Grief is one of the most universal human experiences, yet somehow, we still don’t know how to talk about it—
or what to do when it hits us or the people we love.
Grief is something we all experience, yet no one really prepares us for how to handle it—or how to support others going through it. And here’s the thing: grief isn’t just about losing a loved one. It can come from a breakup, losing a job, or even mourning the life you thought you’d have. In today’s episode, I sit down with Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party and author of Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss, to talk about what grief really looks like, why loneliness makes it harder, and how we can build stronger communities to support ourselves and others through loss. We also dive into something that doesn’t get talked about enough—the financial impact of grief—and why having a plan in place is one of the greatest acts of love you can give your family.
This conversation is honest, raw, and surprisingly hopeful. Carla’s insights will shift the way you think about grief, loneliness, and community care, whether you’re navigating loss yourself or supporting someone who is. Let’s get into it.
Key takeaways
Grief Isn’t Just About Death—It’s About Any Loss We Experience
Grief comes in many forms, from the passing of a loved one to the end of a relationship, job, or dream. Carla emphasizes that grief is how we process change and impermanence, yet our society often limits grief to death alone. Recognizing and naming grief in all its forms allows us to process it in a healthier way rather than pushing it aside.
Loneliness is a Cultural Epidemic—Community is the Antidote
Grief is already hard, but what makes it unbearable is the loneliness that often comes with it. Many people feel isolated in their grief because society doesn’t make space for these conversations. Carla’s work with The Dinner Party is all about creating supportive spaces where people can share their grief openly and find community with those who understand their experience.
Planning for Grief Eases the Emotional and Financial Burden
One of the most overlooked aspects of grief? The logistical and financial strain it puts on those left behind. Many families struggle because their loved ones didn’t plan ahead, leaving them to deal with financial uncertainty, legal issues, or medical debt on top of their emotional loss. Carla stresses the importance of creating a will, organizing finances, and ensuring loved ones aren’t left untangling a mess.
There’s No Right Way to Grieve—But There Are Common Pitfalls
Grief doesn’t follow a timeline, yet many of us try to put it on one—thinking we’ll feel “better” after a certain amount of time or a specific event. Carla explains how forcing grief into a structured process often backfires, leaving us feeling like we’re “failing” at moving on. Instead, she encourages people to sit with their grief, feel their emotions fully, and let the process unfold naturally.
The Best Way to Support Someone Grieving? Show Up Without Expectation
When someone we care about is grieving, we often ask, “How can I help?” But Carla explains that this puts the burden on the grieving person to figure out what they need. Instead, she suggests taking initiative—sending money, dropping off food, offering specific ways to help—without expecting them to guide you.
Reimagining Traditions Can Help Us Honor Loss in a Meaningful Way
After experiencing loss, holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries can be particularly difficult. Carla shares how her family adapted their holiday traditions to make space for grief while also creating new joyful memories. Whether that means altering a tradition, skipping it, or starting something new, it’s about finding what feels right for you.
Notable quotes
“Grief isn’t something you ‘get over’—it’s something you learn to live with. It doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you loved deeply.”
“Loneliness is the real epidemic. Grief is hard enough, but what makes it unbearable is feeling like you’re going through it alone.”
“Don’t ask someone how you can help. Just do something.”
Episode-at-a-glance
≫ 11:41 Navigating grief and community support
≫ 14:11 The physical and emotional impact of grief
≫ 22:08 Grief and the human experience
≫ 32:46 Gender differences in grieving
≫ 33:41 The challenges of grieving under capitalism
≫ 34:58 Financial strain and grief
≫ 40:02 Reinventing traditions after loss
≫ 44:48 Cultural grief practices
≫ 56:14 Supporting others through grief
Carla’s Links:
Website: carlafernandez.co
Order Renegade Grief: carlafernandez.co/renegadegrief
The Dinner Party: https://www.thedinnerparty.org/
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Meet Carla
Carla’s work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. As a creative strategist and facilitator, she collaborates with impact-driven clients through her eponymous community design studio. She is also the co-founder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-support circles for young adult grievers. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and cited in multiple books. Carla is a senior fellow with USC’s Annenberg School Innovation Lab and a Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley and Joshua Tree. Her first book, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Los After Loss, will be released by Simon & Schuster on March 11 2025.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Grief is inevitable in life. Whether it’s losing someone you love or processing a hard breakup or going through a global pandemic, you will lose. But like so many taboos, we don’t know how to talk about grief and we often don’t know how to be there for ourselves or for others going through it.
Hi Financial Feminist, welcome to the show. I’m thrilled to see you as always, thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting feminist media in a very non-feminist fucking world. I’m not bitter at all. It’s fine. Everything’s burning. It’s fine. We are talking about grief today on the show, which is very easy to think that’s heavy and there are parts of it that are. So a content warning. Right off the top, we are talking of course, about grief and death, but also about cancer. So I would love for you to stick around because I really do feel like it’s going to be cathartic and helpful, but also if you’re just like, “I can’t do this right now.” Cool, skip it. We’ll see you back on the next one.
We’re thrilled to have our guest, Carla Fernandez on the show today. We are talking about grief, but also about loneliness, which we talked about an episode all on its own as this complete epidemic. So we’re talking about grief, both in the traditional sense of losing somebody you love, but also grief takes many forms. Grief can be I lost a job opportunity that I really wanted, or I am breaking up with my partner, or I just don’t have the life that I thought I might have and grieving that. We also talked about the importance of building community, both while you’re experiencing grief and of course while you’re trying to be there for friends and family who are experiencing grief. And if you’ve ever experienced grief or loneliness or loss, this episode will help you feel less alone and more empowered to discuss both grief and how to financially prepare for the inevitable.
Let’s talk about Carla. Carla’s work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. As a creative strategist and facilitator, she collaborates with impact-driven clients through her community design studio. She’s also the founder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-supported circles for young adult grievers. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and cited in multiple books. She’s a senior fellow with USC’s Anneberg School of Innovation Lab and a Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. And her new book, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss is out now, wherever you get your books. This is a powerful episode, especially one that would be really great to share with anybody that is processing grief or loss. And without further ado, let’s get into it.
But first a word from our sponsors.
Carla Fernandez:
Tori, I was just creeping on you and I really appreciated your how are we going to handle these next four years post. Thank you for that.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I know, and it’s going to be interesting. I also created a TikTok that we’re probably going to share on Instagram that I am treating Donald Trump as my ex-boyfriend. So I’m going to go out and get really hot.
Carla Fernandez:
That’s the one that I saw on TikTok I think.
Tori Dunlap:
Is that the one?
Carla Fernandez:
We’re going to the gym. We’re getting a fat ass.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, exactly. I’m going to get a fat ass. I’m going to get a fat bank account. And every time I don’t want to go to the gym or don’t want to take care of myself, I’m going to be like, “Well, I got to get back at my ex who doesn’t want to see me thriving.”
Carla Fernandez:
Sweet revenge.
Tori Dunlap:
I would love for you to tell us who you are, what you do, and why this work is so important.
Carla Fernandez:
Okay. She goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Tori Dunlap:
Always.
Carla Fernandez:
I’m Carla Fernandez and I do a lot of different things, but today I’m here representing the book that I just recently wrote, Renegade Grief. I just got my advanced reader copies. They’re smelling-
Tori Dunlap:
Very exciting.
Carla Fernandez:
Did you smell your book when you got your book?
Tori Dunlap:
A hundred percent. Books are the best smell in the world.
Carla Fernandez:
Best smell. But I wrote this book after being a part of a community for the last 15 or so years called The Dinner Party. I’m one of the co-founders along with my sister wife, Lennon Flowers. And we started this work when we both lost parents at a youngish age and realized that some of the cultural norms around grief and loss frankly sucked. And we were longing for a space where we could hang out, talk about how grief was impacting our lives, and have the kind of friendship and companionship that we needed to move through life, having one less parent present. And I think this work is so important because if there’s a skill we need to be building, maybe in addition to financial literacy, to speak to your people, it’s also how do we navigate times of loss? How do we see grief not as this noun that we want to get over or sweep under the rug or not talk about or distance ourselves from but actually as a verb, as this life skill that is essential to navigating the 21st century, frankly, life in any century, but especially now?
Tori Dunlap:
You talked about, you said losing a parent very early. What was that experience with grief like and how did it inform what you do now or what you’re looking to teach people?
Carla Fernandez:
So my dad was dope. His name was Jose. We had a great and complicated relationships. I feel like most teenagers do with their parents. And I was a senior in college when he started showing these weird symptoms that his doctors thought were probably just panic attacks. And then they ended up actually being brain cancer. And then he died about a year after he was diagnosed, which is common for the type of cancer he had, glioblastoma. And it was a gnarly period of my development to go from moving out of my college dorm to being a caretaker for him in his final six months. And it was a time of life where most of my friends who I shared every experience with up until that time were getting their first jobs out of college. And I was about to say, I’m just going to say it, being sluts, hanging out, having fun, doing the thing we do when we’re 21.
And I was doing a little bit of that on the side, but also pureeing vegetables and navigating medication routines and really sitting in the end at a time in my life that for a lot of people, it feels like the beginning. And it had a lot of different impacts on me. But one of the things that I thought about a lot during that time was why talking about what my dad was going through and the grief that I was anticipating was such an awkward subject.
I remember going to parties and talking to people and feeling like I couldn’t be real about what I was living through at that time. And that lack of literacy or comfort we have in talking about hard topics, money included, death being another big one was really getting in the way of authentic relationships and me being in community with people who got it. Anyways, I think that in that experience I realized how critical it is to find circles of care, circles of people who can reflect on the life experience you’re going through and can say the words, “me too,” which we’ve learned in the last few years have taken on even greater significance.
Tori Dunlap:
When you mentioned, “Okay, everybody else in my life is having the quote unquote “normal” experience of being in their twenties and I am now caretaker to my dying father.” I think that is one of the parts of grief that I would love to explore a little bit, which is like the world keeps moving while your world stops.
Carla Fernandez:
Yeah, I mean there’s that amazing David Foster Wallace essay where he talks about you never know what the person standing behind you in the checkout line is going through. It was a lived experience of that line and that essay of feeling isolation. Vivek Murthy, our outgoing Surgeon General, bless his heart, has really made it his number one concern that if there’s a health crisis our culture is going through right now, the same position that put the warning label on cigarettes is putting the warning label on loneliness. And I think that there’s lots of different transitions in life where we might feel that loneliness most acutely. And being a person who’s experiencing a significant loss or extreme grief in an out of order time is definitely pretty up there. So what I realized was that it wasn’t that the grief was a problem.
I loved my dad. I was super fucking bummed that he had died just very plainly. And the emotions that I was going through at the time felt healthy and important to honor and not to try to segue out of or forget about or deny that I was going through. So it was interesting, quickly it became clear that it was the isolation that I felt or the stigma around death and grief that was the problem, not the grief itself, which is what got me so hot and bothered to hang out with other people who are in my same age range and be like, “Is this weird for you too? Is this sucking more than it probably should be for you? And what do we do now?” That was one of the big questions that I started exploring that I ended up spending the last many years writing about in this book was like, “What do you do? How do you tend to grief in a culture where many of us might not have the religious or social scaffolding that past generations turn to tend to grief and for lots of other reasons?”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it sounds like too, it was a bit like, well, maybe I’m putting what I would’ve thought if I had that situation on you.
Carla Fernandez:
Let’s hear it. Project on me, Tori. Project.
Tori Dunlap:
I can imagine you’re going, “This was not part of the plan. I know my parents are going to die, but they die when I’m 40. They die when I’m older. They don’t die when I’m 20. They don’t die when I’m seven. That’s not part of the plan.”
Carla Fernandez:
It was super not part of my plan. My dad was a super healthy guy and it was caught out of the blue and it was not my… And I was signing up for my major in college. I never was like, “Oh,” anticipating that the thing that I would spend the next 15 years focused on would be building circles of care and community support for people who’s had a significant loss in their life. But I don’t know. I think about the emergency fund. We don’t know what we’re going to have to use it for, but we pivot.
And I think in that period in my life, it was an interesting time for it to hit because I was at that precipice of what will I focus on? What will my vocation be? And I’d always been a community organizer. I studied this world of social entrepreneurship, which is this idea that we can actually create organizational structures that solve sticky challenging issues. So a lot of my work had been in how might we take a stigma that people are just like, “Well, it’s just the way that it is, a status quo.” And how might we create community infrastructure to jujitsu flip it to be something different? So in many ways, when my dad got sick, I was sort of handed this big fat assignment and was so lucky that I connected with my friend Lennon Flowers, who’s my co-founder and was our executive director for many, many years. And we were like, “Cool, let’s see if we can create something that offers an alternative pathway for people.”
Tori Dunlap:
You had mentioned before, and I would love to talk about this because the taboos that we face in our life, especially as women, but just culturally too, we are not talking as a society about death or grief. We’re not talking about money. I think we’re more likely to talk about sex, but that’s still a huge taboo. So how do you see this showing up? What was your experience of not being able to bring this conversation up or feeling the taboo or the shame around it?
Carla Fernandez:
I think that the taboo or the shame around talking about grief and loss, it comes from a lot of different places and it has a lot of different impacts. I think about one of my favorite rants is that there is no federally mandated bereavement leave in America. So someone can die who mattered a lot to you, and you can legally be fired. Your kid can die, and if you’re not back to work in a week, you can get fired. And that obviously doesn’t always happen, but there isn’t a lot of wiggle room or grace for doing anything other than keeping up with the hustle. So to me, that’s a signal, a cultural value signal that grief isn’t something that should slow us down or grief isn’t something that should be honored or tended to. Or if it is, do it between the hours of five and nine.
Tori Dunlap:
Don’t let grief and convenience capitalism.
Carla Fernandez:
In fucking deed. Yeah, that’s the vibe. And it’s interesting, I am starting to say things that make me feel like an old lady, which honestly I love. It’s like goals. When we started this work in 2010, it was like early days of Airbnb and the sharing economy and early days of the idea that we would invite a stranger to your house for a potluck sounded a little risque.
Tori Dunlap:
Uber is getting started at that time.
Carla Fernandez:
Exactly. It was an interesting moment in time when we rode off the energy of that like, “Oh yeah, we can actually use the internet to find people, not just to deliver us a pizza, but find people who might live four doors down from me, but we would never know that we had both had a sibling die from suicide because that shit’s not coming up.
Tori Dunlap:
So grief impacts us in so many ways of our life, and of course it’s the emotional side, but how do you see grief extending out into other areas of our lives?
Carla Fernandez:
If you Google image search grief, which I’ve done because I’m a nerd, it’s all stock images of people looking really, really sad. It’s like head in hand. And that is one of 50,000 bajillion colors in the technicolor spectrum that is how grief impacts us, different emotions, obviously. And to your question, how does it affect us in other ways? There’s incredible research that’s happened about the actual physical somatic impacts of grief that it gives us. Foggy brain can mess with our sense of time, can impact our sleep positively, maybe not positively, but we can need to sleep more. We can have insomnia.
Tori Dunlap:
Our stomachs, our guts.
Carla Fernandez:
Our guts, our appetites, our memory. There’s this awesome neuroscientist whose name is Mary Frances O’Connor, who I have a very big crush on, and she also has a book coming out this year about where grief lives in the body. She’s one of the first people to take nodes and strap them on people’s heads and study what is happening inside the brain of someone who is grieving. And she’s discovering amazing things that it’s actually altered, it’s an altered state and that altered state doesn’t last forever. But the part of us that can feel shame that we’re not on top of it because maybe it’s been six months since our partner died, but we’re still struggling. It’s because we’re going through a physiological process that our body knows how to do and we have to let it rip. But we don’t often have the social permission to do that beyond the moment at the funeral or beyond the first month or beyond the first year.
So there’s the emotional impacts, there’s the physical impacts, there’s the relational impacts. I hear a lot about stories around The Dinner Party table about how someone’s death impacts the relationship with the person that died, but almost more surprisingly and sometimes even more powerfully, it impacts our relationships with the living. You might have one parent die and the other parent is grieving or struggling in their own way. Having a sibling die can severely impact a family dynamic, a partner, a child. It doesn’t actually matter who. It changes the ecosystem of a group of people. And what’s been powerful about The Dinner Party community is that it gives people a place that feels like found family where they can unpack the relational impacts of grief, not just with the person that died, but with the people that are still here.
Grief and loss impacts us financially. Speaking to your audience, and I’m sure we’ll get into it more, but it blew my gourd that 65% of families that filed bankruptcy in America, and it makes me want to weep, 65% of families that file bankruptcy in America file it because of a medical emergency. I don’t know the statistic of the subset of those that result in somebody dying and then that family moving into a period of grief. But for many families, it can be the main breadwinner that has died. And not only are you grieving the human being, but also stability that their income provided.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and you can be grieving somebody who didn’t die. You grieve your lifestyle changing or if that person is dealing with an illness that they’re going to be dealing with their whole life, there’s grief in that too.
Carla Fernandez:
We’re recording this not long after the wildfires in California, and I’m talking to my cousin who’s house burned down and we’re talking about the grief of losing all of his belongings and-
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and that’s one of my questions for you is I think even if somebody clicked on this episode and started listening, we as a society equate grief with death. And there are so many other things we can grieve. We were all grieving during the pandemic, whether that was because we had lost people close to us or because we lost the semblance of normal we had, or we lost our communities or our friendships or they changed. Can we talk about the other ways that grief shows up other than just someone dying?
Carla Fernandez:
Sure can. I think that, and from the research that I’ve done and the conversations that I’ve had, the verb of grieving is the thing that we as human beings do to process impermanence. There’s a lot to say about that. There’s whole religions and world philosophies where the point of life is actually coming into right relationship with the fact that we’re mortal. But when we think about what is impermanent and what do we have to reckon with the impermanence of in our lifetime, it is our youth, it is our childhood friendships that have changed over time. It is a sense of something that we wished we’d always had the chance to experience, but it’s not going to happen for us in this lifetime.
And I think in the culture of toxic positivity that we find ourselves in, it can be hard to admit the parts of the story that are like, “That hurts,” or, “I’m feeling this overwhelming sense of grief because something is not how I expected it to be in my life.” And I think that I was forced to look at this part of my life when the most literal version of it happened when a human died. But I’m blown away on a week to week, day-to-day basis where I’m like, “Oh, that’s grief too.” And the more we can know how to spot it and know what it feels like in our system and know how to ride it like a wave or a bucking bronco or however it ends up moving through your system, the more skilled we get I believe in accepting it and letting it do its thing. And I get so annoyed by people that are like, “Grief is a teacher.” But there’s shit that we can learn from it. And if we just ignore it, we never get that download.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, you can hear and believe that grief is a teacher after it’s happened. You don’t want to hear it while it’s happening. You’re like, “Shut the fuck up.”
Carla Fernandez:
When you’re sitting drinking the piña colada being like, “Wow, that was a real breakdown in the grocery store, but I’m cool now. I learned a thing or two.” But in the moment, it can feel like the floor is opening up underneath you.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ve talked about my own grief on the show because I had something happen in 2020, 2021 that felt just life altering for me. And it was not the death of someone, it was the ending of a relationship. And I thought I was quote unquote “grieving correctly.” Lord knows I was crying on the bathroom floor. I was taking good care of myself. I was talking to friends. I wasn’t isolating myself. And yet, and again, I’ve spoken about this before, we’ll link it in the show notes if you want to listen, but I was muscling through it and I kept thinking, “Okay, when I get to X point, I’ll be okay. When I can picture this person with someone else and not feel devastated, that means I’m good. Or in a year we can talk again and everything’s going to be fine.” And so I kept putting these benchmarks on myself of the grief can be done and you’ll finally feel okay when this happens.
And finally I realized that it felt like metaphorically putting my hand on a hot stove and being like, “Okay, I just need to keep my hand here. Then when it stops burning, everything will be fine.” But then it stops burning because I’ve literally burned all of the feeling out of my fingers. I just woke up one day and I realized that’s what I was doing is I was torturing myself as opposed to just being like, “You know what? Okay, we just have to sit in it and it’s going to be really uncomfortable and I don’t know how much time it’s going to take and I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Because I was a planner. I wanted the timeline. I wanted on March 21st, I could wake up and I wasn’t going to be grieving anymore.
When we come back from a word with our sponsors, we’re diving into finding a supportive community, the gender differences in how men and women are allowed to grieve and the financial strain of grief. We’ll see you back here soon.
Talk to me about the ways someone might quote unquote “grieve incorrectly.” And I know there’s no incorrect but isn’t there though? But some of the traps that we might get in. For me, again, it was like muscling through it. It was like, “Okay, I’m doing the grief correctly, but when this happens, then I’ll be fine.” I kept trying to see the light at the tunnel to try to get myself through it as opposed to just sitting at it.
Carla Fernandez:
Well, can I ask you a question?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Carla Fernandez:
How did that work for you? What did you learn?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh God, what didn’t I learn?
Carla Fernandez:
For your own future reference?
Tori Dunlap:
Fuck me. What didn’t I learn? Oh, my God.
Carla Fernandez:
Put this in the show notes for future Tori to listen back-
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, here’s the thing-
Carla Fernandez:
… for you to be like, “Oh, wait.” Yes, go ahead.
Tori Dunlap:
Here’s the thing. Speaking of the grief is a teacher, it truly is, but if someone would’ve told me that in the middle of it, I’d have been like, “Fuck off. Politely, no, I don’t need to hear that right now.” And even probably the advice I was getting, which is just like, “You just need to sit in it.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ve sat in it. What’s now. What’s next? I did my sitting. What’s next?” No, I think the biggest thing I learned is that, well, I learned a couple things. One is that it’s not on a timeline and my life, which has been on a timeline or is at least just like I have some control over it. The example I gave at the time was when I was growing my business, if I wanted to be on Good Morning America, I pitched people until I got on Good Morning America. I did that. And with grief, you can’t just call somebody and keep calling them until you get the thing.
The that happened to me I did not want to happen to me. So then I had to sit with, oh, you can’t, I don’t know, pitch your way out of this, or you can’t just ask for your way out of this. So I think sitting in it’s really important and also realizing that you have no control over whether you get the thing or not, and at what point you feel okay again. The second thing I learned is that the feeling I had of being joyful and alive, I have a very distinct memory of being with some friends in college at midnight or one in the morning, and we were driving down a bridge with the windows down. It was like a Perks of Being a Wallflower moment and I was like, “Oh, this is what it feels like to be alive.”
Or when I’m traveling or like, “Oh my God, life is so incredible.” And that overwhelming feeling, I was having that same feeling, but in grief, I was so upset and so sad, and it meant I was human. It meant that I had the deep capacity to feel. And I wrote down to ask you about this because I’m sure you’ve seen the Andrew Garfield clip when he went on Stephen Colbert. Have you seen that clip?
Carla Fernandez:
Yeah. What part of it stood out to you?
Tori Dunlap:
Well, the part where he’s like, “Grief means that it’s like love showing up every day.” It’s like, “Okay, if I am grieving, it means I cared about this thing so fucking much and that I wasn’t trying to protect myself from the loss.” And so that was the other thing that was weirdly comforting is I am feeling so deeply and it means I’m really alive. It means I am capital A alive and living the capital H human experience. And so that was something that was really helpful. Of all of the times I felt alive because I was so joyful, I can feel just as alive in my deep, deep, deep sadness and grief.
Carla Fernandez:
That’s beautiful. It can have that quality of being this mystical experience of like, “Oh shit, this is it.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it gives me some sort of meaning because that’s the thing I needed was like, “Why is this happening?” I didn’t expect to it to hit me that hard. I was not doing well for a long time, and I was like, “How is this ever going to get better?” And so one, I had to sit in it and I just pictured not me trying to move through a storm and put on 16 rain jackets, but just sitting in it and just being like, “Okay, we’re going to get wet and we don’t know when the storms ending and we’re just going to sit here.” But then also being like, “Wow, the rain on my skin means I’m alive.”
Carla Fernandez:
Have you seen that Drew Barrymore quote or Drew Barrymore video of her encouraging you to go out and dance in the rain?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, of course. Of course. It’s iconic.
Carla Fernandez:
I think of you. Thank you for letting me ask you about that. To me, that’s the-
Tori Dunlap:
You’re welcome. Of course.
Carla Fernandez:
… a big part of my ethos is we are our own best experts and that it is through fumbling our way through these moments where we’re like, “Oh, shit. This is, I’m capital A alive and I’m also capital S, fucking sad.” I want to go back to the girl with her hand on the stove, singeing her fingers, that sweet, sweet girl. There is something to be said about giving yourself intervals at which you have to face the intense milestones that are coming up. My dad was a marathon runner. We would occasionally go for a run together, and he had this technique that he taught me that has proven really helpful in my life, which is he would be like, “I’m going to run to that tree and if I want to stop at the tree, I’m going to stop at the tree.”
And then you run a certain length and then you get to the tree and you’re like, “I actually feel pretty good. And there’s this song coming on my iPod,” or whatever one used when he was alive, “that is actually making me feel like I could run to the next tree.” So I believe in this giving yourself intervals at which you have to handle your grief, like bite-sized pieces. And for someone listening that might be, “Okay, I’m just going to get through the holidays, or I’m just going to get past a death anniversary or the first birthday of myself that I have without this person here or the birthday that is the age they were when they died.”
Tori Dunlap:
I’ve also heard that scheduling grief, I’ve just watched that episode of Shrinking, I don’t know if you watched that show. And it’s like, yeah, okay, you put a sad song on. You get 15 minutes to cry. That’s your designated cry time. Yep.
Carla Fernandez:
I am a big fan of being like, “Okay, but what’s the song that you put on and how do you know what the song is that’s going to get in there? Find the chink in the armor?” I just started watching Shrinking on an airplane and I need to finish it. But I think the other question around the before and after that you’re describing, and I think as a fellow type A girly, I don’t mean to assume that you’re a type A girly, but something’s giving me that vibe. She nods. It becomes this complicated, frustrating thing that you can’t just make a Google Doc and knock it out, and there’s not.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s what I meant by my Good Morning America example, is it’s like if I wanted something, I went and got it, and this was the one time I couldn’t control the thing. I couldn’t really influence the outcome.
Carla Fernandez:
Which is the most humbling, true reality of what it means to be a human being on a tiny marble spiraling through space. I write in the book, this won’t be a spoiler for people who decide they want to read it, but I write in the book about the theory of the expansion of the universe, which might sound like a stoner tangent and a book about grief, but it was something that my dad talked about a lot. He was really into Carl Sagan. And the thing that I write about it is that we live in a ever-expanding universe. The horizon line is only ever getting farther away at any second. So in our attempt to be like, “Cool, I’m going to just beeline for the edge of the world and try to get this thing done,” the horizon line’s always going to be expanding beyond our ability to get there.
And the vision that came to me as I was writing this, the visual metaphor in my mind’s eye was like, “Okay, cool.” Being a renegade griever is being this cosmic motorcycle gang that’s like, “Cool. There’s no getting out.” The horizon line, there’s no end point. There’s no end game. This wild, expansive, complex life for a living is actually only going to get more wild and expansive and complex. So let’s fucking find the people that we want to ride with and learn how to ride and cruise. And that’s how I approached my own relationship to grief. My dad died, on New Year’s Day, it was 15 years and for sure as shit if you’d asked me 15 years ago if I thought that I’d be over it, I’d probably be like, “Yeah.” And the truth is that it’s a feeling I can tap into at any time.
And I totally think about my dad every other day and talk to him in my head in some weird way that we all figure out our own way to do. My grief is more of a companion or more like a channel that I can tune into and I’m only going to lose more people that I care about and places that are meaningful to me that are no longer there because of climate change or possible life paths that the doors have closed. The grief is only going to grow. So the question really becomes how do we learn to cohabitate with it knowing that we can’t check it off a box? We did some research with a social scientist, shout out Laura Brady, she’s a badass. And we were trying to understand what is actually happening around tables of The Dinner Party, this nationwide grief support community for young adults.
Why does this thing work? And we had all kinds of anecdotes and gut feelings about what was happening. But what was cool was that she discovered that it’s not that there’s like, “Oh, you follow a certain number of steps like a program, and when you graduate and get the gold star at the end, your grief is over.” It works because it’s all about normalization. And it’s like you Tori, telling me, “Did you have that phase where you were crying on the bathroom floor and then you realize, ‘Oh, I actually need to take my hand off the stove and now I’m more like here.'”
That’s the moment where I’m like, “Oh shit, me too. That’s what I was doing.” And like, “Huh, cool. You want to go get a martini and talk about it some more? And here’s my phone number and let’s text the next time you find yourself on the bathroom floor because whether it’s related to that person, fuck them or the results of the election or a future relationship, these contractions and feelings of grief are going to come back up.” And the important thing becomes like, who is your ride or die that you can send the text from on the bathroom floor? That’s what I’m really interested in and curious about.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you find that men and women experience grief differently?
Carla Fernandez:
I do, and I also feel very wary of any gender assumptions.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Carla Fernandez:
In fact, we had an early… We have so many stories from being around The Dinner Party table that are like, “Oh, that was a learning moment.” And there was one guy at the table with a bunch of women, and one of the participants was like, “Well, you don’t know.” She made some comment that was minimizing his emotions because he was a man and he very gloriously was like, “Hey, my mom died. Yes, I’m feeling this too.”
Tori Dunlap:
Right. I’m thinking more about women having to continue taking on the load of the household or they have to continue showing up in a way for everybody else, stereotypically. We know that women, if you’re in a heteronormative relationship, tend to do more of the household labor. So I’m thinking about those instances where it’s really, really hard under capitalism for anybody to grieve, but I think it’s especially difficult for women.
Carla Fernandez:
I think about, oh, how challenging it was for me to experience a significant loss and need to tend to my grief when I was a 21-year-old who had no children to care for, who had some cheap ass rent because I was totally fine living in a busted shared home with a bunch of random people I found on Craigslist. It was paradise to me.
While I had had one parent die, there was no other person in my life who I was required to care take for at the time. And it gave me a little bit of, now that I think about it, the privilege of space to be able to actually be like, “Wait a second. Maybe there’s another way. Let me start hosting these potluck dinners.” And so it’s been interesting because in the time where a lot of our programming has moved online, COVID, et cetera, it’s been interesting to see the types of people that can show up now because there’s not the assumption that they’re going to have to get in their car and drive across town or get a babysitter or all of the many things that can be really prohibitive to people having the space and time to get the support that they need.
Tori Dunlap:
We were talking about the financial strain that grief puts on us. So medical debt, lack of bereavement leave. How do you think grief is often mishandled or ignored with financial planning and what can we do to be more prepared when a loved one passes?
Carla Fernandez:
There is so much agita that happens because someone didn’t have the foresight or want to face their own mortality or had queasiness about talking about their death or their parents’ death that creates a big old mess that is super stressful on the other side of someone’s passing. And where I’ve landed is if I am a grief ally, which I aspire to/practice being in my life, one of the things that I can do, not only checking in with my friends who’ve experienced a significant loss or taking note of death anniversaries of, “Okay, I know that this is a big milestone for somebody. Let me check in with them.”
It’s also having my own shit together so that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. Lord, I pray that I die in a more glamorous way than that. But if that happens, let me make sure that I don’t make the process that my husband and family will have to go to even more complicated because they don’t freaking know the password of my computer, which it’s the same thing for all my devices and my husband makes fun of me all the time that that’s the case so he’d be able to get in. So there’s a sense of, because we live in a death denying culture where conversations about death make people so squeamish, we fuck it up and we don’t have our ducks in a row.
There’s a couple incredible organizations that really focus on this, Get Your Shit Together is one of them that comes to mind. The Conversation Project is another one that comes to mind. There’s a board game that’s come out in the last couple of years. It’s like, “Let’s make some cocoa and talk about this over a board game.” So this cultural norm I think is already shifting and changing, and I wonder in 25 years or 50 years how different the stats will be related to this. But I hear about a lot of struggle from people who are having to untangle that knot for families, for someone who died posthumously.
And I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. One of the community members, and I write about her a little bit in the book, her parents died and they owned a family business. And she was an actor, and then suddenly she’s like, “Well, I guess I’m also now a CEO of a company that I never really was interested in and don’t really understand.” I was interviewing her asking her about Shiva, which is this gorgeous Jewish tradition of spending seven days actually just sitting and processing what happened. I was like, “So did you sit Shiva?”, exoticizing this idea of the best ever grief ritual. She’s like, “No. I was trying to figure out how to run payroll and I was trying to make sense of a really complicated business that I just inherited.” So I don’t know, I’m sure you have soap boxed about this yourself-
Tori Dunlap:
Many times, yeah.
Carla Fernandez:
But one of the things that we can do to look out for people and to be an ally for folks who’ve experienced a loss is have our own shit together.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. We’ve done multiple episodes on the show about how to prepare, and again, we’ll link those down below for anybody listening. But yeah, the thing that I always think about is I never want someone who is already dealing with the grief and the loss of someone they care about dying to now also have to figure out what they wanted, where their money is, what their funeral should look like. That’s just so overwhelming. I’ve said this in previous episodes, but my parents have what they jokingly call the binder, and the binder has every single password and the people I need to talk to and where their accounts are and what the insurance policies are, and they’ve done that. That’s a huge gift to me, and I think that that’s one of those… I’m an only child, so it will be me.
And so that’s one of the things that I think you can do is even just having a small little binder or a folder in a safe place. So in a safe or someplace where it’s going to be found that is like, “Here’s all of the things. Here’s all of the end count information. Here’s what we want. Here’s what we don’t want.” And I have said this before, but I really want to make sure everybody listening, you need a will regardless of whether you have a lot of stuff or not, regardless of whether you have assets, whether you’re rich or not, especially if you have children, because wills are how you determine legal guardianship. So especially if you have a fraught family dynamic where you don’t want your children going to a particular family member, you need to have a will in place that assigns legal guardianship or the courts will choose for you. So really important.
You heard me. Get those wills in place, everybody. We actually have a really great partner we’ll link in the show notes and when we come back, we’re jumping into how to build new traditions on big days like birthdays, weddings, and holidays after experiencing grief. And we also talk about different grief practices from different cultures, which was my favorite part of the conversation. So stick with us, we’ll be right back.
I love this that you talk about in your book of your family reinventing holidays after your dad’s death. Can you share that story, especially how do we honor our grief while also breaking free from expectations on those big days, the holidays, the birthdays, the anniversaries?
Carla Fernandez:
It’s funny, I’m recording my audiobook this week and I just recorded that chapter yesterday so it’s fresh in my brain. So one of the chapters in the book is How Do We Navigate Big Days? And it’s in a section of the book that’s about honoring the past and the pattern that I spotted through spending many hours talking to many people about how they’ve navigated grief experiences is like there’s three, door A, door B, door C to handle these big days. There’s the you can do your best to recreate them, meaning the person’s not physically present, but you’re still going to make the same recipe or you’re going to go to the same church service or you’re going to bake the same kind of cake. Just throw out some random examples. There’s the example where you can remix like, “Okay, we’re going to pull a little bit from tradition, but we’re going to shake it up such that it doesn’t hurt so bad that they’re not there and the empty seat doesn’t feel so empty.”
And then the third option is just fucking revolt and giving yourself permission to just not do it, to opt out. The story that I share in the book that perhaps you’re referencing is one Christmas my sibling and my cousin and I were like, “Let’s not.” And instead of the listening to Christmas music and cooking a long meal and doing the things that was the tradition in my household with my father growing up. We instead we’re like, “Fuck this. We’re going to Harry Potter World.” We ate fat THC gummies and just let it rip. And it was a very magical and perfect day.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m inviting myself to Christmas next year. That sounds incredible. Oh my God.
Carla Fernandez:
Please. It was a one-off. It wasn’t like this is how we do this every year, although we should probably reconsider that, but-
Tori Dunlap:
Sure. Disneyland next year.
Carla Fernandez:
Let’s go me and you.
Tori Dunlap:
Perfect.
Carla Fernandez:
I’ll buy you some Mickey ears.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh my God, perfect. That sounds so important. And it sounds like too, it’s making new memories with your family where of course the absence is always going to be felt, but it isn’t as all obvious because it isn’t the way you’ve always done it.
Carla Fernandez:
Correct. And there’s some really good resources on The Dinner Party’s website for how do you navigate the holidays, and I think more and more the conversations that can happen around the Thanksgiving table can be less cozy and more cringey. And it’s definitely there’s help out there if you are experiencing any anxiety about approaching a big day. But I really see them now. It’s almost like an invitation to be creative and have, yes, I can’t control this, but there are places within this experience where I find agency and one of them is like, “Okay, am I opting into a holiday the way that my family’s always done it, or am I going to try something completely different and are Tori and I going to eat gummies at Disneyland?” Join us there.
Tori Dunlap:
What if there is some resistance from other family members? Because I could see maybe a family member who is more traditional going, “No, this is how we honor this person.” How do you navigate that?
Carla Fernandez:
These are so the moments of the work of grief in your life ongoing becomes tending to relationships with the living, with this backdrop of the context of someone having died. I feel like it’s a give and take. I think we live in a cultural story right now that’s so much about boundaries and taking care of yourself. And sometimes I’m like, “I don’t fucking want to do that, but I really love my fill in the blank person and okay, fine.” And the joy that I get is from making sure that they’re getting their needs met because I know that they have my back too. So I think it’s a give and take, and we can go to Disneyland on December 26th. It’s like get that itch scratched. But I don’t think that we have to do it. I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. It’s either we show up for our people who need something different than us or get our needs met. Let’s find a way to be able to take care of each other.
Tori Dunlap:
You mentioned Shiva is this great grieving process, this beautiful experience. Are there others that you love?
Carla Fernandez:
I love so many. I’m like armchair anthropologist over here, zero credentials. But I find myself Googling crazy like funerary art from around the world, and I’m like, “What? People would make this insane jewelry just so that someone could get buried in it?” Kind of goth, but like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider goth. Just I think about you go to the Met, for example, and you can walk through that museum and look at it through the lens of how have cultures over time conceptualized, made art about related to death? And it’s like the stories just leap off of the walls. In Ancient Egypt, there were in the catacombs, which was where they would bury dead people, adjacent to those rooms were rooms exclusively to have big raucous dinner parties for the living. So that part of burying someone was feasting to their life. I’m not trying to put a restaurant in the graveyard so much, but I don’t know.
It’s interesting to look back across the wide span of human history and just get some ideas about how humans have faced death in other moments in time. This is an obvious example, but it’s just so fucking cool Day of the Dead and a lot of Central American and Mexican traditions around grief and loss is so beautiful.
My sister-in-law is from Mexico City and she and my brother every year make an altar for everybody, all the homies who are no longer physically present, grandparents, aunts, et cetera. And my niece, who’s a toddler, but is starting to become a real person with a personality and cracking jokes and being cool and stuff, it’s like a part of her year is to see pictures of her grandparents and of her great-grandparents and to say their name and she toddles around the house carrying her cool skeleton dolls. And I’m so stoked for her because she won’t grow up with death being this thing purely seen as being macabre, but it’s a portal into her history and who she is and who these people are who came before her that are literally in her DNA. And I’m stoked on that.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m sitting here as a white person who I think like many white people are not often in touch with their culture. And most of the incredible stories or the traditions that I hear around death are, yeah, Latin cultures, Hispanic cultures, are Asian cultures. I guess in Ireland and Scotland, there’s keening and wailing. But I’m like, “I don’t have any sort of cultural ritual around death and I’m kind of jealous of everybody else’s.”
I don’t know. I can imagine that other people listening who don’t have those are going, “Well, that sounds really nice. Can we adopt them? Is that cultural appropriation?” I don’t know. I don’t know my question. But I was just like, “Those sound really healing and really lovely and fuck, my family does not have those.” No, that’s not a thing. We go to a Catholic funeral and people get embalmed, which is the weirdest tradition for me in the entire world. My dad’s side of the family is very Catholic and they live in the East Coast, and I have seen so many of my family dead, embalmed and it’s the weirdest fucking thing in the entire world. So I don’t know. I don’t know my question, but these just sound really nice.
Carla Fernandez:
Listen, I think it’s an important question, which is in late state colonialism as the spiritual orphans of the results of colonizers and colonization, A, this rising spiritual, not religious, I don’t have a faith tradition to turn to. My dad was also Catholic, East Coast Catholic, and he was like, “Later,” after being abused in the Catholic Church in Brooklyn growing up. He’d thrown the baby out with the bath water. And I remember going to my grandmother’s Catholic funeral, she died a few months after my dad died, being like, “What? This doesn’t feel like comforting.” And I’ve really sat with this question of, “Oh, let me flip through Google and find all of these interesting customs that are oftentimes the deep, incredible practices of oppressed people.”
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I remember I was in Hawaii and I was just on a beach. I’m in a bikini on a beach, and next to me at the sunset is this group of people who are sending leis into the… I’m going to cry to even think about it. It was the most beautiful. They all got in fully clothed and they sent leis out, and I was just like, “Oh, that’s how I want to go.” I was like, “That is so beautiful.” And everyone, they were playing music and it was just so lovely. And I was like, “I don’t have that.” But you’re right. It’s usually the cultures of oppressed people.
Carla Fernandez:
And that’s why for me, the deeper that I get into this work, I’m like, “Oh, creating space for people to grieve in the way that is culturally resonant for them is a radical act.”
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Carla Fernandez:
These customs and practices are at risk of going extinct. And more importantly, the people and the cultures that have cultivated this ritual technology are at risk of going extinct, and it’s not okay. So it’s been definitely, I think all roads lead to how do we fight white supremacy? It’s like this work is also one of those pathways in and has been for me, and I reckon with it in my book in different places and in my own life, all the goddam time. I think my, you’re not asking me for your advice, but my-
Tori Dunlap:
I am.
Carla Fernandez:
Where I would encourage you to point is each of us has in our own lineage a pathway back to an indigenous self or an indigenous ancestor that had a native way to tend to grief. And I know you mentioned Keening. I ended up asking myself that same question. I feel like we’re cut from similar cloth. I’m Irish, Spanish, Catholic, European mutt person. And I did some research on Keening, and a revival that’s happening in Ireland now around Keening as not just being this weird folkloric thing that people used to do, but a fucking intense, powerful somatic act to get it moving.
And there’s some great research being done about it and recordings and archives that you can still listen to. And I’d be curious for you to listen to it and see if it does anything for you. And then I think the other side of the coin is yes, let’s trace the breadcrumbs of our ancestors and figure out if there’s anything that has resonance for us in that. And then the other thing is how do we continually fight for the liberation of people to be able to worship and practice and grieve in the way that is true to them?
And I talk about in the book The Wiping of the Tears ceremony, which is this exquisite Lakota ceremony that was made illegal, forbidden, I don’t know what the penalty was, but for many decades in the 20th century. And it’s no longer technically illegal, but there’s a whole revival effort to try to bring back this really beautiful indigenous to the plains area protocol that I’ve gotten the chance to be a part of, and it’s so awesome and beautiful and makes so much sense. And I’m like, “This is the thing that I’m longing for.” And I’m not saying that I’m hoping to participate in a Wiping of the Tears or that everyone should buy a Wiping of the Tears kit online or all of the shitty things that capitalism does when we discover something that’s useful developed by an indigenous community and then try to steal it and sell it back to everybody.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and that’s what I mean is I would love to participate and also that feels wrong. But I think we’ve lost so much of the beautiful process of grieving and in a collective because of capitalism or assimilation or whatever word, it’s white supremacy. And yeah, again, I don’t have an answer, but I’m just like, “Oh man, these sound nice. And I don’t have that tool in my tool belt, and I think a lot of white people don’t.
Carla Fernandez:
I will say that in the book, it’s basically designed around a couple dozen, two dozen chapters that each double click on some kind of care practice that draws from a bunch of different things that humans have historically gone to over time, whether it’s building an altar, which is obviously is most popularized perhaps from Day of the Dead, but it’s not exclusively. Altar building is something that humans have done since forever in most places. And I think it’s important that we walk with a lot of deference and respect and be really educated within ourselves of when something is appropriative and when we are overstepping. And that’s work that we all need to be doing all the time.
And I don’t think that means that we should sit on our hands and just let our grief fester when the idea of having a feast or building an altar or writing a letter or singing a song, or any of the things that aren’t owned by any culture, but are just how humans have processed an experience like that, these are available to all of us.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for going there with me. I wasn’t expecting to do that, but…
Carla Fernandez:
Listen, I’m happy and I am 1,000% of work in progress around this question too, and I’m happy to. We need to talk about it and I’m glad you brought it up.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, and for me and my family, again, I think my parents want a Catholic funeral. That is probably not what I want. And so I don’t have any precedent of what I’m quote unquote “supposed” to do or supposed to want. So yeah, it’s just really interesting.
Carla Fernandez:
Have you talked to them about it or would you ever talk to them about it?
Tori Dunlap:
I am almost a hundred percent sure my dad would want a Catholic funeral. And I guess we’d never explicitly said, “Hey, what kind of funeral do you want?” But I imagine it’s in the binder. So-
Carla Fernandez:
Per the binder.
Tori Dunlap:
Exactly. Per page 26 of the binder. No, I’m going to be phone calling after this. So there we go.
When we come back, we’re finishing up our convo with Carla by talking about what we can do to support the ones we care about through their grief. We appreciate you sticking around for the ads. They allow us to continue making the show for free. We’ll see you back here soon.
Okay. My last question for you, I could talk to you as always with the guest for another six hours. Okay. If someone’s moving through grief or if you or yourself are moving through grief, you support yourself, how can you support other people without any sort of timeline or judgment or expectation?
Carla Fernandez:
So starting with how to support other people, there was a story someone told me once that I will never forget, and it’s my friend Hannah was driving to the movies with a friend of hers, and Hannah’s dad had died. And her friend was like, “So your dad died? How’s that going for you?” And Hannah was like, “What? Oh.” And was able to respond in a way that was not comforting the friend, or there was no assumption or projection in the question. It was just like, “How is this going for you?” And I think about it because we get so sweaty about, “Okay, but do I say it this way or do I intone my voice in that way?” So worried about what is the right thing to say or I’m going to fuck it up that we don’t say anything. And what I love about the just straight shooting question that Hannah got asked was like, “Oh, we can make this not…” I mean, it is a big deal, but we can ask it in a way that doesn’t have to take so much pressure or energy.
So checking in with people, “How is this going for you?” I do this, and maybe this is to the type A peeps listening. I know that you’re like put a money date on your calendar and put a reminder to yourself that if someone’s gone through a loss experience, whether somebody died or it was a breakup or their house burned down. It’s crazy that I can use that as an example right now and it’s not a rare occurrence. Remind yourself that it’s not all over and done after the first month, frankly, not after the first year. What kind of systems do you need to put in place for yourself so that you can be an ally and a support for them in the longterm? So those are a couple things. You can also ask them, offer some specific ways that you can show up. And then don’t be offended if they don’t follow up or they don’t accept the help. It’s not about you.
Tori Dunlap:
Also, I’ll just say Venmo. Venmo people money.
Carla Fernandez:
Yeah, baby.
Tori Dunlap:
They always need money. This is what I did. I had a friend of a friend, I don’t even know her that well. Her house burned down. I was like, “What’s your Venmo?” And I sent her money because I’m like, “She needs to have food tonight and maybe needs a hotel to stay at.” No one’s ever going to be like, “Wow, I couldn’t use an additional 200 bucks.” So that’s my thing is if you are financially able, even if it’s just like, “Hey, what’s your address? I’m going to Door Dash you dinner tonight.” That’s just really, really helpful because I think a lot of times, and I have learned this, when you go, “How can I help?” They can’t come up with how you can help right now because then they have to assign you a task. So it’s just like, “Hey, I’m buying you dinner if that sounds good. Are you allergic to anything? What’s your address?”
Carla Fernandez:
Love that.
Tori Dunlap:
Or, “Hey, what’s your Venmo? I’m just going to send you money.” Because that takes the, “Oh, I don’t want to be too much. I don’t want to ask for anything. I don’t even know what I need.” That takes that out of the equation.
Carla Fernandez:
I get questions often from people, the text that’s like, “Oh, what do I do?” And I’m like, “Well, who is it? What are they like? And do they have kids that need babysitting? Do they drink wine?
Tori Dunlap:
Do they have a house that needs cleaning?
Carla Fernandez:
Yeah, exactly. Is there somebody that they take care of, like an elder parent that actually you could help them by helping somebody else? Scan the landscape of someone’s life and figure out where you can insert the acupuncture needle that’s going to release a little bit of stress for them.
Tori Dunlap:
Can I pick their kids up from soccer practice? Can I take them to their appointment? Yep, totally.
Carla Fernandez:
So that’s how do we show up for other people? And I think for ourselves, I don’t know so much of the stress I think I’ve experienced and I hear other people experience who’ve gone through a loss experiences fear that they’re doing it wrong, but they’re like, “It’s taking too long,” that they have to hide it because it’s shameful. It’s giving yourself permission to be exactly where you are even where that place is hot mess. Or maybe that place is sort of numb and you feel bad because you should be more sad. There’s some really interesting research that came out of Columbia that studied, it was one of the first studies that happened that studied people pre and post before they’d experienced a loss and after they’d experienced loss. I don’t remember the stats on the top of my head, but the storyline was that actually a lot of people, grief impacted them less dramatically than they thought it might.
And they were like, “I don’t know. I went back to work in two weeks and is there something wrong with me that I’m actually functional?” And the answer is no. We can anticipate that we should be responding in one way and our actual response in the real moment is another. And we can make that wrong in some way. So there’s that. There’s the normalization. And then the other two things of how do you care for yourself? And I loved, in your book, you talk about self-care that is just soothing in the moment. And actually what is a long-term thing that you can do that’s not just putting a bath bomb?
Tori Dunlap:
Yep, exactly.
Carla Fernandez:
It’s two things. One is finding your people. Finding the people with whom you can be open and honest about where you are in your grief so that the vulnerability… You have a place to go to be vulnerable where you’re not isolating. And that can be at thedinnerparty.org table. It might be a completely different local support group in your area. It might be friends at the gym, it might be friends from high school. It doesn’t matter who it is. It’s people that you can actually answer the question, but how is it going honestly, to.
And then the other thing is this idea of practices. Cool, grief is a verb we grieve. How are you going to do the thing that is grieving? What are the tools that you can turn to and the rituals that you can borrow from your grandparents or invent because it feels good to you, that allow you to take the grief out from the closet and put it on the table in front of you and tend to it and talk to it and be in relationship to it so that it doesn’t come bursting out at the seams. So it’s all about normalizing what you’re going through. It’s about finding people who get it, who have your back and you have theirs. And it’s all about practices and rituals to allow yourself to move through it. 1, 2, 3. There’s a checklist for you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for your work. Thank you for this focus of grieving and community because I think it’s just so important. Plug away my friend. The book, where can people find it? Dinner Party, plug away.
Carla Fernandez:
Bing, bang, boom. Okay. My website personally is carlafernandez.co. You can find out more about the work that I do with The Dinner Party and the other community strategy that I do with clients, mostly foundations, lots of information there to check out on my website. You can pre-order Renegade Grief. It comes out on March 11th. I’m not sure when this will air in the end, but sometime around then I assume. Pre-order the book. If you pre-order it and you drop us your email, we’re creating a bunch of additional resources to go along with it, a week-to-week companion guide to not just read about these practices, but reflect on them and research them and go deeper on them in your own life. So make sure you sign up for that because it’s really juicy. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready to find the circle of people with whom I can be my realest self in my grief,” come to thedinnerparty.org.
You can sign up there for a table. You can host a table. We’re always looking for more people to open tables as hosts. Your table can be in person in your home, it can be online. Your table can be specific to an affinity that you identify with, whether it’s related to your loss type like, “I only want to meet with people who’ve experienced both parent loss or sibling loss or lost to suicide.” You might come to us and say, “I really want to meet with people who are also BIPOC or who are also LGBTQ.” And you can create a table specifically for that identity. And the caveat is that our age range is people in their twenties to mid to late forties. 20 to 45 is the range we have. The age stipulation for us is related to the fact that we find it’s really important that people are gathering with folks in similar life phases as them.
And when whoever is listening to this podcast and wants to give us a humongous grant, we will expand the age range, but for now we’re 20 to 45. If you’re outside of that age range, if you’re looking for resources for kids or you are in your finer years, I’m about to be 45 in like 15 minutes probably. So I’m almost there. But we have other resources on our website for anyone that’s grieving of any age. So the final, final plug, and I just teased this, is The Dinner Party is a 501c3. We’re a nonprofit. We are always looking for financial resources so that we can pay our staff so they can continue doing this very important work of training hosts, matching people to tables, developing resources, allowing for this community to continue growing in a way that’s really strong and considerate and thoughtful. And I’ll shout out Mary Pauline Diaz-Frasene as our executive director and is an incredible human and someone that I recommend rallying behind. I think those are the plugs I will leave you all with today.
Tori Dunlap:
Carla, thank you for being here.
Carla Fernandez:
Thank you, Tori. I love your podcast and I’m so glad that you exist in the world.
Tori Dunlap:
Right back at you. Thank you.
Thank you so much to Carla for joining us on this really powerful episode. You can get her brand new book, Renegade Grief, wherever you get your books. We appreciate you supporting local independent bookstores, but if you want to buy through Amazon, you can do that. Thank you so much as always for being here, Financial Feminist. We hope you have a kick-ass week and we’ll see you back here very, very soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
