Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show this week, we're having an All Of It watch party. We will be discussing the big hit streamer, Paradise, about life in a man-made community underground after a catastrophic event destroys most of life here on earth. Emmy Award actor Julianne Nicholson, who plays the villainous billionaire in the series Paradise, will join us for a watch party. She'll discuss her character, the show, and she'll invite listeners to call in as well.

On Friday, we'll wrap up our discussion of COVID five years later, with a book about essential workers, with Manhattan Borough Historian Robert Snyder. It's called, When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers. That is all in the future, but right now, let's get this hour started by turning grief into community.

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Alison Stewart: Some people think of grief as a step by step process involving stages like denial and depression. However, a new book reminds us that these stages don't always occur in order. It's titled, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. Written by Carla Fernandez, the book is the result of her experiencing co-founding The Dinner Party, a support group of young adults who are grieving. Carla lost her father to brain cancer when she was just 21 years old.

In the introduction to her book, Carla shares the pep talk she wished she had been given. She writes, "For too long, grief had been discussed with cozy pity, something misunderstood as simply sad, to be moved on from and forgotten, but when I close my eyes and think of what it looks like to experience real grief after spending the last decade in conversation with people in the thick of it, it's much more badass than that." Renegade Grief officially publishes today, and Carla Fernandez joins us in studio to discuss. Hi, Carla.

Carla Fernandez: Hi, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: What's so badass about openly grieving the loss of someone?

Carla Fernandez: I think we live in a culture that would have us ignore, sweep under the rug, quickly move past times of grief and loss. Whether that's grief from someone that we care about dying, or other forms of loss experiences. When you Google Image search grief, the images that pop up are the single sad image of a person hanging their head in their hands. While grief includes that, of course, in my experience, being a community leader in a community dedicated to creating space for conversations about grief, there's so much more to it than that.

It is this Technicolor experience that encapsulates so many more emotions than just the hanging the sad head in our hands. In going through a loss experience, there's something powerful about inviting ourselves into the possibility that our grief can be more than just that moment of sadness that we move on from as quickly as possible, but actually a deep initiation into learning what it's like to live with impermanence.

Alison Stewart: The death of your father sparked this 15 year journey into grief. What was an experience or feeling throughout your grief that you would never in a million years expected to have?

Carla Fernandez: There was so much beauty in his passing. He was diagnosed with brain cancer when I was 20 and passed away when I was 21. While I'm very cautious to never look for the silver lining in what can be a dumpster fire, there was so much tenderness and care in the experience that we got to have in his final months. There was such a wide range of feelings and conversations that we got to have. It was as if I didn't feel prepared for that moment, for that rite of passage, and I think in many ways, it's hard to prepare for something as significant as a parent dying.

Once I was kind of entering into the club, so to speak, of people who've experienced significant grief, I realized that there was so much more to it than that, and was also so hungry to find companionship and friendship with other people who could say back the words to me, me too.

Alison Stewart: Yes, let's start with The Dinner Party platform, because it didn't initially start out as The Dinner Party. [chuckles]

Carla Fernandez: Right.

Alison Stewart: Let's roll it back a little bit. In the beginning, why did you feel the need to gather people for that first get together?

Carla Fernandez: After my initial loss experience of my dad dying, I kind of went on this Goldilocks quest to find the care that I was hungry for at that time, and went to some incredible more traditional grief support groups, but being a younger person, I was often the youngest person in the room compared to people who were losing their parents maybe at a more natural age in life, in their 50s or 60s. I had an amazing therapist, but it was a monologue, and she was decidedly not my friend, but my therapist. The place where I missed my dad the deepest, where my grief felt the most acute, was around our family dinner table.

He was-- loved food, loved wine, and sort of our family's church was sitting down to dinner together. I knew I wanted to honor him and stay connected to him by breaking bread and seeing what kinds of conversations I could have around a dinner party table. I'd also, around that time, started to notice I was drawn to other young adults who'd also experienced a loss, even if it took us many conversations to both reveal, kind of show our cards, that we were a part of this club.

I invited a handful of folks over to dinner one night with the intent of it being a one-off social experiment, blind date, and see what might happen if we allowed for this conversation that we'd all gotten quite good at avoiding, what might happen if we made it the main course of the meal, so to speak. It was a powerful evening where we could not just share the diagnosis or the accident or the death or the kind of what happened, but really how our grief was informing our lives in the present tense, and where our grief might inform where we were going.

The conversation moved between stories of our loss, but also how we were choosing to live our lives, and the people we were dating, and the places we were going out. We didn't have to compartmentalize our grief in this conversation. That first dinner became a monthly gathering, and my co-founder, Lennon Flowers, who's been our executive director for many years, and I kind of committed to seeing what this might be. It's now a nationwide network called The Dinner Party, officially. Yes, there have been about 150 tables in New York City alone, that we've helped match over the last five years.

Alison Stewart: First of all, why young people?

Carla Fernandez: I think it was what Lennon and I, who were both in our early 20s, needed ourselves. This wasn't like a business plan that we hatched. It was like a deep internal longing for this kind of community and support. While there's deep value in intergenerational conversations, we found that there was something really poignant about being around a table with people who were in a similar life phase. In the world of grief support, there are some really incredible programs specifically for grieving children. Camp Erin is one that comes to mind. Camps where kids can be kids.

In many of the more traditional grief support settings, it was folks that were losing people later in life, not kind of in their early 20s. In many ways, this transitional time in life is, you're not living at home necessarily anymore, but you might not have a family yet of your own, sort of this in between adolescence that we really kind of focused around.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I was going to ask you, what happens when you get a group of young people sitting down at a table who are grieving? What topics come up?

Carla Fernandez: That first dinner that we had, it was the sort of game of chicken was being played conversationally, of like, "Okay, we all know why we're here. Who's going to go first?" It was, I toasted to my dad, which kind of, I love cheersing, and it was sort of this moment of inviting his spirit into the room and going first, so to speak. Then we were really off to the races. Dinner party conversations go all over the place. They talk about work, they talk about relationships with the living and how oftentimes navigating somebody's departure has a lot to do with navigating relationships with the living, relationships and spirituality and the dreams we've had and the books we're reading.

One of the themes that really struck me was the rituals and the care practices that people around the table were finding really helpful in metabolizing their loss experience. I felt like I was sort of, after the first 40 days after my dad died, there wasn't that much that I knew to do once-

Alison Stewart: Because you were his caretaker at one point.

Carla Fernandez: I was.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Carla Fernandez: My stepmother and I were his caretakers.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party. Her new book offers others help in their grief. It's titled, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. You said you sit around a dinner table. I'm assuming you're serving dinner. Yes? [chuckles]

Carla Fernandez: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What role does food play in the gatherings?

Carla Fernandez: Early on, the food was a really important piece. It was a way of-- it was always a potluck dinner, and the invitation was to bring in a dish that helps you introduce your story of your person, to introduce them not by the way that they died, but rather what they loved and the flavors of their life and the foods that maintain memories for you related to them. Over time, people get busy and takeout was ordered. I remember one early dinner party, everybody accidentally brought a pint of ice cream and we just passed those around with a bunch of spoons.

More and more, especially since the pandemic, many of our dinners are happening virtually. It's maybe less of a satisfying experience to bite into a sandwich on Zoom, less of a sharing experience. What we found over time, that while food was the entry point, it actually wasn't the reason people were there. It created an opening that allowed for a kind of conversation that's now happening, yes, still in person around dinner tables, these potluck style dinners, but also on Zoom as well.

Alison Stewart: Is the subject of the dinner, of the conversation, is it planned?

Carla Fernandez: It's not. There's always a consistent opening, some guidelines that we set, and we ask people, "Where are you at with your grief right now?" So that we step out of the kind of autopilot spiels that we are used to telling about our relationship to what happened and who is no longer here. We really invite people to talk about what happened this week, this month, this day that is maybe present with your grief.

What's powerful about the tables is that people join a table and stick with that same group of people consistently. Maybe night one you're sharing the story of someone who passed away, but by night four, you know the basics, you know the background, and you can really just be companions in all the different ways that grief might show up in your life moving forward.

Alison Stewart: What were some of the early mistakes you made with The Dinner Party? There have to be lessons that you learned.

Carla Fernandez: So many. I wish Lennon were here. She would-- she remembers them with me. One night we had, the conversation just kept going, and people kept piling on and telling more and more stories, and somebody finally got up and was like, "I got to get home. The babysitter's texting me." We've learned to kind of-- time is real, time constraint is real.

Early on, we realized that what we thought was maybe a mistake of not having everything perfectly ready for the participants to arrive was a blessing in disguise, because as people arrive to a stranger's home to talk about a topic that can, for many of us, feel uncomfortable as we're easing into it, it can actually be very helpful to be given a task. A cocktail to make, a salad to toss, a table to set. To give folks something to do with their hands.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party. Her new book is titled, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. What's renegade about it?

Carla Fernandez: About grief?

Alison Stewart: In the title. Renegade Grief.

Carla Fernandez: In the title? My experience is that we live in a culture that if you default to the norms of how one might be suggested we grieve, we'll be not talking about them anymore, we'll be back to work in three days, and we will have moved on as soon as the funeral is wrapped up. To actually tend to loss requires you to be a little bit of an outlaw, to defy the status quo, to be a little bit of a renegade. I think historically, that word is maybe conjures up more of like a Marlboro Man. Alone, pulling yourself up, et cetera.

To me, it's actually renegade in the moment we're living in now, to be interdependent as opposed to independent, to be reaching out for support, to be checking in on people, to be giving yourself the space you need to tend to your grief and the respect that it deserves. In some ways, it's like a title that gives the topic that is too often painted in pastel colors a little bit of torque. I'm really curious what happens and how we change in our relationship to grief, and we allow it to be a renegade, radical act.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. In the book, you discuss all the different ways different cultures deal with grief. From rituals to memorials. How have cultural differences impacted how you do your work?

Carla Fernandez: Cultural differences are very present. Everyone comes to the story with their own-- everyone comes to the table with their own particular cultural experience of grief, with their own intersectionality related to grief. We've started to form what we're calling affinity tables, so tables for people who are like, "I really want to just be with people who also identify as queer, or are also people of color, or who've also lost someone due to suicide or a specific type of loss." We're really finding pathways for people to be in community with others that feel like their version of home.

There's something powerful about when that table is its own melting pot. We're getting to hear stories of rituals from across faith traditions or family lines and recognize that there isn't one way to do it. If you zoom out your cultural lens, human beings have been improving and iterating on this technology that is tending to grief over so many thousands of years. Even if you feel like there are no options, or you have no idea what to do with this question of, what do I do? There are wild, beautiful, vivid examples from across time and from across cultures that we can all draw from.

Alison Stewart: Something that was really interesting is the book also, you also write about how time is not the same for everybody. You quote a neuroscientist and she explains how time is different. How people experience time differently. What surprised you about time and grief?

Carla Fernandez: It's now been 15 years since my dad passed away, and I feel like I last saw him yesterday, and I last saw him 100 years ago. It is a snake eating its own tail, is the kind of image that comes to mind for me. I'd love to shout out Mary-Frances O'Connor's work, who's an amazing neuroscientist who was strapping things onto people's brains and actually understanding like, what does grief look like as it's pulsing through our command central stations.

The book I actually ended up structuring around this concept of time, there's a chunk about honoring your past, there's a chunk about being with your present, and the final is about creating your future. The sense is not at all that you move through one and check the box and then move to the next, but it's sort of this spiral that we're continually revisiting and coming back to over time.

Alison Stewart: Yes, where does that come from? That you'll move on from this, you will get over this.

Carla Fernandez: I think it's just sort of Western culture's obsession with like, the neat, tidy completion of things. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is an incredible thanatologist who kind of pioneered the five stages of grieving, but it's not so widely known that her research actually was conducted with people that were preparing for their own death, not actually people who were grieving somebody that had died. In no ways did she ever imply that it was like a check one box, move on to the next, check the next, and complete, but rather five different flavors that you might experience.

I think our desire to oversimplify what is a wildly complex grief itself being renegade, always kind of defying categorization. I think the culture we live in longs to kind of give us a box to check, but it's outside of the box.

Alison Stewart: What if you are in relationship, friendship with someone that is grieving? Sometimes people don't know the right thing to say. Could you give us a little advice on what you should say to someone who you know is grieving?

Carla Fernandez: I will do my best. I would say it's probably not a what if, but a you are. You do know someone who is grieving, whether--

Alison Stewart: Or will be. Yes.

Carla Fernandez: Or will be, and it might be from a death loss or from a relationship loss or just general sense of ecological grief, given the moment we're living in. I think my biggest piece of advice, which I have learned from people wiser than me, is instead of not saying anything at all because you're afraid that you're going to say the wrong thing, say something. Instead of the platitude or the generic gift basket, use this as a moment to show your intimate awareness and sensitivity and connection to who that person is, and what their preferences are, and what might be something specific that would be supportive or interesting to them.

It really depends on the person. I think that's so the case with grief. There's not one-size-fits-all of a solution for how to show up for someone, but the main thing that matters is that you do something. Reach out, say something.

Alison Stewart: Is it okay to tell someone not now?

Carla Fernandez: Yes. As a griever responding?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Carla Fernandez: 1,000%. I think the other important piece of advice that I constantly have to remind myself of when I'm trying to show up for someone who I know is grieving is to not come in with expectations that they're going to give me the pat on the back, or tell me what I want to hear. The response might be, not now. "Not now, I'm at work." "Not now, I'm with my kids." "Not now, I need months of space to kind of get my feet on the ground." So we offer our hand, we offer thoughtful, intimate ways of connecting, with no expectation for what that response or reaction might be.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. It is by Carla Fernandez. Thank you for coming in to the studio. We really appreciate you sharing your writing with us.

Carla Fernandez: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: The Dinner Party. She's part of The Dinner Party as well.

Carla Fernandez: [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Thanks, Carla.

Carla Fernandez: Thanks.