March 18, 2024 • 52 mins
There’s no denying the grief that permeates everyday life. It’s in the news, in our communities, and in our personal lives. The thing is - we never really talk about how much this grief connects us.
This episode is STUNNING. It has gifts for everyone - whether you’re grieving a personal loss or you’re an activist of any kind. It was recorded in the summer of 2023, so you will not hear us mention P*lestine - you can bet if we’d recorded it now, that grief, and that need for belonging, would be present.
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. 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.
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)
Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
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
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. Their writing has appeared in publications like Politico, Motherboard, Essence Magazine, The Atlantic, and three documentary films including the Oscar nominated 13th. Find them at @radical_loss Instagram.
About Megan:
Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief
Additional resources:
Read “The Antidote to Authoritarianism” from The Atlantic
Read Grief Belongs in Social Movements: We Embrace it?
Want to talk with Megan directly
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.
Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance.
(01:19):
I am on break working on a giant new project,
so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from
the first three seasons of the show. Some of these
conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and
some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you
capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover
a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together,
(01:41):
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Take what you learn here, take your
thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk
about it. Hey friends, Okay, now I have said this
a bunch of times already the season, but I'm saying
(02:03):
it again. The guests on this show have brought so
much magic 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.
(02:24):
But the thing is, we never really talk about it.
We don't 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
(02:46):
actually true. Not talking about grief is killing us. I
first met today's guests through their article titled Grief Belongs
in Social Justice Movements. Malchia de Cyril is a poet
and a media activist. They are the executive director of
the Center for Media Justice and a co founder of
(03:06):
the Media Action Grassroots Network. Their writings on media, race, justice,
and grief frequently appear in national publications such as Politico,
The Guardian, 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 Malka Knows Grief from
the Inside Out. They cared for their spouse, the comedian
(03:30):
and editor Alana Debt Cyril, through their death from cancer
in twenty eighteen. We spent a lot of time in
this episode talking about their relationship and their love. 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
(03:51):
Malchia's mother, Janet Cyril Janet was an activist in the
Black Panther Party, So Malchia grew up surrounded by and
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
(04:12):
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
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
(04:35):
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
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
(05:01):
happening right now with Malchia Davitch Sira Okaiya. I am
so happy to have you here with me today. I
was just saying before we started rolling that we followed
each other on Twitter for a long time. So I'm
really glad to have you here with me.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
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, Aalana.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
There's so much that I want.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
To get into today about grief and justice and media
and collective grief, but I would really like to start
with love.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Always a good place to start.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:05):
you as a leader is that no matter how far
you go, no matter what kind of rant you're writing
or what you're trying to teach about grief and justice,
you always come back to your wife.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
She and my mom are definitely the anchors in my life,
and my greatest teacher is about grief.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
For sure, 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 (06:40):
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
(07:03):
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
(07:26):
to those conditions, 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
(07:49):
as a black person, or separate from my experience as
a movement leader, or separate from my experience as soone child.
It's all kind of connected for me.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, was it directly spoken about when you were a child,
all of those facets of grief.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
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 emotions, but what we're
talking about is actions, and so you know, she definitely
taught me and my sister that sorrow and grief were
(08:29):
not the same thing. That sorrow isn't an emotion. Grief
is a set of activities and response to laws. 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 to
(08:51):
the losses in your life. So she definitely played a
hand in helping me to understand what I think grief
is 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
(09:12):
a fatal illness. My wife, Alana had struggle with the
same same thing and so so. Speaking of Alana, my
text messages are her voice saying I love you. So
sorry I turned that off.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Now, wait, did you just get a text message with
Alana's voice saying I love you?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I mean hear that? Okay, great, I couldn't hear it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
But how beautiful is that? 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 say I love you. I mean that could not
have been I love this like this. That couldn't have
been more beautifully timed. Thank you, Alana. Yes, I love
(09:57):
this idea of the difference between 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 (10:09):
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
(10:30):
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 eighties comedy
(10:53):
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 understand
(11:14):
as movement leaders that sorrow melancholia is actually it's an
important emotion to understand. But it's the transformation that's engagement
of that emotion and the acknowledgment that joy is also
present in grief. That's what becomes a motive force, that's
(11:37):
what becomes mobilizing energy. And so if we want, if
we want people's grief to turn into action, if we
want it to transform into agency, we can't only engage
with it at sorrow. That's not gonna work.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Right, 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
(12:14):
don't stay in sorrow, don't stay sad, make something out
of it. And that's actually not what I hear you say.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
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
(12:41):
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 is to
include joy, it's to include anger. It's to allow ourselves
(13:03):
the full 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 these were funny women. These
(13:26):
are women with strength and bigger and brilliance, and so
I just want the whole story, that's all. And I think,
as a strategist and as a movement leader, and as
the Left, I think sometimes we love to focus in
and get mesmerized by the sorrow part of it. You know,
(13:47):
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
(14:09):
stay in a movement that actually moves. They need a
movement that moves. And so that's kind of what I'm
when 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 (14:28):
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.
(14:50):
That is that is 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
(15:12):
over life and death, an entire worldview centered on my failure. Yes,
can you tell me what you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You know, from my deeply personal experience both watching my
mom sick and die and watching 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
(15:40):
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
(16:02):
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 that I tried so hard, you
(16:23):
know 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
(16:45):
tried and failed. And that's a perspective, you know, that's
a that's a way of thinking. I know it's not
wholly true, but it is how it feels.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
This is something that's so common I think for people,
the say 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 frame that that
this is a feeling and it's real and it's not
the whole story. And I think what we tend to
(17:16):
do when we hear somebody say I failed is talk
them out of that failure.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yes, And I hate that it doesn't work. We talked
out of my feelings period. And also it's disrespectful. 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 and
(17:40):
agreed then persuaded out of it. And like you said,
it doesn't work to be persuaded anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
It's just it makes people feel misunderstood.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
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, it basically then you
were going to talk them out of their own truth
and their own feelings. And that's ineffective.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Think about that 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, we're going to only
(18:27):
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
(18:49):
it grief, 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. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Okay, let's get back to this honestly amazing conversation with
Malchia da Vitch Cyrol.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
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 this issue are
quick to jump on social media and be like, show
the pictures, do this, do that, and like this is
(19:40):
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 it stop? I think we leapfrog over the
(20:04):
intimate in those situations.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
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,
(20:28):
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,
(20:51):
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,
(21:12):
as part of their own healing, protect other children, 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 about building
(21:35):
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 then you shrink, diminish, and in
(21:55):
my view, disrespect a complex, 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
(22:15):
think we can do better, and we would do better
if organizationally, we had new ways to embody grief as
leaders and as institutions.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
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
(22:50):
acknowledge that grief as a way to power change instead
of the leap to a spokesperson that we see.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
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 long for to
(23:23):
come into being, we have to find a way to
grieve together strategically and humanly.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
I think it boils down to this, right.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
So either as a people we lean into the truth
of our lost 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,
(23:56):
we 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
(24:17):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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
(25:22):
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
(25:44):
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 any when in my ancestry
participated in the taking of life, the destroying of life.
(26:09):
There 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,
(26:33):
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 changed strategy. We
will not be ready. We will not be ready. And
(26:55):
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
(27:19):
is right at the is the pivot point.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
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
(27:43):
the beautiful world and the just worlds, and refusing to
feel with each other creates the violent, disconnected world. And
it's it's interesting, like I'm preparing for another conversation later
today and this idea that we're recording, this conversation during
(28:08):
Pride Month, and the hatred against the queer community and
the trans community, especially queer people of color. It's like
you see yourself reflected in someone and you hate that
reflection and it causes emotions. It causes sensations, it causes feelings,
(28:29):
and because we don't have a structure within which to
be tender to ourselves, within which to listen to those
swirling emotions, we otherize them. Right. 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
(28:55):
and so ill equipped to greet our our own stew
of emotions with kindness and tenderness and 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
(29:17):
angry at this queer person, you're a closet queer person. Like, okay,
that may be accurate, but it's also like assaultive language.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
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 (29:39):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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.
(30:47):
They have no water, they have no electricity. It is
right wing militias 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.
(31:10):
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
(31:32):
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,
(31:53):
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
(32:16):
the reorganization whatever that looks like. You know, for me,
that is something that I 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
(32:39):
organizing 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 and that's why you know,
who wrote that book about the role of meaning, I
don't remember who wrote that book, but about yeah, about
the role of meaning grief, and that to me is
(33:01):
something 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,
(33:26):
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 dissonance amongst bereeved peoples.
I guess what I'm saying is the right knows full
well that grief is a terrain for organizing, that grief
(33:48):
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 part
of and barriers. You know, everybody grieves, we all face loss.
The question is what is our organized response to it.
(34:08):
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 there, you know, you know, you have to ask
some love, love, security so that people can be have
their full range of emotions. You know. I run something
on Sundays called Pandemic Joy. It's like church, but it's
(34:32):
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. I'm starting to build resources for some future work,
(34:55):
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
was needed is what I needed, and so I figured
it is what somebody else needed to.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:16):
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 1 (36:26):
To feel it.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Like that is the work. 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
(36:49):
can go in certain directions.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It's true, but I want to be clear. I think, yeah,
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
(37:10):
make it your fuel, 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 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
(37:34):
the side of justice or on the side of the
status quo, and you know, profit and privilege, it is
still a reaction to some kind of loss, realor pacy.
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
(37:57):
toward alienation and apathy. But in any way you think
about it, we definitely move. Grief moves us.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
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 you what to do
with it, that's right. 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 you
that like nah manjo own damn business. But yeah, that
that you know from the outside, especially you know in
(38:25):
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. Like these very public 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
(38:46):
a movement, do a foundation, which you know, if you
if your person was killed by a drunk driver, and
a lot of the support you're going to get back
is like join mothers against drunk driving, like advocate for this.
And you're like, I can't manage to bathe myself. Can
we talk about that instead of like, right, push me
(39:08):
to jump to a movement. I think jumping to you
a quote unquote movement is one of the ways that
we bypass grief.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
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 broken
to move about. It's not about not jumping to a movement.
(39:37):
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
I hate when people talk about belonging because people be onesome, like, oh,
(40:01):
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.
Loss that is the product of inequality, right, that is
(40:22):
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
in the grieving process. It's necessary, but it's not first.
(40:44):
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
they are, you know. In fact, that's part of the
difference between the Mother's Against Drunk Driving and you know
(41:07):
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,
you know, like I have not seen another specific support group.
(41:28):
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
being connecting in with authentic emotion, of authentic emotional sorrow,
(41:48):
authentic experience and breed. Folks who are in the Healing
Justice movement, you know, have been offering us, you know,
various ways of engaging embodied grief, but it still remains
very individualized, you know. And how do we move that
into collective process? How do we move from individual loss
(42:13):
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, 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
(42:34):
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 need both. I healed,
I continue to heal, and I don't even honestly believe
(42:54):
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 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
(43:18):
metastatic cancer. And 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, 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,
(43:39):
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 way to survive
that is to do something, to feel like you can
do something about it, to transform the conditions that produced it.
(44:03):
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, be sad,
be everything that you are, and we need to meet
them with an opportunity for them to move because stagnation
(44:24):
that don't work either, You know that don't work either.
So figuring out what we can offer folk that gives
them a chance to connect to meaning as well as
a chance to connect to authentic emotion. That's kind of
how I engage with with that.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
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 anyway because it's specific through your
whole life and through the inheritance of your mom and
(45:01):
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. What does hope look like for you?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
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
(45:47):
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. And my wife loved the moon. She
love to walk in the moon and bathe in the
moon light. And when I look at the moon, and
I go out to the ocean every full moon with
(46:08):
some of my friends and 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
(46:31):
in 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 so can we all. My mom
(46:54):
always used to tell us like something about believing in
the people. When you ask her what her religion was,
she was saying, 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,
(47:14):
and I don't care what issue I work on I
care about the people. That's where my hope lives is.
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,
(47:36):
or at the beginning of it, 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 something unique and beautiful to
offer that death can't take away. You know, our love
(47:58):
survives us, and that's what I believe in.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
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 (48:16):
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 (48:38):
I cannot wait for your book. I will do my
best to not pester you Everay couple of weeks like
when's your pub date? When can I get it? Can
I get an advest Reader copy? When is it coming?
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Oh my gosh, yeah, thank you so much for having
me such a play. I'm so thrilled.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
All right, everybody, stay tuned 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 (49:00):
Be right back.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
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.
(49:32):
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
(49:53):
me know what you took from the knowledge and the
wisdom that Max shared with us. If you're grieving a
personal loss, were you as moved by max 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. How about you? What stuck with
(50:16):
you in this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different
from today's show, but I do hope you've found something
to hold on too. 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
(50:38):
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 Okay Pod 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.
(50:59):
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 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.
(51:20):
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 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
(51:42):
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 professions, or you work in any
kind of social change movement. Get help to have better
conversations about grief with trainings, professional resources, and my best
(52:02):
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
produced by Elizabeth Fouzio, logistical and social media support from Micah,
Post production and editing by the ever patient Houston Tilly.
(52:25):
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.
Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance.
(01:19):
I am on break working on a giant new project,
so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from
the first three seasons of the show. Some of these
conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and
some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you
capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover
a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together,
(01:41):
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Take what you learn here, take your
thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk
about it. Hey friends, Okay, now I have said this
a bunch of times already the season, but I'm saying
(02:03):
it again. The guests on this show have brought so
much magic 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.
(02:24):
But the thing is, we never really talk about it.
We don't 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
(02:46):
actually true. Not talking about grief is killing us. I
first met today's guests through their article titled Grief Belongs
in Social Justice Movements. Malchia de Cyril is a poet
and a media activist. They are the executive director of
the Center for Media Justice and a co founder of
(03:06):
the Media Action Grassroots Network. Their writings on media, race, justice,
and grief frequently appear in national publications such as Politico,
The Guardian, 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 Malka Knows Grief from
the Inside Out. They cared for their spouse, the comedian
(03:30):
and editor Alana Debt Cyril, through their death from cancer
in twenty eighteen. We spent a lot of time in
this episode talking about their relationship and their love. 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
(03:51):
Malchia's mother, Janet Cyril Janet was an activist in the
Black Panther Party, So Malchia grew up surrounded by and
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
(04:12):
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
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
(04:35):
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
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
(05:01):
happening right now with Malchia Davitch Sira Okaiya. I am
so happy to have you here with me today. I
was just saying before we started rolling that we followed
each other on Twitter for a long time. So I'm
really glad to have you here with me.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
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, Aalana.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
There's so much that I want.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
To get into today about grief and justice and media
and collective grief, but I would really like to start
with love.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Always a good place to start.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:05):
you as a leader is that no matter how far
you go, no matter what kind of rant you're writing
or what you're trying to teach about grief and justice,
you always come back to your wife.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
She and my mom are definitely the anchors in my life,
and my greatest teacher is about grief.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
For sure, 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 (06:40):
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
(07:03):
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
(07:26):
to those conditions, 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
(07:49):
as a black person, or separate from my experience as
a movement leader, or separate from my experience as soone child.
It's all kind of connected for me.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, was it directly spoken about when you were a child,
all of those facets of grief.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
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 emotions, but what we're
talking about is actions, and so you know, she definitely
taught me and my sister that sorrow and grief were
(08:29):
not the same thing. That sorrow isn't an emotion. Grief
is a set of activities and response to laws. 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 to
(08:51):
the losses in your life. So she definitely played a
hand in helping me to understand what I think grief
is 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
(09:12):
a fatal illness. My wife, Alana had struggle with the
same same thing and so so. Speaking of Alana, my
text messages are her voice saying I love you. So
sorry I turned that off.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Now, wait, did you just get a text message with
Alana's voice saying I love you?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I mean hear that? Okay, great, I couldn't hear it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
But how beautiful is that? 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 say I love you. I mean that could not
have been I love this like this. That couldn't have
been more beautifully timed. Thank you, Alana. Yes, I love
(09:57):
this idea of the difference between 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 (10:09):
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
(10:30):
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 eighties comedy
(10:53):
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 understand
(11:14):
as movement leaders that sorrow melancholia is actually it's an
important emotion to understand. But it's the transformation that's engagement
of that emotion and the acknowledgment that joy is also
present in grief. That's what becomes a motive force, that's
(11:37):
what becomes mobilizing energy. And so if we want, if
we want people's grief to turn into action, if we
want it to transform into agency, we can't only engage
with it at sorrow. That's not gonna work.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Right, 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
(12:14):
don't stay in sorrow, don't stay sad, make something out
of it. And that's actually not what I hear you say.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
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
(12:41):
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 is to
include joy, it's to include anger. It's to allow ourselves
(13:03):
the full 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 these were funny women. These
(13:26):
are women with strength and bigger and brilliance, and so
I just want the whole story, that's all. And I think,
as a strategist and as a movement leader, and as
the Left, I think sometimes we love to focus in
and get mesmerized by the sorrow part of it. You know,
(13:47):
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
(14:09):
stay in a movement that actually moves. They need a
movement that moves. And so that's kind of what I'm
when 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 (14:28):
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.
(14:50):
That is that is 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
(15:12):
over life and death, an entire worldview centered on my failure. Yes,
can you tell me what you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You know, from my deeply personal experience both watching my
mom sick and die and watching 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
(15:40):
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
(16:02):
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 that I tried so hard, you
(16:23):
know 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
(16:45):
tried and failed. And that's a perspective, you know, that's
a that's a way of thinking. I know it's not
wholly true, but it is how it feels.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
This is something that's so common I think for people,
the say 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 frame that that
this is a feeling and it's real and it's not
the whole story. And I think what we tend to
(17:16):
do when we hear somebody say I failed is talk
them out of that failure.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yes, And I hate that it doesn't work. We talked
out of my feelings period. And also it's disrespectful. 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 and
(17:40):
agreed then persuaded out of it. And like you said,
it doesn't work to be persuaded anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
It's just it makes people feel misunderstood.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
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, it basically then you
were going to talk them out of their own truth
and their own feelings. And that's ineffective.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Think about that 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, we're going to only
(18:27):
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
(18:49):
it grief, 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. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Okay, let's get back to this honestly amazing conversation with
Malchia da Vitch Cyrol.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
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 this issue are
quick to jump on social media and be like, show
the pictures, do this, do that, and like this is
(19:40):
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 it stop? I think we leapfrog over the
(20:04):
intimate in those situations.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
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,
(20:28):
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,
(20:51):
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,
(21:12):
as part of their own healing, protect other children, 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 about building
(21:35):
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 then you shrink, diminish, and in
(21:55):
my view, disrespect a complex, 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
(22:15):
think we can do better, and we would do better
if organizationally, we had new ways to embody grief as
leaders and as institutions.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
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
(22:50):
acknowledge that grief as a way to power change instead
of the leap to a spokesperson that we see.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
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 long for to
(23:23):
come into being, we have to find a way to
grieve together strategically and humanly.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
I think it boils down to this, right.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
So either as a people we lean into the truth
of our lost 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,
(23:56):
we 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
(24:17):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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
(25:22):
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
(25:44):
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 any when in my ancestry
participated in the taking of life, the destroying of life.
(26:09):
There 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,
(26:33):
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 changed strategy. We
will not be ready. We will not be ready. And
(26:55):
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
(27:19):
is right at the is the pivot point.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
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
(27:43):
the beautiful world and the just worlds, and refusing to
feel with each other creates the violent, disconnected world. And
it's it's interesting, like I'm preparing for another conversation later
today and this idea that we're recording, this conversation during
(28:08):
Pride Month, and the hatred against the queer community and
the trans community, especially queer people of color. It's like
you see yourself reflected in someone and you hate that
reflection and it causes emotions. It causes sensations, it causes feelings,
(28:29):
and because we don't have a structure within which to
be tender to ourselves, within which to listen to those
swirling emotions, we otherize them. Right. 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
(28:55):
and so ill equipped to greet our our own stew
of emotions with kindness and tenderness and 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
(29:17):
angry at this queer person, you're a closet queer person. Like, okay,
that may be accurate, but it's also like assaultive language.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
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 (29:39):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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.
(30:47):
They have no water, they have no electricity. It is
right wing militias 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.
(31:10):
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
(31:32):
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,
(31:53):
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
(32:16):
the reorganization whatever that looks like. You know, for me,
that is something that I 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
(32:39):
organizing 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 and that's why you know,
who wrote that book about the role of meaning, I
don't remember who wrote that book, but about yeah, about
the role of meaning grief, and that to me is
(33:01):
something 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,
(33:26):
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 dissonance amongst bereeved peoples.
I guess what I'm saying is the right knows full
well that grief is a terrain for organizing, that grief
(33:48):
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 part
of and barriers. You know, everybody grieves, we all face loss.
The question is what is our organized response to it.
(34:08):
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 there, you know, you know, you have to ask
some love, love, security so that people can be have
their full range of emotions. You know. I run something
on Sundays called Pandemic Joy. It's like church, but it's
(34:32):
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. I'm starting to build resources for some future work,
(34:55):
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
was needed is what I needed, and so I figured
it is what somebody else needed to.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:16):
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 1 (36:26):
To feel it.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Like that is the work. 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
(36:49):
can go in certain directions.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It's true, but I want to be clear. I think, yeah,
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
(37:10):
make it your fuel, 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 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
(37:34):
the side of justice or on the side of the
status quo, and you know, profit and privilege, it is
still a reaction to some kind of loss, realor pacy.
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
(37:57):
toward alienation and apathy. But in any way you think
about it, we definitely move. Grief moves us.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
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 you what to do
with it, that's right. 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 you
that like nah manjo own damn business. But yeah, that
that you know from the outside, especially you know in
(38:25):
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. Like these very public 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
(38:46):
a movement, do a foundation, which you know, if you
if your person was killed by a drunk driver, and
a lot of the support you're going to get back
is like join mothers against drunk driving, like advocate for this.
And you're like, I can't manage to bathe myself. Can
we talk about that instead of like, right, push me
(39:08):
to jump to a movement. I think jumping to you
a quote unquote movement is one of the ways that
we bypass grief.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
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 broken
to move about. It's not about not jumping to a movement.
(39:37):
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
I hate when people talk about belonging because people be onesome, like, oh,
(40:01):
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.
Loss that is the product of inequality, right, that is
(40:22):
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
in the grieving process. It's necessary, but it's not first.
(40:44):
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
they are, you know. In fact, that's part of the
difference between the Mother's Against Drunk Driving and you know
(41:07):
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,
you know, like I have not seen another specific support group.
(41:28):
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
being connecting in with authentic emotion, of authentic emotional sorrow,
(41:48):
authentic experience and breed. Folks who are in the Healing
Justice movement, you know, have been offering us, you know,
various ways of engaging embodied grief, but it still remains
very individualized, you know. And how do we move that
into collective process? How do we move from individual loss
(42:13):
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, 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
(42:34):
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 need both. I healed,
I continue to heal, and I don't even honestly believe
(42:54):
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 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
(43:18):
metastatic cancer. And 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, 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,
(43:39):
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 way to survive
that is to do something, to feel like you can
do something about it, to transform the conditions that produced it.
(44:03):
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, be sad,
be everything that you are, and we need to meet
them with an opportunity for them to move because stagnation
(44:24):
that don't work either, You know that don't work either.
So figuring out what we can offer folk that gives
them a chance to connect to meaning as well as
a chance to connect to authentic emotion. That's kind of
how I engage with with that.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
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 anyway because it's specific through your
whole life and through the inheritance of your mom and
(45:01):
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. What does hope look like for you?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
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
(45:47):
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. And my wife loved the moon. She
love to walk in the moon and bathe in the
moon light. And when I look at the moon, and
I go out to the ocean every full moon with
(46:08):
some of my friends and 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
(46:31):
in 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 so can we all. My mom
(46:54):
always used to tell us like something about believing in
the people. When you ask her what her religion was,
she was saying, 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,
(47:14):
and I don't care what issue I work on I
care about the people. That's where my hope lives is.
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,
(47:36):
or at the beginning of it, 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 something unique and beautiful to
offer that death can't take away. You know, our love
(47:58):
survives us, and that's what I believe in.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
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 (48:16):
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 (48:38):
I cannot wait for your book. I will do my
best to not pester you Everay couple of weeks like
when's your pub date? When can I get it? Can
I get an advest Reader copy? When is it coming?
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Oh my gosh, yeah, thank you so much for having
me such a play. I'm so thrilled.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
All right, everybody, stay tuned 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 (49:00):
Be right back.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
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.
(49:32):
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
(49:53):
me know what you took from the knowledge and the
wisdom that Max shared with us. If you're grieving a
personal loss, were you as moved by max 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. How about you? What stuck with
(50:16):
you in this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different
from today's show, but I do hope you've found something
to hold on too. 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
(50:38):
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 Okay Pod 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.
(50:59):
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 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.
(51:20):
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 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
(51:42):
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 professions, or you work in any
kind of social change movement. Get help to have better
conversations about grief with trainings, professional resources, and my best
(52:02):
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
produced by Elizabeth Fouzio, logistical and social media support from Micah,
Post production and editing by the ever patient Houston Tilly.
(52:25):
Music provided by Wave Crush and background noise provided by
the perfectly timed recycling truck
Host
Megan Devine
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