SA
Hi Carmen. How do you feel? What time is it where you are?
C
Yes this timing is perfect, I just finished work so I’m feeling great! It is 6pm currently in Toronto so I’m just glad the day is done and we’re able to do this chat 🙂
SA
Can you tell me a little bit about how you arrived at BIPOC DeathTalk?
C
Sure! Basically I had suffered several traumatic losses and had been working in the mental health sector as a social worker and realized that the way people talked about and understood grief was really terrible and not at all helpful and through a friend who was a death doula I was introduced to Corinne, who had just become a doula themselves. We both agreed that death and dying conversations were very white and eurocentric so we decided to run an in-person discussion group called BIPOC DeathTalks and it was so well received and popular we ran a couple more. Since then things have changed as Corinne is doing their own thing but I now cofacilitate BIPOC Grief and Death Talks with Kayla Carter, who is a full spectrum doula (and I’m a death doula).
SA
What an incredible resource you have cultivated. I’m so glad to be here with you, this morning, for me! I mentioned this in my email, but I lost my grandmother in August. I am processing it in all different ways, but my initial reaction to the news of her loss was so unlike me as someone who naively thought I ‘confronted’ death a long time ago. How has your own relationship with death and dying shifted through your work as a death doula?
C
I definitely realized that my understanding of death was always “weird” in comparison to those around me and within society. I am Mexican, I wasn’t born in Canada but when I started grieving I was told by people I worked with in mental health that I was a liability and I really felt demonized for grieving and for wanting more support. Through my work as a death doula I realized that actually, society as a whole in many “western/eurocentric” countries are actually terrified of talking about death, looking at it, being around it and so even when we grieve, and we know we do so in our own ways and mourn in our own ways, the systems tell us that we’re wrong and that we’re not “resilient” and that thinking about death is bad. I think it really helped me face the fact that the world is full of toxic positivity that’s trying to tell us that something like death shouldn’t hurt for too long and that if it does it’s bad but it’s just not true. I’ve always accepted dying as a part of life (because I’m Mexican) but I never thought of it as something radical? Until I became a death doula.
SA
Wow. I’ve never made that connection before, between toxic positivity and the encouragement to almost ‘get over’ death. Totally. Right now, I feel like we’re in a moment where we’ve just been explicitly exposed to so much death and dying, not just with the pandemic but its root cause – the way the climate is dramatically shifting. Although in the west there’s been no ritual to grieve these losses. So as a result, we just keep moving forward and into the ‘new normal’. Do you feel that at all?
C
Yes I definitely think that’s the case – it’s terrible. We have not been given the chance to grieve or mourn anything that’s happened in the last year and a half. The way I put it is we’re carrying the dead carcass of our pre-pandemic lives, hoping it comes back to life instead of accepting the loss we’re currently going through and letting ourselves collectively feel it. We are all traumatized, especially those of us from marginalized communities, because the loss hasn’t stopped for hundreds of years but now we add a pandemic and the constant threat of world-ending climate disasters and we’re all just sitting here traumatized, trying to smile our way through it and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I really feel that in the west certain people get to grieve, predominantly white people, we are not afforded that luxury because grief and death is looked at in a very narrow way. But we are grieving the death and loss of our lands, our people, our childhoods and our own identities. In Canada when stuff started coming out about the Indigenous children they were finding in unmarked graves all of these white people cried about “this isn’t the Canada I know.” It’s the Canada we as Indigenous people have always known and we don’t get to cry about it. Sorry, that was a long response but its a whole mess and I do believe that only certain people are allowed to feel the depth of loss they experience.
SA
Yes. Folks from marginalised communities have not been given a chance to grieve throughout the history of the modern world. I think a lot about apocalyptic, end of the world minded folks who have been shaken up in the past year and a half (my mother is one of them). I also think about in Australia, on Darug Land where I currently am in so called Sydney, the Darug people considered colonisation to be the apocalypse.
It’s not like we’re given proper space to grieve either, if we are reliant on the wheels of capitalism to make a living and survive. How do you begin to suggest we collectively make space for that grief, in a western world where we are constantly distracted and pushed towards dissociation?
C
We as BIPOC Grief and Death Talks come to it from the perspective of 2 physically unwell, chronically ill women who look at it through a disability justice lens. So our first thing is building and creating community. We run these grief talks online for free in the hopes that people will build solidarity and community. We’ve already heard about people coming together and speaking to each other or giving each other support and advice after we run the groups and it’s completely self-sustaining because people are only asked to do what they can, and are more than willing to be there for others, especially knowing that so many of us have never been given that opportunity. I know many people who do things differently but I do believe that capitalism wants us to believe that we’re all alone in our struggles, that we’re all individuals who cannot learn or experience healing through each other (without it being some hyper-professionalized and psychiatrized space like a counselling space or a psychotherapy) but we totally can and if there’s anything I’ve learned through our groups its that we just kind of need to make space for people to hear each other without judgement and feel held in the moment? If that makes any sense? It’s small but I do think it starts with unlearning what we’re constantly told and understanding we can be here for each other as complete strangers, in whatever way you can do that? We do it this way but others do it differently and it’s great. Not sure if that made sense?
SA
Yes, that makes total sense. What I am understanding about my own resistance towards an expansive grief comes down to a very basic feeling of being judged for how I feel. And how we’re taught, in the west, to repress any type of extreme emotion. So I can imagine that a space nourished in a way to disconnect judgement from our expressions of grief can be so healing and beneficial.
What about in our daily lives, how can we integrate this knowing into how we engage in our everyday activities?
C
Hmmm that can be hard but I always believe in acknowledging shame. We feel a lot of shame when it comes to emotions, you can’t be too happy or too sad in this society, it’s all very beige and bland. We learn from an early age to shame and police ourselves so we definitely talk about giving yourself (in private at first usually) the ability to let out your emotions in ways that feel good, and not attaching it to an outcome. That’s the other thing, we’re obsessed with outcomes and something meaning that something else will happen. Not to mention unlearning our idea of therapeutic care. Yes, counselling/therapy, massage, pampering is very good for ourselves as self-care but so is smashing things in a rage room or just screaming and yelling, taking up an “angry” sport. It doesn’t have to be pretty or neat and it doesn’t have to be linear so we always encourage people to allow themselves to feel, because we’re quite good at being compassionate to others but when it comes to ourselves we’re constantly policing our feelings and doing things to “complete” healing. Grieving doesn’t stop, it changes you and you grow around it, it doesn’t just go away after 10 sessions of counselling so definitely fighting with yourself and your own beliefs about who you are – it’s been programed since we were kids and it takes many years to really feel like you’re making any headway at confronting death and grief in a realistic, non-capitalistic or ableist way. Not sure if I answered that correctly or if that’s what you were looking for?
SA
Yeah, I guess the way we acknowledge and hold our grief doesn’t just change overnight, it is a lifelong process of unlearning, like you said earlier. It’s really interesting that you mention shame as well, as something programmed into us.
As a death doula, do you work with folks who are explicitly in the process of conscious dying? We are all on that journey in one way or another, have you ever had the chance to be part of that more focused journey?
C
Currently due to COVID I haven’t been able to work with anyone who is “actively” dying but actually since things opened back up I am going to start doing some work at a hospice nearby so I am excited about that. I have worked with children of immigrants whose parents are older and a bit more stubborn than they’d like about admitting that it might be time to start organizing their affairs but that’s less of stuff like vigiling or doing hand-on death preparation and informational work for families and more of the administrative side of death preparation, because many of us with immigrant parents have to contend with parents who like to pretend they’re back home and everything will get settled in their absence somehow and that if they plan it now they’ll die sooner. I work mostly with immigrant folks and have had the opportunity to work with Trans folks because unfortunately we are not always granted the privilege of knowing when we’re gonna die so my goal as a doula is to get everyone to prepare ASAP regardless of where they’re at, especially because some of us have targets on our backs because of who we are.
SA
I am so appreciative of all that you offer, Carmen. How have you been preparing yourself for the work that is approaching you at the hospice?
C
Yes! Part of the prep work was doing 10 weeks worth of training, then I have more in-person training coming up, as well as more extensive bereavement counselling training. But on a personal level I have been investing a lot into my own care and mental health, I have been doing intense trauma therapy (EMDR) since May and have also been working on taking as much off of my plate as possible in order to be ready for this next chapter. It’s been a journey to get here, and I was supposed to have started this portion 2 years ago but that’s what happens with COVID. I think it will be meaningful and messy and I am just happy to be able to support people in my neighbourhood. I think just having a good support system has made all the difference. I have chronic pain issues that happen when I’m stressed so I’ve already set myself up with a chiropractor, physiotherapist, naturopath. It’s no joke and it’s extremely expensive, I have the privilege of having a workplace with good health benefits so it’s not as expensive but it’s a lot of things to set up so I don’t crash and burn.
SA
It’s amazing to know you have such a strong eco system, and that you’re so intentional in giving back to yourself. Wishing you continued wellness and strength as you enter into this new phase <3 What are three things you do daily to ground?
C
That’s a great question and something I need to work on constantly as someone with severe anxiety, because for me being grounded in myself is horrifying (I have no other words for it). But for me, I am not a meditation person or a silence person (not sure if that’s a bad thing) so what I do is I take many deep breaths when I start my work day, at least 5 intentional breaths just to get myself situated.
The other thing I do is I dance, I am not a skilled dancer or a good dancer but dancing helps me shake out a lot of the left over emotions going on – I dance it out at least one song a day
And at night while watching some sort of true crime show(my coping mechanism), I do this thing called symmetry exercises? I think? But its basically tensing and relaxing your muscles in a very specific sequence to trick your body into relaxation. That’s it 🙂
Carmen Galvan is one half of BIPOC Death and Grief Talks, a death and loss support organization that she runs with her co-facilitator Kayla Carter. Carmen is a death doula, while Kayla is a full spectrum doula. BIPOC. Currently supports available include online discussion groups, one on one grief peer-support, death doula services (in English and Spanish) as well as grief and loss trainings and debriefs for groups and organizations. You can find them on Instagram at: bipocdeathgrieftalk
Their own instagram handles are carmen_maria416 and kaylaxcarter
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Services for individuals/community members are free but for organizations or companies a fee is included (but can be negotiated depending on size, funding availability etc).