want to know what your AHA
moments were? Did you like fill an entire notebook? What
happened for you during this conversation? I really want to know.
And if you're involved in some kind of social change movement,
would you let me know what it is and let
(51:01):
me know what you took from the knowledge and the
wisdom that Max shared with us. If you're graving a
personal loss, were you as moved by Max's love for
their wife as I was? I mean, the entire conversation
is something that I am going to carry with me
for my whole life.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
How about you?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
What stuck with you in this conversation. Everybody's going to
take something different from today's show, but I do hope
you've found something.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
To hold on too.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. You can also leave a review for a
show That is a fantastic way to share your thoughts
with me and to encourage others to listen. So reviews
a win win for everybody. Follow the show at It's
(51:55):
Okaypod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else. To
see video clips from the show, use the hashtag It's
Okay pod on all the platforms, so not only I
can find you, but others can too. None of us
are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about
that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're
(52:18):
in good company. That's it for this week. Remember to
subscribe to the show, leave a review for the show please,
and share the show with everybody you know. Coming up
next week. Gina Rossero, author of Horse Barbie, follow It's
Okay that You're Not Okay on all of your favorite
podcast platforms so you do not miss an episode. Want
(52:41):
more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my
dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that
we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all
that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is
an important skill for everyone. Whether you're trying to support
a friend going through a hard time, or you work
in the helping per professions, or you work in any
(53:02):
kind of social change movement. Get help to have better
conversations about grief with trainings, professional resources, and my best
selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus the
Guided Journal for Grief at Megandivine dot Co. It's okay
that You're not okay. The podcast is written and produced
by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co
(53:25):
produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical and social media support from Micah,
Post production and editing by the ever patient Houston Tilly.
Our intern this season is Hannah Goldman. Music provided by
Wave Crush and background noise provided by the perfectly timed
recycling truck
I think sometimes we love to focus in and get
mesmerized by the sorrow part of it. You know, we
get mesmerized by the problem. We stay limited to what hurts.
And I'll tell you this, a hurting person wants to
bond with other hurting people. But they also they're not
(00:22):
going to stay in a movement that is only dealing
with pain. They're going to stay in a movement that
actually moves.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, And I'm
your host, Meghan Devine. This week on the show, activist
and writer Malkia Devich Cyril on grief, love, and book bands,
among other things. This episode is stunning. It has gifts
for everyone, whether you're grieving a personal loss or you're
interested in what it really takes to create a safer, kinder,
(00:56):
more beautiful world. Settle in, everybody, and grab your notebok
or some other note taking device, because you will absolutely
need it right after this first break, before we get started,
one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional
(01:17):
relational territory in each and every episode, this show is
not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental
health provider or for professional supervision related to your work.
Hey friends, Okay, I know I have said this a
bunch of times already the season, but I'm saying it again.
The guests on this show have brought so much magic
(01:40):
and medicine into my life. I hope they're doing something
special for you too. Now, whether you're interested in social
justice or not, there is no denying the grief simmering
beneath the surface of everyday life. It's in our personal lives,
it's in the news, it's in our communities. But the
thing is, we never really talk about it. We don't
(02:01):
really talk about how much grief connects us. If we
learn to lean into that grief together, we might just
create the beautiful world we all long for. We literally
cannot get to that world without talking about grief. I've
said this for a long time, but it is actually true.
Not talking about grief is killing us. I first met
(02:26):
Today's guest through their article titled Grief Belongs in Social
Justice Movements. Malka Devich Cyril is a poet and a
media activist. They are the executive director of the Center
for Media Justice and a co founder of the Media
Action Grassroots Network. Their writings on media, race, justice, and
grief frequently appear in national publications such as Politico, The Guardian,
(02:49):
The Atlantic. We're going to link to some of those
show notes. Their work was also in the Oscar nominated
documentary film Thirteenth Now Malkia Knows Grief from the Inside Out.
They cared for their spouse, the comedian and editor Alana
Debit Cyril, through their death from cancer in twenty eighteen.
We spent a lot of time in this episode talking
(03:10):
about their relationship.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
And their love.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
We actually get a well timed message from Alana herself
during our conversation, so listen for that neat little drive by.
Another relationship that figures heavily into our conversation today is
Malchia's mother, Janet Cyril. Janet was an activist in the
Black Panther Party, So Malchia grew up surrounded by and
(03:32):
immersed in justice and social action, but also grief. Some
of that grief stemmed from the deaths in her community,
but it was also ever present in her mother's chronic illness.
You're going to hear about both of these women and
their effect on Malchia's life right at the top of
the show. I mean, we get into like really complex
nuanced issues in this episode, but we started, as all
(03:55):
good stories do, talking about love friends. I am not
exaggerating when I say that meeting Malchia, getting to spend
time with them talking about grief and love and justice
and the state of the world, it was one of
the highlights of my life. We all have a part
to play in this beautiful world, and I am so
(04:17):
glad Mac is here playing theirs. I am really interested
to hear what you think of this week's show, everybody.
It was a truly magical experience for me, and I
hope you love it too. Grief, love, action and belonging
happening right now with Malchia Davitch Sira.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Akia.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I am so happy to have you here with me today.
I was just saying before we started rolling that we've
followed each other on Twitter for a long time, so
I'm really glad to have you here with me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm psyched, okay, so getting ready for our time here together.
I was drawn into what people wrote and what you've
said about your relationship with your wife, Alana. There's so
much that I want to get into today about grief
and justice, and media and collective grief.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
But I would really like to start with love.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Always a good place to start.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I mean, I know it's a good place to start
because it chokes me up when I talk about it,
like so much of what I read of you, and
I promise everybody we're going to get into the background
so you know what I'm talking about here. But so
much of your writing is about grief and justice. One
of my favorite things about you as a writer and
(05:38):
you as a leader is that no matter how far
you go, no matter what kind of rant your writing
or what you're trying to teach about grief and justice,
you always come back to your wife.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
She and my mom are definitely the angers in my life,
and my greatest teacher is about grief. For sure.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
You kind of grew up with social justice with your
mom and Black Panthers, Like there's so much grief involved
in social justice. But was that grief evident to you
as you were growing up?
Speaker 1 (06:13):
You know, my mom besides being a founding member of
the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, my mom
also had sickle cell anemia, which is a genetic and
fatal disease. It did kill her at the age of
fifty nine. But also, you know, it's something that you
have from birth, So it's something that I knew about
(06:36):
her having my entire life. So between the grief that
is endemic to growing up black in America when mortality
rates are so high and violence against black people is
also so high, to the grief that comes with being
a member of a movement that is targeted in response
(06:59):
to those cans, to the grief that comes from having
a parent with a fatal illness that is absolutely going
to kill them, there was no question about that, And
the only question was when I think that I grew
up with grief all around me, And so I don't
see my experience with grief as separate from my experience
(07:22):
as a black person, or separate from my experience as
a movement leader, or or separate from my experience as
someone child. It's all kind of connected for me.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, Was it directly spoken about when you were a child,
all of those facets of grief.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I don't know that the word grief was ever used.
I think that my mom, for example, would say things like,
it's up to you what kind of life you want
to live. You know, these are our emotions, for what
we're talking about is actions. And so, you know, she
definitely taught me and my sister that sorrow and grief
(08:02):
were not the same thing. That sorrow isn't an emotion.
Grief is a set of activities and response to lass
and one is something that you don't really control. You
don't control your emotions, you have them. And the other
is something you do have some agency around and you
can have some choice in, which is how you respond
(08:24):
to the losses in your life. So she definitely played
a hand in helping me to understand what I think
grief is, you know, helping me to have some agency
and control. Because she was so focused on having agency
and control, she had to live with anticipatory grief, as
does anyone with a fatal illness. My wife, Alana, had
(08:48):
to struggle with the same same thing. And so, speaking
of Alana, my text messages are her voice saying I
love you so sorry I turned that off.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Now No, wait, did you just get a text message
with Alana's voice saying I love you?
Speaker 1 (09:06):
I mean hear that?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Okay, great, I couldn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
But how beautiful is that?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Right? When we're talking about grief and sorrow and agency
and sovereignty and all of these things. And then we
have your wife chiming in to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Say I love you.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I mean, that could not have been I love this
like this. That couldn't have been more beautifully timed.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Thank you, Alana.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, I love this idea of the difference between sorrow
and grief. I mean, I've been doing this work for
ten years now, and I don't think I've heard that distinction.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, I mean, I think for myself it was important
for me to separate those things out because one, I
think people believe that grief is sorrow, but in fact,
you know, my wife was a comedian, and when she
was in hospice, I would say I spent the vast
(10:03):
majority of the two years that my wife was aware
of her metastatic cancer trying to make her laugh. And
there was a lot of fun times in that, you know,
And there was a lot of laughter in that. I
mean when she was in hospice, when we were trying
to lift her on the Hoyer lift to use the restroom,
she requested that we sing theme songs from an eighties
(10:26):
comedy shows like The Brady Bunch, Facts of Life, Cheers,
and we sang those songs, we belted them out. See
that's grief too, you know. And especially if we're thinking
about grief in terms of its utility for social change,
we have to I think it's incumbent upon us to
(10:47):
understand as movement leaders that sorrow melancholia as actually it's
an important emotion to understand, But it's the transformation to teams,
engagement of that emotion and the acknowledgement that joy is
also present in grief. That's what becomes a motive force,
(11:10):
that's what becomes mobilizing energy. And so if we want,
if we want people's grief to turn into action, if
we wanted to transform into agency, we can't only engage
with it as sorrow. That's not gonna work, right.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
And that's different from that like binary of you're all
healed and everything is ducky and you find the gifts
in what's happened to you versus like collapsed in a
corner in despair. I think, especially if you've just lost
somebody or you just received a devastating diagnosis, it could
be easy to hear what you just said as don't
(11:48):
stay in sorrow, don't stay sad, make something out of it,
And that's actually not what I hear you.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Say, not at all. In fact, I'm sad every day,
you know, and I will be sad for the rest
of my life. And I think that any black person
in America is sad most days. I think that you
can't be an immigrant in this country and not be sad.
You know. The sadness is a critical, crucial part of
(12:14):
acknowledging the reality of our conditions. So I believe in sorrow,
I believe in the night. I am one hundred percent
a fan of the truth. I think that the difference
is that joy is also the truth, and there's you know,
the point is not to exclude sorrow. It's to include joy,
it's to include anger. It's to allow ourselves the full
(12:37):
range of what acknowledging loss means. When I think of
my mom, she lost her life at fifty nine years old.
She was a brilliant, beautiful woman who has survived so much.
And there's nothing sadder to me except another brilliant, beautiful woman,
my wife, losing her life at forty two. And yet
(12:58):
these were funny women, are women with strength and bigor
and brilliance, And so I just want the whole story,
that's all. And I think as a as a strategist
and as a movement leader, and as the left, I
think sometimes we love to focus in and get mesmerized
(13:19):
by the sorrow part of it. You know, we get
mesmerized by the problem, you know what I mean, We
stay limited to what hurts. And I'll tell you this,
a hurting person wants to bond with other hurting people.
But they also they're not going to stay in a
movement that is only dealing with pain. They're going to
(13:42):
stay in a movement that actually moves. They need a
movement that moves. And so that's kind of what I'm
what I'm what I'm talking about is grief. That is
the full range of our responses to LASS, and not
just a limited, singular, binary response.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I want to get into a specific thing here. It's funny,
like some of my questions were about social justice and
some of them were about personal loss, and I kind
of knew coming into this that those are the same thing, right,
But I love that in just a few short minutes
you have erased many of my questions.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
That is.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
A sign of some brilliance there, and I so appreciate
the ways that you include everything in the ways that
you speak personal and collective. After your mom died, you
wrote the incongruence between working daily to heal the world
but being unable to save my mother's life was powered
by the illusion of my control over life and death,
(14:46):
an entire worldview centered on my failure. Yes, can you
tell me what you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You know from my deeply personal experience both watching my
mom sick and die and why ching my wife Alana
sick and die. You know, if I as an organizer,
you know you're trained to take action. You know, in fact,
the whole point is mobilizing your agency and developing the
(15:13):
agency of others because you believe that something can be done.
That is the entire analysis behind the strategy of organizing
something can be done to confront illness that is absolutely
going to lead to death. Nothing can be done, Nothing
(15:35):
can be done. That's the feeling anyway, It's actually not
the total reality, but the feeling is death is the
strongest boundary the world has to offer, you know, and
it cannot be violated, It will not be violated. And
so this feeling that I tried so hard, you know
(15:56):
that I that I did everything that I could to
try to extend my mom's life. My sister did too.
I did everything I could to try to extend my
wife's life and I couldn't do it. Or then again,
maybe I did do it. You know, we'll never know
what the original what the real date was supposed to
be or whatever. But that's the feeling, right that I
(16:18):
tried and failed. And that's a perspective, you know, that's
a way of thinking. I know it's not wholly true,
but it is how it feels.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
This is something that's so common I think for people,
this sense of failure. Yeah, right, that I did everything
I could and it wasn't enough and this is my fault, right,
And I love I love how you framed that, that
this is a feeling and it's real and it's not
the whole story. And I think what we tend to
(16:49):
do when we hear somebody say I failed is talk
them out of that failure.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yes, And I hate that. It doesn't want to be
talked out of my feelings period. And also it's it's respectful.
It's like, I'm intelligent, I'm very clear. It's a feeling
and not a fact. I know that, but nevertheless, it's
what's happening, you know, that's what's happening. And I prefer
to be met, and I think most people prefer to
be met in their greed then persuaded out of it.
(17:16):
And like you said, it doesn't work to be persuaded anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
It's just it makes people feel misunderstood, yes, right. And
as a support person, as somebody who cares, that feels counterintuitive, right, Like,
if you think that your job is to make somebody
feel better, basically, then you were going to talk them
out of their own truth and their own feelings. And
that's ineffective.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Think about that on a on a more global scale.
Think about that in terms of strategy, in terms of
narrative strategy. You know, if you, as a left narrative strategist,
are saying, you know, instead of acknowledging the terror that
folks are experiencing around gun violence, around crime, going to
(18:00):
only talk about the systemic aspects of that, what you're
really doing is trying to persuade people out of their grief,
out of their fear, out of their out of their
authentic emotions, and move them with that kind of persuasion.
It doesn't it doesn't. It's not effective, you know, it's
not effective. And I think ultimately we just don't understand it. Grief,
(18:23):
you know, we don't understand it, and it messes with
our strategy, It messes with our relationships, you know, and
it messes with us our inside, you know.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Okay, before we get back to my conversation with Nolkia,
I want to talk to the therapists, social workers, nurses,
and other people in the helping professions for a second.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
No matter what you focus on in your practice, you
are going to encounter grief.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Anywhere there are humans, there is grief.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Now. The problem is that most people aren't really sure
how to work with it when it shows up in
the room. I mean, the state of grief education is lacking.
Let's just say to be gentle about it. If you
want to know how to be truly helpful to people
grieving any kind of loss. Spots are still available in
my six month Grief Care Intensive training. There's even a
(19:25):
unit on grief and social change, which includes many of
the topics we explored in this episode. Today, there's a
unit on working in grief in special populations, including gun violence,
hate crimes, and natural disasters.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
If you work with.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Humans, grief is always in the room in some form,
and these are the conditions that you need to learn
how to address with skill. So come learn those skills
that you need to work with grief. This six month
training is designed for people in the helping professions, but
you don't have to be a therapist to join. This
training session begins on September fourth, twenty twenty three, So
(19:58):
if you are listening to this episode later or you
can't start with us in September, check back for it
because we're planning to run this training once a year
or so. All of the information about this six month
grief care intensive training is at the registration link in
the show notes to this episode, and you can also
find the link in my Instagram bio at Refuge in Grief. Okay,
(20:21):
let's get back to my conversation with activist Malkiya Devich. Cyril,
you bring up a really cool point here. You know,
if we just focus on gun violence for a second,
when a new public gun violence events very predictably irrupts,
and you know, people who care about.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
This issue are quick to jump on social media and.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Be like, show the pictures, do this, do that? And
like this is so important, we have to do something
and make people understand. And I feel like another casualty
in that are the people's whose kid was just shot,
whose sister was just killed, Like yes, yes, we jump
to justice, and how will we change this and make
(21:07):
it stop? And I think we leapfrog over the intimate
in those situations.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
What we're leapfrogging over is belonging, you know, And and
the issue here is this, you know, honestly, there's a
reason why in these moments, after the shooting of black
folk in Buffalo at the supermarket, or you know, after
after you know, the shooting in of Valde you know,
(21:36):
of these beautiful children, or after the millions of people
who died from COVID, you know that these very organic
parent led or survivor led actions and organizations evolved. You know,
you have these these parents now, you know, who are
very vocal in social media, very vocal on the news,
(22:00):
and yet there is a disconnect between them and social movements.
We organize social movements, and I think the disconnect is
a grief disconnect. You have these folks who are passionately responding,
and some of them are very vocal about specific policy changes.
They want to see something happen, you know, they want to,
(22:20):
as part of their own healing, protect other children and
other people from what has happened to their child or
their loved one. But there's a reason why they're not
necessarily involved in an organized social movement because the movement
is not prepared to pause and do the part that's
about belonging, do the part that's about listening, and that's
(22:42):
about building relationship and intimacy, that's about engaging in that
collective grief process, or institutionalizing even a collective grief process
into the organization. None of that is happening. What's happening
is the policy fight, you know, and then you then
you shrink, diminish, and in my view, disrespect a complex,
(23:07):
painful experience. You shrink it into a spokesperson a sound bite,
and that is not respectful and it's not appropriate. But
also it's bad strategy. It's bad narrative strategy, it's bad
organizing strategy. And I think we can do better, and
we would do better if organizationally, we had new ways
(23:30):
to embody grief as leaders and as institutions.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This is part of your your radical loss project, right,
what you're talking about. What you're describing right now is
there's the project is about giving activists and movement organizations
what we need to catalyze grief for change. That's the
work that you're doing to mobilize what you just described, right,
like bringing grief and belonging and finding new ways to
(23:58):
acknowledge that grief as a way to power change instead
of the leap to a spokesperson that we see.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I'm fascinated by this and I love you and your
work so much and I don't know nearly enough about
it what I hear you saying or the way that
I understand that in my head, the image I have
is like you're putting the wheels on the bus, right,
Like we started out talking like I think in pictures,
but this like, if we want the world that we
(24:31):
long for to come into being, we have to find
a way to grieve together strategically and humanly.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I think it boils down to this, right. Yeah, So
either as a people we lean into the truth of
our loss and we lean into grief together. Either we
do that, and what we get from that is we
get true citizenship, we get a new social contract, we
(25:05):
get new ways of being a community. We get people
who if you acknowledge loss, then you're going to think
about the criminal justice system differently. If you acknowledge loss,
you're going to think about the foster care system differently.
If you acknowledge loss, well, you're going to actually think
about the south and reparations differently. You know, like it
(25:26):
changes your entire worldview to honestly and profoundly and authentically
acknowledge loss and be in a grief process. Grief is
a political process. Grief is inherently about our ability to
govern ourselves. You know, we can only govern ourselves who
(25:47):
we're rooted in reality in the truth and loss is
the truth of the world. And so or or we
can go a different direction. We can go the direction
that the right has gone in this country, which is
that we erect monuments to maintain a fixed focus on
the past. We want to hold on to the way
things used to be. We want to hold on to
(26:10):
the status quo of power relations. Because we refuse to
engage with loss, We reject loss as a part of life.
We maintain privilege as a protection against loss, and our
whole racial hierarchy and dynamic is a fight between producing
(26:30):
loss for some and protecting from loss for others. And
so I think that if we could actually understand grief differently,
if we could learn to grieve differently, it's not just
about our personal healing and well being. We're talking about
the transformation and healing of a nation, of a world,
the transition of power relations We're talking about new ways
(26:52):
of understanding history. In fact, book Bannings are all about
ignoring grief. They're all about saying, I don't want you
to I don't want to think about that. That's a
denial of grief, is what that is. I don't want
to acknowledge that I or anyone in my ancestry participated
in the taking of life, the destroying of life. There
(27:18):
is a denial of grief. And so this is a
more spiritual journey, but it is also a political journey.
And so I just that's kind of like my work
is about understanding that relationship. It's about then transitioning that
understanding into new ways of organizing, new forms of organization,
(27:42):
new strategies. As we confront what is a growing emerging
fascism here in the United States and around the world,
we are set for extreme loss of life we are
going to see extreme loss of life. If we don't
understand grief as a part of our change strategy, we
will not be ready. We will not be ready. And
(28:03):
the kind of governing systems that emerge during extreme loss
of life can either be radically focused on living. There
will be living, after all, or they can be radically
focused on denying that living and denying that grief, and
that is fascism. So those are our choices. And grief
(28:27):
is right at is the pivot point.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I need a second because I don't know if you
noticed it, and certainly in the recording no one can tell.
But this is life saving to me that the way
that I view the world is like grief is that
pivot point. Right, Grief is that Rosetta stone that unlocks
(28:52):
the beautiful world and the just worlds, and refusing to
feel with each other creates the violent, disconnected world. And
it's interesting, like I'm preparing for another conversation later today
and this idea that we're recording, this conversation during Pride
(29:16):
Month and the hatred against the queer community and the
trans community.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Especially queer people of color. It's like you see yourself.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Reflected in someone and you hate that reflection, and it
causes emotions, It causes sensations, it causes feelings, And because
we don't have a structure within which to be tender
to ourselves, within which to listen to those swirling emotions,
(29:48):
we otherize them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
We destroy the thing that makes us feel discomfort in
our own beings. And we're like so unaware of the
mirror of the world and so ill equipped to greet
our own stew of emotions with kindness and tenderness and
(30:11):
curiosity that it's like the only option we've made available
to us is to destroy that which makes us feel it.
That's right, And we don't have those conversations, right. I
think that sometimes we say, like, oh, you know, if
you're so angry at this queer person, you're a closet
queer person. Like, okay, that may be accurate, but it's
(30:32):
also like assaultive language. How do we even begin to
build collective structures for engaging with grief our own and
the grief of the world in a way that furthers
the world that we long for?
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I mean, I think ultimately the organizing strategy is about
engaging with people at the point of pain, and many
people who believe in justice and who seek a more
just future tend to engage more at the point of
promise and like, this is what could be, and we
(31:09):
believe in that vision. And that's beautiful and I love that,
you know, and people do need alternatives and we do
need to offer new ways of seeing the world. But
you know, people go to church, they go to the doctor,
they go to these opioid clinics, they go to twelve
(31:32):
step programs. People go to places certain places because they
are in pain, and it is at those places that
the right shows up. In fact, after a natural disaster,
you know, there are many cities and towns across this
country when people are reeling from tremendous loss of life.
(31:55):
They have no water, they have no electricity. It is
right when militsia that are driving around in trucks to
deliver gas, to deliver water. Because there is something that
is understood about strategy, which is, you know, in these
moments of breakdown, this is when you can reorganize the world.
(32:18):
And grief loss, I'll say, is a moment of breakdown
when you lose someone, when your reality breaks because someone
who was in your life no longer is, they're not
in the world. They're gone. Reality breaks. There's a somatic
meltdown almost right that you go through. You are ripe
(32:41):
or human reorganization, yes, and either you can be reorganized
by your own hopes, your own dreams. You can be
reorganized by meaning that comes from a movement that is
about your greatest good, you know, that is about belonging,
(33:02):
that is about your safety, that is about your dignity.
Or you can be reorganized by profit. You can be
reorganized by privilege. You can be reorganized by rage. Organizing
at the point of pain means that you are going
to be standing in the suffering and being part of
(33:24):
the reorganization whatever that looks like. You know, for me,
that is something that that I believe we find it
difficult to do. You know, progressive movements have not always
found that easy to do. But I think that's why
doctor King went from city to city. Why you know
when he was assassinated, he was going to be organizing
(33:48):
with the garbage strike, because you go to organize at
the point of pain and engage and build the meaning
at that point, right, And that's why you know who
wrote that book about the role of meaning and I
don't remember who wrote that book. But yeah, about the
role of meaning grief, and that to me is something
(34:10):
that as an organizer I have to understand and we've
done that to some degree. You know, every time a
black person is killed by the police, there is a
set of people that goes to that city, you know,
that sits with those parents, that engages you know. But
have we built a movement of grief parents. No, we haven't.
(34:34):
And there's consequences to that. We've seen those parents picked
off move to the right. We've seen how influx of
resources can you know, create harm and and dissonance amongst
believed peoples. I guess what I'm saying is the right
knows full well that grief is a terrain for organizing,
(34:56):
that grief is a terrain for strategy. The question is
do we know it? Do we know it? Does everybody else?
Because if we knew it, I think we could use
what we know to even break down the partisan the
partisan barriers. You know, everybody grieves, we all face lost.
The question is what is our organized response to it.
(35:17):
That's what I'm trying to figure out. A lot of
my work is experimentation, some of it is responsive. I
run a grief group for activists. But it's relationship based,
you know, I don't. It's not just like anybody come
in here. You know, you know, you have to have
some love, love security so that people can be have
their full range of emotions. You know. I run something
on Sunday. It's called Pandemic Joy. It's like church, but
(35:40):
it's not church, you know, it's a secular We sing,
we meditate, We hear from people in the community, all
at the intersection of loss and leadership, joint justice, you know,
grief and gratitude. I do events. I just do them.
I'm actually I don't get paid to do any of that,
you know, starting to build resources for some future work,
(36:04):
you know, some research and writing a book. But you know,
up until this point, it's just odd just being I
just do what I want to do because I think
what's needed is what I needed, and so I figured
it's what somebody else needed to.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, there's that human at the core. Right as I'm
listening to you, I'm thinking, like this all sounds powerful
and amazing and necessary, and it is sort of looping
back to where we began our conversation. For me, it's
like we can't do any of that until we learn
(36:39):
to acknowledge the truth of somebody's grief without trying to
cheer them up or take it away from them. So
we go back to like acknowledgment as the core for me,
and that like that tender little spot at the moment
of dissolution if you are not met with somebody or
met with the skills to acknowledge the truth of your
(36:59):
own experience without being cheered up or talked out of
it or weaponized weaponizes maybe the wrong word here, but
like weaponized in service of the movement, Like there are
so many ways that that moment of loss and dissolution
can be influenced, and if we can't start from the
(37:25):
ground of everyone is sovereign in their own experience, and
our role is not to make them stop feeling it,
but to help them feel safe enough.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
To feel it like that is the work.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
The work isn't about erasing grief or using your grief
as fuel. It's how do we come to this both
intimate and universal experience and honor it in ourselves and
honor it in each other. And it's only from that
respect and acknowledgment that we can go in certain directions
(37:58):
it's true.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I want to be clear. I think grief is fuel,
whether you try to make it that or not. It
is governing you right one way or another. It's organizing
how you understand the world. It's organizing what choices you make.
The difference is when somebody tries to make it your fuel,
(38:20):
you know, when somebody tries to come in and direct
it for you, you know, it's not helpful, it's not healing
in the backfires. But but I'm really clear that every
social movement known to man has been fueled by grief.
You know, every social movement is a response to loss
of some kind, whether it's on the side of justice
(38:43):
or on the side of the status quo. And you know,
profit and privilege is still a reaction to some kind
of loss, real epacy. And so we I think for
us understanding that, understanding the role that that grief plays.
To me, it's like this, either we move toward agency
and action, or we move toward alienation and apathy. But
(39:08):
in any way you think about it, we definitely move.
Grief moves us.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Thank you for that. That's a good clarification that all
that grief is fuel in and of itself, and the
difference is do other people tell.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
You what to do with it?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
That's right?
Speaker 3 (39:21):
I mean this is like do other people tell you
what to do with your body? Do other people tell
you what to do with your that.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Like nah, manjo own damn business. But yeah, that that
you know from the outside, especially you know in these
sort of I'm going to use the word sensationalized death
and that's not really the word that I want, but
we'll roll with it.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Like these very public.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Deaths, let's put it that way, high profile, high profile.
Thank you for that phrase. That's more accurate like that
those high profile deaths, like the way that we greet
that is make meaning out of it, do something about it,
Start a movement, do a foundation, which you know, if
you if your person was killed by a drunk ever,
and a lot of the support you're going to get
(40:02):
back is like join Mothers against drunk driving, like advocate
for this. And you're like, I can't manage to bathe myself.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Can we talk about.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
That instead of like, right, push me to jump to
a movement. I think jumping to a quote unquote movement
is one of the ways that we bypass grief.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Well, let me say this, this is how I think
about it. But movements should actually be a place that
comes to your house and cleans your house, you know.
It should be a place that brings you some food.
You know, it should be a place that tastes come
take care of your kids when you are too too
broken to move about. It's not about not jumping to
(40:45):
a movement. Is that movement should be different, you know, movement, movement.
All the movement is is a community. All it is
if you're doing it right right, it's about belonging plus meaning.
That's it, you know, and then you move into action.
The thing is when we missed the belonging part. And
(41:05):
I hate when people talk about belonging because people be onesome, like, oh,
we just all need to be love each other and
blah blah blah. And I know that belonging is also
about power. I don't want to get that twisted. But
when you are trying to build power, you're trying to
build power to prevent future loss, you know, mechanized loss.
(41:26):
Loss that is the product of inequality, right, that is
the point. That's what movements are for. They are to
protect against and to prevent the kind of mass loss
that comes from inequality. They are to build something that
allows for that not to happen, and so they're necessary
(41:48):
in the grieving process. It's necessary, but it's not first.
The first thing is to be met with community. The
first thing should be, you know, I think to be
held in whatever place you're in, and that is where
we don't have infrastructure. Movements should have support groups where
(42:09):
they are, you know. In fact, that's part of the
difference between a Mother's against Drunk Driving and you know
a lot of the community organizing group says you join
Mothers against Drunk Driving, you will get a support group.
You join the you know, a lot of the fights
against gun violence, you're not going to see that. And
so like there's some interesting infrastructure that's just totally missing,
(42:30):
you know, Like I have not seen another specific support group.
I've seen very few rather support groups for activists, you know,
and I've seen very few places where activists can go
and engage with their grief. There are some places where
we are doing embodiment, which in some ways is about
(42:52):
being connecting in with authentic emotion, of authentic emotion of sorrow,
authentic experience and breed folks, who are are you in
the healing justice movement, you know, have been offering us,
you know, various ways of engaging with embodied grief, but
it still remains very individualized, you know. And how do
(43:14):
we move that into collective process? How do we move
from individual laws to individual grief, from individual grief to
collective grief, from collective grief to public mourning, from public
mourning to movement action. This is the process to me,
(43:35):
you know, But we missed the whole first part, you know,
we missed that. And that's what I hear you talked about.
That bypass is moving past the emotions, the strong emotions,
to the action. That doesn't work, But ignoring the action
also doesn't work. Right, We need both. We need both
in order for us to survive as a people. We
(43:57):
need both. I healed, I continue to heal, and I
don't even honestly believe in healing. Let me not use
that word. I move toward living. Every time I run
a group, every act of service for me helps me
move toward living. But in those acts of service, I
have to bring my wife with me. I have to
(44:17):
bring my mom with me. You know. I spent a
year after my wife died caring for my friend Siya,
who is also suffering from metastatic cancer. She died one
year after my wife. Did you know I spent the
months directly following my wife's death with partnering with my
sister and her friends to care for our god sister,
(44:39):
who also died just a few months after my wife died.
All of these are young black women, and in that
time frame, I mean, we lost so many people. None
of them to COVID or very few of them to COVID,
but we lost so many people. And the only way
to survive that is to be in community. The only
(45:03):
way to survive that is to do something, to feel
like you can do something about it, to transform the
conditions I produced it. So basically, I'm saying yes and yes,
we need to be in that space of authentic emotion.
We need to let people go through their process. We
need to meet people where they at. We need to say, yeah,
(45:24):
be sad, be everything that you are, and we need
to meet them with an opportunity for them to move
because stagnation that don't work either. You know that don't
work either. So figuring out what we can offer folks
that gives them a chance to connect to meaning as
well as a chance to connect to authentic emotion. That's
(45:45):
kind of how I engage with with that.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
I have so many things I want to talk about
with you, but I also want to be conscious of
our time. And you've kind of answered my closing question
in the course of our entire time together. But I'm
going to ask you because it's specific through your whole
life and through the inheritance of your mom and and
(46:09):
everything that you've been through, like you keep your eyes
and your heart open to things that, as we've talked
about in our time together, a lot of people like
to pretend don't exist right because it hurts too much.
Knowing what you know and living what you live the
things that you keep your eyes and your heart and
your hands in.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
What does hope look like for you?
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Well, I think it's funny because you know, my mom
named to be Malkiya Amala and that means queen of Hope.
Now I always say she got the gender wrong, but
she got the hope part right for me. You know,
we started this conversation about guilt about this feeling that
nothing can be done. Hope for me is the understanding
(46:55):
that not only can something always be done, something is
always being done. It is always being done. And I
just recently shared with folks that I love to look
at the moon. My wife loved the moon. She love
to walk in the moon and bathe in the moonlight.
And when I look at the moon, and I go
out to the ocean every full moon with some of
(47:18):
my friends that we drum and we sing. And one
of the reasons that I do that is because the
moon reminds me that life outlives me. And that is
what hope. Feels like that the understanding that life will
outlive me, and that feels good. Actually, you know, it
feels good to know both that what I do in
(47:39):
this time is significant and also insignificant both, and that
feels good to me. That feels like it's not so
important that I can, you know, destroy anything, but it's
important enough that I can't create something. I can leave
a mark and we all. My mom always used to
(48:03):
tell us like something about believing in the people. When
you ask her what her religion was, she would say,
my religion is the people. For a long time, I
didn't understand what that meant, but now I do. You know,
I don't care necessarily where I live, and I don't
(48:23):
care what issue I work on. I care about the people.
That's where my hope lives is in the is in
the ongoing nature of humanity. And I understand I'm a humanist,
but I also understand right. Power is real, privilege is real,
hierarchy is real, and we suffer under those conditions. But
at the end of it, or at the beginning of it,
(48:45):
however you want to think about it, I believe in people,
and that's where my hope lives. And that's what I
think about in terms of in terms of hope, believing
in each other, believing that that we have some thing
unique and beautiful to offer that death can't take away.
You know, our love survives us, and that's what I
(49:10):
believe in.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Thank you so much for being here. We didn't get
to talk about the Media Justice Center, but we'll link
to that in the show notes. Is there anywhere else
people should look for you or anything else you want
them to know about where to find you.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
You've mentioned Center for Media Justice, so you can find
more about that work at Media Justice dot org. I
am building a website eventually you'll find me at Radical
Loss dot org. But I'm on Twitter everywhere on social media.
I'm culture Jedi, you can find me. Find me there
and look for my book, you know, look for my books.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I cannot wait for your book. I will do my
best to not pester you every couple of weeks, like
when's your pubdate?
Speaker 3 (49:52):
When can I get it? Can I get an advant
reader copy?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
When is it coming?
Speaker 3 (49:54):
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Thank you so much for having me such a play thrilled?
Speaker 2 (50:00):
All right, everybody, stay tune for your questions to carry
with you. We'll be right back after this break and
I spend more time talking with Makiya off camera.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Be right back.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Each week. I leave you with some questions to carry
with you until we meet again. This episode, friends, I mean,
what didn't I carry with me from this episode? Everything
got to me. Everything was medicine. I wonder if it
unlocked a lot of things for some of you too.
(50:40):
You know. I always want to hear how you feel,
what you think about every episode, but for this one
in particular, I really want to know what your AHA
moments were? Did you like fill an entire notebook? What
happened for you during this conversation? I really want to know.
And if you're involved in some kind of social change movement,
would you let me know what it is and let
(51:01):
me know what you took from the knowledge and the
wisdom that Max shared with us. If you're graving a
personal loss, were you as moved by Max's love for
their wife as I was? I mean, the entire conversation
is something that I am going to carry with me
for my whole life.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
How about you?
Speaker 2 (51:23):
What stuck with you in this conversation. Everybody's going to
take something different from today's show, but I do hope
you've found something.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
To hold on too.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. You can also leave a review for a
show That is a fantastic way to share your thoughts
with me and to encourage others to listen. So reviews
a win win for everybody. Follow the show at It's
(51:55):
Okaypod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else. To
see video clips from the show, use the hashtag It's
Okay pod on all the platforms, so not only I
can find you, but others can too. None of us
are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about
that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're
(52:18):
in good company. That's it for this week. Remember to
subscribe to the show, leave a review for the show please,
and share the show with everybody you know. Coming up
next week. Gina Rossero, author of Horse Barbie, follow It's
Okay that You're Not Okay on all of your favorite
podcast platforms so you do not miss an episode. Want
(52:41):
more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my
dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that
we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all
that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is
an important skill for everyone. Whether you're trying to support
a friend going through a hard time, or you work
in the helping per professions, or you work in any
(53:02):
kind of social change movement. Get help to have better
conversations about grief with trainings, professional resources, and my best
selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus the
Guided Journal for Grief at Megandivine dot Co. It's okay
that You're not okay. The podcast is written and produced
by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co
(53:25):
produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical and social media support from Micah,
Post production and editing by the ever patient Houston Tilly.
Our intern this season is Hannah Goldman. Music provided by
Wave Crush and background noise provided by the perfectly timed
recycling truck
Host
Megan Devine
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