Trauma, Grief, and Disrupting Death-Dealing Systems with Dr. Jamie Eaddy

If you’ve ever struggled to make space for your own grief—or wondered why so many people around you seem to push through pain without tending to it—this episode offers a compelling and liberating invitation.

This week, Rachael Clinton Chen and guest co-host Wendell Moss sit down with Dr. Jamie Eaddy. Dr. Jamie is a thanatologist, which is a professional who studies and provides support related to death, dying, bereavement, and grief. She is also a grief and death doula, a healer, and the founder of The Ratchet Grief Project®. Jamie’s work centers especially on the Black community and other marginalized groups whose grief is often overlooked or dismissed. She invites us to see grief not as a private burden or spiritual failing, but as a sacred, communal, and even political process.

Together, they name the systems that make it hard for us to grieve—particularly in communities shaped by Christian triumphalism, generational survival strategies, systemic racism, and the pressure to “keep going” at all costs. 

Dr. Jamie challenges death-dealing theologies that shame us for being human and normalize suffering as something deserved or redemptive. Instead, she offers a vision of a God who grows with us, who is expansive, and who longs for us to be fully alive.

This episode is a call to reclaim grief as part of what it means to be human—and to reimagine our faith, our communities, and our systems to reflect that truth. If you’re longing for permission to pause, to feel, and to be held in the midst of loss, we hope this conversation will meet you right where you are.

About Our Guest:

Dr. Jamie Eaddy is the founder and principal of Thoughtful Transitions, as well as the creative force behind The Ratchet Grief Project®. A thanatologist, theologian, healer, author, and innovative educator, Dr. Eaddy’s work extends beyond guiding people and communities through grief—it’s about conjuring new ways of being, disrupting death-dealing systems, and creating space for collective healing, especially for those whose grief is often overlooked or misunderstood.

Her practice is rooted in the sacred labor of liberation. She combines sound therapy, aromatherapy, somatic practice, ritual, and storytelling to create a space for transformation and growth. As a certified death doula, trauma professional, clinically trained chaplain, and Fellow in Thanatology (FT), Dr. Eaddy holds grief as a spiritual companion—one that, when honored, can open portals to possibility and re-membering.

She is a sought-after speaker and educator whose teaching invites people to think critically, feel deeply, and return to themselves. Her offerings support individuals, churches, nonprofits, and schools in building grief-informed, trauma-conscious, anti-racist cultures rooted in radical inclusion and community care.

But before the titles, Dr. Eaddy is Alberta’s granddaughter, Pauline’s cousin, and Salam’s niece. A lover of pink lipstick, 90s hip-hop, and 80s gospel. A poet and body butter maker. 

Her ethic is clear: “If your fight for liberation stops once you get free, it wasn’t liberation you were after—it was privilege.” Her work is an invitation to reimagine grief, resist erasure, and rise again and again.

Be on the lookout for Dr. Eaddy’s forthcoming book and podcast. You can join her email list here to stay updated.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. It feels these days as though death is all around us. And there is genuinely so much to grieve collectively and personally. I was trying to put together a list in my head last night of just the kind of very public natural disasters that have happened in 2025 thus far –  let alone a lot of the death dealing policies coming out of this administration and all those kind of personal and ongoing ways in which we’re confronted with heartache, pain, and trauma. And yet it feels like one we’re overwhelmed, two, we’re so resistant to entering grief, to entering lament, to even knowing how to do that. And here at the Allender Center, we talk a lot about the reality of death, the reality of grief as an important part of healing from trauma. But we’re up against a lot. So we need help. And I am thrilled today to be joined by my colleague and friend, soon to be Dr. Wendell Moss and Dr. Jamie Eaddy and her robust holy labor as a uniquely gifted healer, dreamer, educator, theologian, thanatologist, which we’ll get into, and traumatologist whose works spans a broad spectrum of care and transformation. Dr. Jamie Eaddy is the founder and principal of Thoughtful Transitions, the director of counseling and wellness at the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia, as well as the creative force behind the Ratchet Grief Project. She is a sought after speaker and educator whose offerings support individuals, churches, nonprofits, and schools in building a grief-informed, trauma-conscious, anti-racist cultures rooted in radical inclusion and community care. So Wendell and Dr. Jamie, thank you for being here.

Wendell: Good to be here.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Rachael: Alright, so let’s just set the stage. Let’s talk a little bit about your work as a, is it thanatologist or thanatologist?

Jamie: Thanatologist.

Rachael: Thanatologist.

Jamie: That’s it.

Rachael: And also you talk about yourself as a grief and death doula, which I just love that language. So tell us a little bit about what a thanatologist does.

Jamie: Yeah, so thanatology is really the scientific study of death, dying, grief, bereavement, right? So I’m always saying somebody’s grandmother is a thanatologist, they just didn’t have the title, right? So is I’m not doing anything new in the world. I’m carrying on a legacy that some of our grandparents, great grandparents did. But thanatology is the academic word, that scientific study of death, dying grief and bereavement. And that then takes me to being a death do and grief doula. And I don’t know that a lot of people use the term grief doula, but grief doula, I join people in, and I think this is helpful sort of naming what I say, grief is, grief is one, an emotion, but grief is also grieving this process that it’s our natural response to loss, change, transition, unmet expectations, unrealized dreams, shattered assumptions. So grief doula is someone who joins with individuals and communities who are navigating all of those kinds of ruptures. So I say from death to dreams to divorce, whatever kind of disconnection or loss someone has encountered, the grief doula in me comes in and sits with them and joins them and co-creates rituals with them and may open up new ways of feeling with them so that they can move through their grief process. And as a death doula, it is, you said this already, that death is one, it’s all around us. And in so many ways, the dying process has been taken out of community or out of the public and placed into these sanitized medical systems. Listen, I went to the doctors yesterday. I need this doctor and I’m going to PT because of the doctor’s recommendation. I support healthcare in that way. And there is this way that death in healthcare systems sort of removes some of the humanity from the process. And so as a death doula, whether you are dying in a hospital, in a nursing home or at home, I join you and your people. I don’t say loved ones and we can talk about that later, but I join you and your people in your journey toward that last breath. And so again, co-creating rituals, helping you make contact and make decisions about body disposition and about what kind of care, who do you want to show up? All of those things as a death doula and I advocate for you in the system. So they need more pain medication, all those kinds of things as a death doula and grief doula in my work as a thanatologist.

Rachael: Yeah, right. Well, it makes me think about, one of our colleagues is always talking about the wailing women in Jeremiah. Just call for the mourning women that they may come send for the skillful women some sense. So when you say not only your ancestors but this rich tradition that we’ve certainly lost at least a collective memory of that it actually is a skill. So the generosity to lend that to people, and I think it’s a skill most people don’t realize they really need help with until sometimes it’s too late. And so it’s part of why I want people to know about your work. How did this come to be? I think you’re the first thanatologist that I’ve… certainly encountered folks who would say, yeah, I journey with people in seasons of death therapists who help people enter mourning. But how did this come to be?

Wendell: I read the bio, I’m like, I’ve never heard this name before and I definitely haven’t heard a sister name of this. I’m like, help me.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you for that and your excitement around it. So one, I want to say I have some amazing colleagues, and I need to say it this way. I have some amazing Black thanatology colleagues because the organization that we’re a part of is probably 80% non-black, 80% non-people of color. And so that 20% people of color who name themselves as thanatologist is really important for me. So being this Black girl thanatologist is how I introduce myself to people. I would say this, I can go back to being… my mother and I were just having this conversation. When my cousin Pauline died and part of my introduction as always, I’m the granddaughter of Alberta Brown, the cousin of Pauline Bennett, the niece of Salam Brown. And when you meet me, you meet them. And so when my cousin Pauline died in 1989, I had a dream. And I know for some it’s like kind of woo woo, but I had a dream. And in that dream, the word I heard was that I was sort of a healer. And so this is 13 years old. I understand myself in the world as a healer that looks different at 13 than it does when you’re about 50. But just I understood myself as healer. And then as I sort of grew in my understanding of what it meant to be a healer, I started realizing early on, particularly with people who had losses around abuse, intimate partner violence and other kinds of violence, I started seeing how there were a lot of losses associated with that. And I found myself pulled into those people’s lives. Again, not necessarily skilled or trained because let’s be clear, I love my family, but they didn’t have language or the skillset to help me develop. So I’m just out here in the world. I’m a healer, I’m drawn, but don’t quite know all of the things. So that’s kind of where it started as a 13-year-old leaning in now around 18 or 19, I what we say, acknowledged the call to ministry. And I was in a church in DC, very large church I talk about at Metropolitan Baptist Church, 40-50 associate ministers, so large, 8,000 to 10,000 folks on Sunday mornings. And each of the associate ministers were assigned to do things and one ministry all of the ministers were assigned to. And that was sort of death and bereavement. Well, guess what? Most of the ministers found a way to get out of the death and bereavement assignment. So I found myself for a good 10 years straight being one of the four that was sort of assigned to death, to bereavement, to funeral preparation and stuff. And every year I said, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’ll be clear, that’s not the sexy ministry. Can I say that? It’s not the, nobody’s calling you to be that person. So I’m not doing this, I’m not doing this. And my mentor, one of my mentors, Dr. Sherrill McMillan Duckett, we call her Dr. Mac, she said, obviously Spirit is trying to tell you something, so maybe you should try to lean in. She said, because when people call for bereavement support, they ask for you. So they’re asking for you. You’re good at it. I know you don’t want to do it, but maybe just explore why behind your desire to not do it, especially since you know you’re a healer. So let’s just figure out what’s happening with you in that. And I leaned in, and that was three decades ago. I leaned in. But over time, at chaplaincy, pastoral care, all of these skills that I develop, I believe in getting training, but also in wisdom from the elders, all of these ways that we grow. And so I just leaned in at 19 and now again approaching 50, I have leaned all the way in and I have recognized that this is my medicine for the world. There is nothing, I shouldn’t say that because I don’t do absolutes, but I am so locked into my lane, my purpose and lane in being in this world. And so it was initially just being pulled. Then it was an assignment. Then it was, well, let me lean in and see what it has to say. And I call grief the process a “she,” and she has been talking with me over the years about the importance of helping her be in the world with other folks. So that’s how I got in it. I just leaned in and she grabbed hold of me. And that’s kind of where we are now in this very intimate partnership working and bringing healing into the world. So that’s kind of how I describe my entry and my continued presence in that kind of work.

Rachael: And I would imagine, I just think about at least my own experiences of being close to death of loved ones or my people being in the room, having the privilege of being invited into that really vulnerable, messy, complex, but really thin space, really thin. There’s a threshold that’s happening and you feel it. You may not be experiencing all that the person is experiencing, but it’s such a holy place. It’s also, I feel kinda like weddings, I understand why you say your people because it is also, it can be such a complex space of what’s coming into the room, the relational connections, the trauma, the grief that is being held in bodies in that process. So I think it takes a lot of courage and it’s really powerful to hear your story and makes a lot of sense that you’re a healer. So Wendell, anything as you kind of asked that question coming to mind?

Wendell: Yeah, I would’ve just caught by what she said, that the ministers didn’t come and show up. They didn’t come to the death part, they didn’t come to that specific piece that you offered. And what it made me think about is growing up, I’m from St. Louis and in many Black communities the funeral and everything is big, but there’s this sense of celebration they’re going on. And so there’s this almost… weep a little but celebrate and don’t cry for me. So there’s something of, I don’t want you to hold heaviness for me because I’m going on, but nonetheless, it does minimize there is actually grief. And so it almost sets the stage. Grief is the antithesis of faith and there’s almost antithesis of actual resilience. And so as I heard you talk about that, it felt like what I heard you say that I was like, no surprise, but in which you brought up the complexity and it felt like how death has even held in a Black community and dealt with at funerals is complex. It’s a mixed message. Yes. And we can’t be here for too long.

Jamie: And oh, thank you so much for saying that. So that’s one of the challenges that… We may get a lot of people that show up at the funeral, the funeral might be packed. And this is my own pet peeve, I think many, not all, I think some eulogists don’t create the space for our humanity. They want us to be disembodied. And so we can’t feel, and this way that so many for years, our theology and many of us are unlearning this, but our theology only allows us to sort of sit in victory and not recognize that or sit in resurrection and not recognize that there is a path to resurrection without actually falling down or crucifixion if you want, but without the death, without the dying part, which when someone with one of your people dies. And here’s why I don’t say loved one because y’all know for me, grief is like the saying, we grieve because we loved, I don’t say that and this is not a knock to others, but I don’t know that we grieve because we love. Now we can grieve because we love, but sometimes we grieve because we are attached. That’s right. We have developed these attachments. And so some of the people who show up are not people who love you as much as there are people who are attached to you in some kind of way. They haven’t figured trauma could be the attachment. So we don’t know if it’s always love. And so I say “my people,” whatever reason. So I think this idea that we have to rest in celebration and not be with people in their humanity to the resurrection or to the celebration is a disservice that it’s harmful, that our bodies are paying the price of not being able to fully acknowledge what loss, change, transition, rupture does to us internally, what it does to us sort of relationally. And this focus on pushing me to resurrection can be premature. So I love that you mentioned that in Black church specifically most of my experience. But I am saying, Hey, I wonder if God is inviting us to sit and acknowledge the pain so that we can then really say the joy that we have is something that the world didn’t give and the world can’t take away. I have joy that no one can take from me, but that is because I know deep sorrow, right?

Rachael: That’s right, that’s right. And also how much of, well, first of all, there’s a lot in the scripture that is like lament, purgatory, lament that gets real messy and real honest and real vulnerable. And there’s so much about our mourning leading to a kind of comfort that we’re meant for that I do think we don’t actually get to experience. And I grew up in white evangelical churches where not only is there, it’s not, there’s room to mourn, but there’s always this: “But God’s plan in this,” in the most heinous of tragedies of being human, we’ve got to find some deterministic meaning of do I believe in a God who will bring beauty from ashes as a movement, as a posture, as a way of being? Absolutely. Do I think that God is like, I’m going to kill this five-year-old in a car accident so that I can bring about character development in your life? And no, I think that’s so wicked and evil. And this is not a question I included in, but I meant to just before we talk about embodiment of grief and the nuances of that and the cultural implications, can we talk a little bit about some of the death dealing systems that we’re up against that have huge, I just feel like our capacity to grieve and our capacity to get close to death, especially as people who claim to follow a crucified God who invites us into baptism. And there’s so much nuance on around that. So that’s another podcast conversation as someone again who grew up in white evangelicalism like white fundamentalism. But there’s something about the death dealing powers of this world that I actually think benefit greatly from keeping us out of our bodies, away from grief. Just think it has major implications. But I would love to hear from the two of you, what are some of the systems that we’re up against when we talk about grief and dying and trauma?

Jamie: So I think that one of the first systems is we’re already talking about it, right? This sort of faith system, this church, this system of theology, and it can be death dealing in that it does not allow us to rest in our humanity, that it shames us for being human. And this might be different podcasts, but I need to say this to connect it. And any theology that starts you off with being a filthy rag and then you have to spend the rest of your life sort proving your worth, then you think loss, change, transition, interruption, disruption is a part of your test to prove your worth. So then you don’t lean into the grief of it, because in your eyes, this sort of redemptive suffering is how you view it is: this is where I’m supposed to be, right? And so you readily accept losses that are ungodly. You readily accept loss of support systems that will force our disabled siblings, our queer and trans siblings. You readily accept those systems, those systems of loss because somehow we are proving our work to a God. And so you don’t grieve it, you don’t pause for it. You don’t make space for people’s grief because you have bought into the lie that this pain is one inevitable and two deserved. And so when you think pain is inevitable, and yes, in some ways loss is inevitable, but when you think it is deserved, right, then you don’t make space for grief. So for me, that’s part of one of the systems that is death dealing in our understanding of who God is and how we are to be human together. So that’s one thing. And then we have family systems and culture that has also sort of reinforced what strength is. And so I just wrote on Facebook the other day something about Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes and her work around the strong Black woman, one word, and this belief that we don’t have time to grieve. To grieve means you might need to pause and to pause mean you’re not being productive. And if you’re not productive, then are you worth anything? So this way that these systems have us prove our worth by disconnecting from the very real human, the holistic being here. So again, cultural and we learned this, and I need to say this and then I’m going to stop talking because y’all know this is my favorite subject in the world. We can be here until the weekend, I say this, some of the cultural things, some of the things that we’ve learned through culture systemically through culture. And so this way that we disconnect from our emotions. Now people of African descent, our origin story does not begin at slavery, but I want to start there for this, right? There is a way that chattel slavery forced us to disconnect from feeling because to feel meant to put yourself and others in danger. And so you learned as a survival technique, how not to cry, how not to shed a tear, how to swallow your pain because it was how you stayed alive and what did you do? You taught your children how to stay alive. By what? By not crying, by not complaining, by not grieving. So we learned this as a survival technique. So I don’t shame my grandmother, although I never saw her cry, I don’t shame my elders for doing what they needed to do to survive. The question becomes are we able to do something different today? Do we know the story behind? Is there a narrative that tells us why we weren’t feeling, why we didn’t allow ourselves to feel the grief? And so that systemic death dealing expectation that is on us, we no longer have to live into, right? But it’s still forced upon us. So systemically that is a death dealing sort of ideology that we have to disconnect from. So those are just a couple. There’s so many, but those are a couple that come to mind when I heard you answer that question.

Wendell: But the two that you bring up, one, what’s often so hard to push through is when there’s a theological framework around it. When it’s in the theological realm, I wish you would. When it’s, especially if, the sense that no, Jesus paid it all or you know the sayings. And so therefore almost like you should be living in the future where there will be no more tears. We can’t be in the here now and again. If I got my theology around it, it’s hard to move me and two, what makes your work feels so, so powerful. Dr. Jamie is that, and you just brought it up, this thing is historic, the way that we’ve been taught to survive. It’s historic. You’re talking about a historic, I dunno if you remember the movie, if you’ve seen a movie like Rosewood, remember the scene, where the dude said, ain’t no time to cry. I remember that. And so we’re talking about the way of survival that I heard we want to honor, you want to honor grandma and how they made it. And yet the cost has been. And so what it feels like you’re doing it, you are kind of messing with a historic way of survival. And I love what you say now, is God inviting you to help folks to heal in the way that is pushing against historic. Because I remember talking to a sister who lost her family, lost her husband as a pastor, and I asked her, how do you survive? And she said, “Baby, all I could do was pray and all I could do is be there for my kids, my girls,” which made sense. But one of the key things she said is that “Baby, but I ain’t got time. I ain’t got time to focus on me. I ain’t, I got to focus on my babies.” So one way it was like, yes, ma’am but I felt a tear go down my face because it meant that she didn’t have time to care for her family. And for her that was right. That’s what it meant to be a Black mother. So again, when I think about your work, it feels like you honoring that, but I also feel you’re pushing against that historic narrative way that we have had to make it.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And pushing against it, really asking us to expand. Paul Knitter, who I love deeply, book that Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. I love it. And in there Paul Knitter talks about how our spirituality and emotional, our emotional maturity and intelligence grows as we grow. That’s typically how it happens. However, our religious or theological understanding does not. And so we have people who are growing emotionally or intellectually, but are spiritually still and he says at an eighth grade or maybe teenage diploma. And so what I am saying is I wonder if the God that we have placed our trust in is bigger. We have created a static God, right? A God that does not grow because we have not grown.

Rachael: That’s right.

Jamie: And so when it comes to grief, what I’m inviting us to do is to lean into a God who is expansive, but that also gives us access to an expansive way to be in the world. So yes, grandma and them didn’t have time to cry. They had work to do. Understood, understood.

Wendell: Yes ma’am.

Jamie: Guess what? There are times that I don’t have time to cry because I got to get on a Zoom and I need my face to be fixed for this Zoom. That’s all good. And here’s the challenge. When I’m off the Zoom, do I get a chance to return to the pain or the grief or does it just start to, I don’t like to fold clothes. So if you go in my room, there’s a big pile of clothes. Is it me just taking clothes or my pain and grief out of the dryer and sitting it on top of the clothes that are here from last week and the week before? And that’s what I do with my pain. I disconnect from it. I compartmentalize, okay, until it’s not. And I just take it and I stack it on top of the other thing. And for many of us, the compartmentalization is understood. You do have to find a way to be in the past but also be in the present and maybe think about the future and there’s a reason for that. But here’s the question that I ask the folks that I journey with this why a mother who is caring for 1, 2, 3, however many children this particular mother you name was caring for, why she got to pick the kids up from school?

Wendell: Come on.

Jamie: Why she got to pick the kids up from school? Why can’t she put you on the list?

Rachael: That’s right.

Jamie: And for the next month you pick the kids up from school and you take them to your house to feed them and then you bring them to her after that.

Wendell: Come on Doctor Jamie,

Jamie: Because that way she has had three hours to not have to be with her kids. I know she loves them. I know she love her babies. I know for the most part, I know she love her babies. However, why she got to pick the kids up from school? Why does she need to go grocery shopping? And then to Rachael’s question about systems, we can talk later about later, maybe another podcast about how systems don’t give us the space to actually have space to reorient ourselves into the world. We have to go right back to work. And be as productive as we were before. But we are different people after a loss, right? So one, community is supposed to be there so that the mama, the papa, whoever the caregiver is, doesn’t have to do all of the work they had to do before because they are different. They don’t have the same capacity. And if we as community come alongside you to join you in this reorienting yourself into the world, then you can grieve because you don’t got to pick the kids up from school every day. And as folks who are maybe decision makers, we get to say that you get more than three days off. And yes, I know you said your cousin died and we don’t really give bereavement time for cousins because cousins don’t, right?

Rachael: Cousins don’t count as real family.

Jamie: Well see, guess what? My cousins are like my siblings. My cousins. I had cousins before I had a sibling. My cousins are my people. So my neighbors are my cousins. So if Ms. Clara passes tomorrow, ain’t no way you going to tell me I can’t take time off to see you. I know Ms. Clara for 45 years.

Wendell: It’s a village.

Jamie: So those are again systems that we need to think about, but also we are a system. And so what happens when Dr. Mama Itihari Touré, who’s one of my elders, Mama Itihari Touré, you can look her up, but she talks about there’s no sort of individual action, that does not have communal consequence. So when that person’s loved one, that person’s person dies. And now they have to pick. There’s a communal consequence. And are we allowing ourselves to sort of forego our responsibility in the communal consequences? We are now to step up and support this person. And when we don’t, then for me that I know God is in it because we have shown up. I don’t want you to talk to me about God making a way and keeping me if people aren’t showing up. I have never seen God except I have seen my neighbor bring me food when I was sick.

Wendell: Go ahead. I was going to say what I feel like the statement you just made and it’s humbling where you both hold. I had to do what I got to do. But when you said and making us hold that after what has happened after death, your capacity is not the same.

Jamie: It’s not.

Wendell: That’s huge and have it don’t have what you had before. You changed. I just love that statement and humbling to hear, but it’s true. So I appreciate you putting that there. This is what death does. This is what trauma does. It changed in your capacity lessens.

Jamie: You are a new and have to get. And I have to get to know the new me because I don’t quite realize that I’m not as sharp as I was before. I don’t realize that I don’t have access to the same language, that it doesn’t come to me as quickly. I don’t realize that I’m a little more tired than I was this time last year. I don’t realize that until I’m going through it. This is part of, for me, this is what grief does. Grief is this invitation. She reminds us that one loss is inevitable and we are navigating losses from our first breath to our last. Right? We are always navigating losses, which means we are always being reborn and reimagined and remembered in this world that this is new Jamie that you see today. And so how do we help people recognize that grief is inevitable? The emotion you’re going to experience loss. Grief the process though is an invitation. The emotion you feel, period. But the process which leads you to your resurrection, to your remembered self, to your new way of being in the world as an Afrofuturist too to me in the future, grief, the process invites me into that. And that’s one thing I think we need to help spread the word and our workplaces in our churches. That is what grief can do. Last thing, and I’m going to let you ask any other question you have, but for congregations, this is what I try to help congregations, particularly some pastors understand because they’re like, sis, all you talk about is this grief work. This is like you, you’re starting to bore us a bit. And I say, but grief is involved in everything. So here’s the thing, there are people in your congregation who don’t give financially. They’re not necessarily generous what they’re giving. I said, I bet you I can trace it back to a loss. I bet you, I bet you I can trace it back to a loss that they experienced. This could be a person died. This could be a job, this could be a betrayal. This could be that you said something harmful from the pulpit and it felt like, I bet you I can trace it back to, so here’s why grief is important, because when we are helping congregations work through their grief, they’re giving changes. And I’m not pleased. Hear me, I’m out here trying to make money. It’s not about money, but it is recognizing that when I have a loss, sometimes I hold onto what I have because I have control over this thing. If I don’t have control over anything else, I can control my wallet. And what I won’t do is write a check for anything. I’ll control it because I won’t let you take it from me. So I help people say when we work with loss like this, we are helping people. One, your volunteerism changes because you free them up in some ways that they can join a community and work toward the vision of congregation, community and pastor, they free up their money because they’re not holding onto it the way they were prior to the loss they experienced. There are ways that just being practical as a practical way of being in the world, if you want productive people, you need to give people space to work through their grief. That’s just a practical sense of things. You want a productive workforce, guess what? Give them some chances to move through and work through their grief. They’re going to show up, they’re going to be creative because grief swallows our creativity sometimes. They’re going to show up, they might… So just a practical sense of things, if you give people space to move through and rituals to help them move through their grief, that it can help all of us in all of those spaces.

Rachael:I don’t really want to move on from that. And I also feel like you don’t have to apologize for taking up space. I love hearing from you, and I don’t want to shift here or center this, but I want to just make a note for the white folks listening who maybe are going, oh, so we’re good at grief. And I just want to say no, we’re not. Whiteness is a disembodying entity, not knowing even our ancestry, not knowing our culture, not having collective rituals outside of a lot of times our faith community, which is not necessarily instilling rituals of grief and lament and healing and embodiment. So there’s just a lot of, we have some work to do. There’s a lot of work to do that will be particular to some of our cultural nuances. But there’s so much shame, there’s so much trauma and fragmentation. I’m so grateful for the work of folks like Resmaa Menakem and naming some of that. So there’s work, there’s paths, there’s people we can be learning from. I think Dr. Jamie is one of them, but I just make no mistake about it. And I think that that’s a piece I’d love to hear more from you and whether you want to talk more about The Ratchet Grief Project, but just that sense of what you’re saying about we need a communal memory or understanding of how we come together. That means when someone I’m connected to in relationship, whether they’re blood family or not, is in grief, I’ve got to get close to grief and I’m not going to be able to do that. I’m not going to be able to be creative and actually go, what have I needed? Would I have needed someone to feed me? I’ve needed someone to show up and do the things that just have to be done. So there is some sense of we need more rituals of community. And I would just love to hear more from you around what you’re creating around that, how you’re wanting to help particularly the Black community have reclaim and create rituals.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you so much for that. And as I go into this Ratchet Grief Project piece of the conversation, I love what you named about sort of whiteness as a social construct, this white supremacy, whiteness not so much people, but this system. And for me, its refusal to grieve that because grieving means acknowledging change. And acknowledging change means that I didn’t have to become something, someone, different. And whiteness does not want to be anything other than itself, right? And so those who buy into it, we can’t have anything other than this. And so that inability to grieve really will kill all of us. A refusal. So for me, even thinking about this, a refusal to grieve is deadly. And it is deadly for everyone because what we don’t realize is that if you are my neighbor and you are grieving, I can pretend not to see you. I can. But for me, the earth bears witness to the fact that you are disrupted, that you have experienced grief, that there the energy is different and I can pretend not to see you, but that does not, one, support you in your grief, and it does not support me in my humanity. So in some ways, I am disconnecting myself from human connection when I allow you to grieve and I don’t create space. When I tell you that your grief, we think of disenfranchised grief. And for me, short definition, we don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to hear it. We’re not going to create space for it. So when I do those things, I am also disconnecting from my power source. I’m disconnecting from my capacity to become because your loss is connected to my loss and my becoming. So our loss and becoming connected to each other’s loss and becoming. And when I disregard yours, I am also disregarding myself, right? This is the whole, “love God and love your neighbor is yourself.”

Rachael: This is biblical.

Jamie: So when I ignore you, I’m ignoring myself, my own needs. And so the Ratchet Grief Project is something that, because I saw just how many people, particularly folks who were incarcerated or had incarcerated loved ones, and folks who were disabled, and folks who were queer and trans, that’s not all that’s in this bunch. But I started to see how their grief was ignored. And as a chaplain, I remember a person losing their partner, but no one in the hospital had language that was anything other than sort of Christian and heterosexual. So they kept saying, will their husband be here? Will their husband be here? And I was just like, are you not listening? Their wife is right across from us. And so I just started to see how we were ignoring people’s grief because we put them in these sort of boxes. We have this box for what it means to be human. And really what it means to be human is white, male, cisgender. We have this thing and anyone outside of that box we don’t cultivate space for. And so the Ratchet Grief Project is radical grief justice initiative that I center the grief of Black folks, but really all folks who are pushed to the margin. So again, that could be queer, that could be trans, that could be Indigenous, that could be disabled, that could be those living impoverished, the system impacted. And we honor grief in all its forms. So one, we recognize there’s no one way to grieve, right? That the stages, I don’t like when people talk about stages. So we make sure that we are providing this sort of education, community care, liberative practices, helping people re-member themselves after loss. It is messy. It is also joyful. It is loud, it is also silent. It is emotive. It is also numb sometimes, right? But we sit with folks in all of the radical ways that we are human. We sit with you. We believe grief is holy. We believe grief is political. We believe grief is a portal to transformation and remembering what does it mean to connect to the you… that when God says, before I formed you, I knew you. That means you existed. So what does it mean to weed your way through some of these losses, to reconnect to the you that God created in the beginning? That is what the radical Grief Project does. And we know that grief, again, is a vehicle to transformation, but it is also a vehicle to grievance. That grief can lead to grievance. And what does grievance say? Grievance says, these systems that disregard us need to be dismantled. These ways of being that call us to cut off parts of ourselves in or to fit in need to be these death dealing systems. So our grief, this transformative process can also help us dismantle systems that keep us from being fully embodied, fully human, together. So that’s the radical Grief Project. It’s a 501c3, but it is also a podcast. And I post right now, every day I have a book coming out. I’m going to say… that’s the idea for me is what does it mean to be incarcerated and grieving? Because we’ve already written you off because you’re incarcerated. We already don’t believe that you have anything to grieve. What does it mean to grieve someone who is incarcerated? Well, we don’t think you’re human anyway, right? So why would you grieve? I mean, they’re in jail. Why would you create space? No. Everyone deserves the space to explore their grief, to sit in and to have someone sit with them in order to help them remember themselves whole, right? What does it mean for me to remember to pick up pieces that were taken, pieces that I dropped, pieces that I had to hide in order to survive? What does it mean to pick up those pieces? And no, it’s not going to be, it might be little slots missing, but to put those back together as I continue to become after the losses I experienced. Because I think that’s what life is. I think life is you continuously becoming after loss, becoming after loss, becoming after loss. And with each iteration of yourself, ideally with more wisdom and more compassion and more grace, and leaning even more into justice and what it means to be human together.

Wendell: I have two words that come to me. A phrase comes to me. I think the first time I heard this, I heard this from Sister Linda Royster. She said, if I don’t have Shalom, if you don’t have Shalom, I don’t have Shalom. I remember the first time I heard her say, I was like, yes. And I think what you’re hitting so hard is also that grief. Grief doesn’t happen in isolation.

Jamie: It does not.

Wendell: It’s meant to be communal. And that, is that not a biblical framework? Lament was meant to be, it’s also meant to be communal. So I love how you continue messing with the framework when there’s pain that you grieve by yourself and you lament by yourself. Actually, that’s not true. And then to even hear you talk about that, we’re empowered by grief. That’s what I heard you say. If we’re empowered by grief and it empowers us to change systems, I can’t say I’ve heard too many folk put that together.

Jamie: Yeah. We are empowered by grief empowers us. Grief gives us more insight into what is supposed to be in the world. So when I live in the city of Philadelphia, well we know, right? So in Philadelphia where I’m working with families, we call ’em families of murder victims. And so there are ways that violence has disrupted people’s lives. Well, guess what? That grief will remind you. No one’s life should be disrupted by violence. And then it empowers you to stand on the front lines in ways. And again, and you said this, Rachael, I am not suggesting that the loss came for you to do this. Nope. I am saying that in the loss that we find ways to pull out wisdom and power in order to do what we need to do in the world. I certainly don’t believe that God is dropping losses on us.

Rachael: No, but what you’re saying is that, and I’ve been think about this, the more I become human and connected to creation and others, I’ll say, the more Christian I’m actually become in the sense that I know that we need a God who is on the side of the oppressed in order to live into that empowerment because it does feel like there’s too much injustice. What do we do? And it’s like, I think your mentor said, you lean in with Spirit and you lean in with community. And I wish we had more time. I want to keep going because I feel like there’s so much more to cover here and we are going to bring things to a close. But I want to say to you, Wendell, thank you. You are one of the most fiercely tender men I know. And I know that changes things for not just here and now, but the past and future. So thank you. And Dr. Jamie, thank you for joining us and sharing just your thoughts and work and your body and heart with us. And if you want to find Dr. Jamie, her work is prolific actually. And it sounds like there’s more coming out, but Thoughtful Transitions I think is where people can find you and your death doula and grief doula work, the Ratchet Grief Project, which is really like a community consultation, teaching a podcast that’s coming, a book that’s coming. I’m sure there are other ways people want to have you come speak or come do things with their community, but we’ll make sure all of that is available to you as listeners. But thank you so much for saying yes at 13 and saying yes at 18 and 19. Just an honor to spend time with you. Thank you.

Jamie: Yeah, this is great. And can I just say this last thing, Rachael, you said this in terms of lament you as well, Wendell, right? That we talk about weeping may endure for a night, right? But joy comes in the morning, and that’s something that we often hear people say. And I always say, joy comes in the morning because joy comes through the mourning. So maybe it’s not in, it’s a through. Joy comes through the mourning, the process of allowing yourself to grieve. And that’s when you get to the kind of joy that makes you fully alive in this world. And I believe God wants us to be alive. So thank you for having me.