Grief is a portal to joy with Abby Goelzer

In this moving conversation, Emily sits down with death doula and grief coach, Abby Goelzer of Garnet and the Moon. 

Emily and Abby discuss the complexities of grief and joy, estrangement, intergenerational healing, communal grief, and creative expression.  

Tune in for… 

• Abby’s stories of loss and why she became a death doula and grief guide
• Meeting our grief to expand our capacity for joy 
• The nuances of estrangement and how choosing ourselves can lead to intergenerational healing 
• The power of community and creative expression to metabolize grief and connect with others 

To learn more about Abby and her offerings, visit her website www.garnetandthemoon.com, follow her on Instagram, and subscribe to her newsletter.  

Thank you Bre Legan for our artwork and Paul Krasnoshchok for our music.

Resources & Links
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🌔🌀 Receive the free Lunar Living guide and attune to the gentle, nourishing cycle of the Moon

Transcript

Intro

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Soil and Stars, a podcast exploring our interconnectedness and unique roles within the web of life. I'm your host, Emily Hall, and I invite you to awaken your mind, open your heart, and remember that you are made of soil and stars. Welcome back to Soil and Stars, a podcast where we explore and deepen our relationships with the living world and cosmos. I'm your host, Emily Hall, and it is, I'm just having so much fun this season. Podcasting brings me so much joy. It is one of the most aligned outlets for my creative expression. And just as any artist and creative knows, the longer that we're with our practice, the more that we skill build, the deeper that we go. I feel like the practice itself just really grows and flourishes. And I'm really feeling that as I'm recording season two of this podcast. Season one was amazing and so much fun. And season two, I'm maturing, I'm getting better, and I'm just really infusing a lot of magic into every episode that I record. I do a little ritual, I call in the support of my guides and my ancestors to help me co-create as much magic as possible with my guests while I'm interviewing them. And so far, each conversation has been so delightful and so expansive and just such a joy. And the really fun thing about podcasting, at least in the way that I am approaching it and doing it, it is so nonlinear. As I'm recording this intro, I don't know when this episode will be published, but I just recorded this interview today with a friend and beloved of mine. And I just really wanted to record the intro today. And I don't know the date that this episode will be published. So this is Emily from the past speaking to you in your earbuds right now. And that just makes me giggle. And that just also makes it very fun. I keep telling all my guests, my process is very intuitive. It's I'm not quite sure of the order. It's very spiralic. But when I have the date that I will be releasing your interview, I will let you know ASAP. So it's really fun for me because I'm a neurodivergent being. I, in my natal chart, have Mars and Cancer. I run on lunar time and seasonal time and cyclical time and spiralic time. So, anyways, I am really excited. You know, this season we are exploring all things Venus, her multi-dimensionality, all of the facets of her. And I'm really excited to share this side of Venus through my conversation with this week's guest, because many of us know, or maybe are one of our entry points into learning who Venus is as a deity, as a planet, or as a mythic being, whether you meet her as Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman tradition or Inanna or Ishtar, her more ancient rootings. Right? There are many faces of Venus. And how she was introduced to me, I think back to sixth grade when I was doing a lesson in elementary school on Greco-Roman mythology. We were reading Greek myth, and I was introduced to Aphrodite. And I was like, wow, did I feel this like spark for her at such a young age? And, you know, she was introduced as the goddess of love and beauty. And I remember as part of that lesson, we had to get into groups and we had to do a little group project, and we had to make up a skit based on the Greek gods and goddesses. And each of us had to be one of the gods or goddesses. And I raised my little hand and I was like, I'm gonna be Aphrodite. And that tells you so much about me. I'm a Taurus son, my son is ruled by beloved Venus, and I just love thinking back to like 12-year-old me being like, I'm gonna be Venus. And at the time, the Venus Razor commercials, they were actively having a commercial where they were singing the Umya Venus, I'm you fire your desire. And in the skit, my friends who were the other gods and goddesses, one of my friends was Athena. Uh, we got like a little pool floaty, like one of the ones that you laid down on, and I was on the pool floaty, and they lifted me up, and I was singing that song. So that was my introduction to Venus and to Aphrodite at 12 years old. And I was obsessed with Greek myth at that age. And it makes sense that your girl became an astrologer, little 12-year-old me went deeper with the myth, the Greco-Roman myth, expanded beyond that pantheon. And here I am today. So I just like reflecting on how Venus has revealed herself to me throughout the years. And circling back to why I brought this up is many of us first encounter her as this goddess of love. And so, what is the other side of love but grief? And it's so interesting because I did two podcast recordings today. And the first interview that I recorded is the one that you will hear today. And I will reveal our one of the main topics is grief, which is, you know, hand in hand and intertwined with love. And then hours later, later in the day, I recorded another interview. And that guest brought up how their introduction to Venus as a deity in this like devotional relationship with Aphrodite as a deity was because of a grief they were carrying. And I was just like, these guests don't know each other, they haven't heard each other's conversations, and yet grief was very much in the conversation today in both of the interviews I did. And I just think that's very synchronous, very delightful. It is Venus Day as I am recording, as I recorded these two conversations, and it's summer. Well, it's almost summer, it's still technically spring, it's still technically Gemini season. Happy pride from the past. And yeah, so I am very excited. Let's just get into today's conversation, which is revealing this side of Venus, which has to do with grief, because grief has to do with love. And the goddess of love is there to hold us through grief. She is there to mend our broken hearts, to hold us on her shoulder as we cry, and to be there to hold us through all of the mess and the ups and downs of relationships.

Meet Abby Goelzer

SPEAKER_01 7:53

And so I am so excited to introduce you to this week's guest. Her name is Abby Gelzer. She is a death doula, a grief worker, a writer, and a facilitator living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In her grief attending, she helps people who have experienced a shift in their sense of self due to loss or life change and helps them move toward embracing the person they are becoming while holding sacred all that has been lost or changed. Abby loves facilitating spaces and holding thresholds where people can move through grief towards liberation and self-actualization. So this conversation was so special to me because Abby and I have sparked a connection in the real world. We're both local to Milwaukee. And it was a mutual friend who just out of the blue, it was right around Christmas time last year, it was like late December. I just got a group text one day from our mutual friend Kate. Shout out, Kate. Thank you, Kate, that just texted me in Abby, even though I had been aware of Abby because her work is so known in the community here and even beyond our local community. Her grief work, her death doula work, her business is Garnett and the Moon. And so I knew her as Garnett and the Moon, but I didn't quite know the person, the amazing person behind Garnett and the Moon. And Kate just texted us and said, Abby, meet Emily, Emily, meet Abby. I think you need to know each other. And it was beautiful. And so Abby and I have been getting to know each other for the last six months. And it has been so delightful. I'm so grateful to be in community with her. And you are just going to love this conversation, dear listener. So I just want to give a little preview about everything that we discuss. So Abby shares her personal experience, experiences with grief and loss and how those led her to becoming a professional death doula and grief guide. Abby talks about grief work as liberation work, which is so beautiful. We talk about this beautiful relationship and dynamic between grief and joy and grief and love, as I hinted at earlier. We get into a deep and radically honest conversation about estrangement. And I share some very personal details about my own estrangement that I am living. And because I know that I'm not alone. Abby has also experienced estrangement. And I'm sure there are folks who are listening who have experienced estrangement. And so we get into the nuances and the complexity and the grief around that. And then we talk about intergenerational healing and cycle breaking and how processing grief is really this metabolization, and how art and creative expression and creative practice and building and making with our hands and moving our bodies can really be these very sacred practices for metabolizing grief and moving it through our bodies. And then we end on the beautiful story of morning altars, this phenomenal offering that Abby co-facilitates and co-creates here in Milwaukee, which people from all over the Midwest have been traveling to Milwaukee to attend. And so you'll get to hear all about that. And maybe if you're local to Milwaukee or you're local to the Midwest, maybe you'll want to come visit us here and uh enroll in one of the Morning Altars classes because they are so special. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this beautiful, moving, profound conversation with Abby. Hi Abby, welcome to Soil and Stars. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to be in conversation with you and just to share a little bit with the listeners. Abby is uh local to the same city that I live in Milwaukee. And so we have had the opportunity to connect in person and have had many beautiful deep conversations and are just kind of within this beautiful web of just really radical artists, healers, business owners, organizers, creatives here within Milwaukee. So it is just so exciting for me to be in conversation with you, Abby, and to just amplify your amazing services and work in the world. And today for our conversation, I invited Abby on, and I just feel like we're going to be weaving many different threads, but just to kind of ground us and so the listeners know where we're going today, we're going to be talking about grief and death. That is really the heart of Abby's work in the world. And then we're also going to be weaving in the threads of relationships, community, art, and creativity. So very excited. So, Abby, I would love to invite you to share anything you would like about yourself and anything that's on your heart in this present moment.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Sure. Thank you so much, Emily. Let's see. About me, I have lived in Milwaukee my whole life, except for four years when I lived in Montana, and half a year when I lived in India. But otherwise, I have lived in Milwaukee. I love living near the Great Lakes. I am a Lake Superior person though. Lake Michigan is lovely and beautiful, but the first time I saw Lake Superior, I was like, oh, I'm a Lake Superior person. Um, so we go all the way up to the top of the state every summer so I can spend time there. I am a forest person and not a beach person or ocean person. I have two dogs. I love to garden. I have two wild, beautiful children. A wonderful partner. I like to write. Grief and death work are my jam. So I was like a weird kid that was interested in dark things and weird things. Um yeah, what else?

SPEAKER_01 14:31

What else? Is

The beauty of the Great Lakes

SPEAKER_01 14:32

that good? What else? That was incredible, Abby. I'm just really sitting with you naming you're a forest person, not a beach or an ocean person. And I totally resonate with that. And yeah, we are both very blessed to live in the Great Lakes region, which to me is a deeply sacred region of the world. And I got to experience Lake Superior for the first time in my adulthood. I can't remember if I visited Lake Superior as a child, probably. But my husband and I, two summers ago, after we got married, we we did our honeymoon in Marquette, Michigan, which is the UP, the Upper Peninsula. And we stayed right on Lake Superior. And this was actually in the fall. And I feel you, like Will and I have always talked about, I've lived on Lake Michigan for a decade. Like I lived in Chicago for six years, then moved home to Milwaukee. But I have been within like four miles of this beautiful Lake Michigan for a decade of my life. And I feel so connected to Lake Michigan. And although I'm not, you know, I occasionally like the beach, but I like to visit the lake more so to connect with the lake. And really, my favorite practice is watching the full moon rise over Lake Michigan. It's one of my favorite just activities, practices ever. But I feel you when we went to see Lake Superior, we were like Mother Superior. She is so powerful. And we got to kayak, we did the pictured rocks, uh, seashore, and kayaked in her waters. It was the end of September, early October. So her waves were getting really powerful. So I just I when you said that, I just like there is something so miraculous and so powerful about Lake Superior. And I love that you have that connection with her because I definitely feel that kinship with her. I just feel like an awe and a reverence for her.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Truly, I feel the exact same when I am there. It's like it is the easiest place for me to be my fullest self. I don't know why, but I like meet with Lake Superior and I'm like, ah, okay. I'm in myself completely in this place.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

I love that. Oh, and the only other thing I wanted to add was I am becoming a river person as I am getting ready to move away from my beloved neighborhood of River West, which is right on the Milwaukee River, and to move to South Milwaukee, uh just south of the city of Milwaukee. So still I'll be within Lake Michigan, but I'm having a lot of grief about leaving the Milwaukee River. I'm not so much feeling the grief of leaving the human community here because I will always be tethered to the human community here in River West. I will always be back. But being able to just walk from my house anytime and go and visit the river, and the river is just absolutely flourishing. Like there has been a lot of ecological restoration and repair work being done to the Milwaukee River because of the damage of colonization, of industry, of toxic waste dumping, all the tanneries that used to, you know, be along um the river that my ancestors worked at those tanneries and were part of that, you know. Um, but to see, I had just in the last week, I've seen my first beavers in the Milwaukee River, which have literally like life bucket list. I intentionally said 2026 is the year I'm seeing a beaver in the wild and an owl. Need to still need to see an owl in the wild, but I've seen two beavers. I saw one yesterday morning and I saw one last week. And I'm obsessed with the river. My husband and I got married on the river. I'm like, this river knows all my secrets. I walk around it. I've walked it with so many friends. I've done this for the four years I've lived here, and I'm feeling a lot of grief, but I'm really becoming a river person and just how sacred, like these sacred lifeways that rivers are, and how and all the beautiful life uh that just congregates there. It's so special to me. So that's all I wanted to share.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

I I love that so much. And having lived in Milwaukee my whole life, I absolutely I mean, my whole childhood, the narrative of the Milwaukee River, right, was like, don't put your hand in there, it'll disintegrate because it was just the most polluted. Like we'd go on school trips because I grew up in a suburb that is also very close to the river. So we'd go down to the park, we'd go on these school trips, and people would find, you know, like toxic waste fish and like dead fish with, you know, I don't like just not right, not correct. And it's so beautiful how the river has been restored. Like the restoration, it's like truth and reconciliation with the river where like the city had to face all of the damage it had done, and then all of these beautiful things got put into place and people worked really hard. And I I love that it's like a it's like an ecological grief restoration process to me. That like the river is this thriving, beautiful place now. And yeah, I loved when we first started seeing like um trees that were like beaver, you know, beavers had done work on them, and we were like, oh my god, the beavers are here. And it was, yeah, it's been really exciting to watch that transformation happen again.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

And I'm a huge birder. I love birds, and I have found that my favorite birds are all the waterfowl. So there's magnificent herons, there's great blue herons that I see along along the river. I've been seeing these really cool um mergansers are really cool, kind of duck-like birds. I've seen several different species of heron, and it just is such I've seen baby ducklings, that was very exciting, and there's just so much life. So I will be back visiting the river often, but I am, yeah, this grief of this, which I feel like this is a good, a good segue, Abby. Um, you know, already grief is coming up in our conversation. That is just the space that you hold. And it's so interesting, like the grief of leaving a place. Even though I'm not going to be far, I'm only gonna be, you know, 25 minutes by car, but there's still this grief of like I've really rooted in this place and and this river is so magical and special to me. Um, so I would love to hear a little bit about your relationship with grief and death, Abby, and what led you to becoming a death doula.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

I think my relationship with grief and death is it's a really honest one. And I think I love what you said about sort of your grief of moving from the river to a different place, even though you won't be that far. I think at the center of my praxis and the center

Abby’s experiences with grief and loss

SPEAKER_00 21:42

of my experience with grief is that grief comes to us when what we knew to be true is no longer true. So, like you live next to the river, and by the end of the month you won't. So that fundamental truth changes for you and it like brings things that you have to sit with and so So I my relationship with grief and death is an honest one because I've experienced a lot of it, as you know, we all do over the course of a lifetime. Um, but I was really young between my when I was 20 and 31, 12 people in my family died, including all of like my parents, my grandparents, a sibling, a cousin, aunts, uncles. I really anyone who had a hand in kind of like raising me for better or worse was gone by the time I was 31. And I'm a very, the way my brain operates is I'm a very like there's no way out but through kind of person. Um, and so each of those years I had to just like keep moving through. And I would love to say, you know, it was like one person a year, so there was like distance in between them. But there were years where like three people died and someone I loved was beaten almost to death outside of a bar, and then we would like loop into the next year, and someone else would die, and then there would be like an 18-month stretch where no one would die. So it wasn't this like evenly spaced sort of grief deposit. It was um, it was the way grief and death are, where it was a lot of times very unexpected and just on my doorstep and waiting for me to kind of look to it and process it and integrate it. And uh I didn't have a lot of modeling for that. Uh you know, growing up in like a German-American family in Milwaukee and white Western colonial culture, we didn't have like practices to metabolize grief, um, certainly not in community or anything like that. And so it was a lot of me figuring out how to live with the grief that kept arriving. And what that very naturally did then was turn me into the friend that everyone would turn to when something would happen. I think it's really common in our culture to be very grief avoidant. We have like a really grief-averse culture, and we get taught that our grief is like a burden to other people. So you should keep it to yourself and deal with it and then come back to your friends and family when you're like back to normal, which there isn't. Uh, there isn't a back to normal. Grief fundamentally changes us each time it arrives. And so having experienced all of that, it was very easy for other people to look to me to help them hold what they were trying to process or navigate. Uh after my mom died, I was definitely the person that other people would turn to when their moms died. Yeah. Um, to kind of just be with them. And I think it was helpful because they knew that I wouldn't run away from it. I would just be with them in the grief. And so, so that's sort of my like experiential background with

Becoming a death doula and grief guide

SPEAKER_00 25:08

it. And when my mom died, all of the she she had a she'd had a heart condition for a long time, but she wasn't acutely ill when she died. She died in her sleep 11 days after I got engaged. So it was a really enormous moment of my life where I had to try and hold both joy and grief at the same time. And there are a lot of days that felt impossible. Um, my partner was really, really supportive and uh really sort of clearing out where my mom lived and settling her, you know, her life, her bodily life was really left to us. Um, we were 31, so we didn't know what we were doing, but we we just kind of like went through all of the logistics, all of like the emotional journey of it together. We had to plan a wedding, um, we had to get married, and like my mom wasn't there. And so there was a lot to sort of navigate. And um, that was like in the you know, late 2000s. And I kept thinking, so I'm very good at like task-based things, and I kept thinking after she died and after we had sort of settled everything, like I wish there was like a, you know, like a burst doula, but for when people are dying, because we had gotten so far away from that in our culture, I didn't even know like death doulas or death midwifery was a thing. And by the time I realized it, I had a toddler and I had an infant, and all of the training classes were in person. You had to like travel and stay there. And so that was all really inaccessible to me at the time, like the way my life was structured. And then COVID happened, and everything moved online. And I happened to, I've always before now I had a career in education and academic medicine, and uh I was really good at those jobs, and they didn't really like feed me in any sort of like nourishing or spiritual way, which is something I really wanted. And so when I finally got COVID for the first time in 2022, I was so, so, so sick. I was in bed for 10 days. And uh, you know, for some of us, when you have COVID, like you can't like read, you can't like concentrate on anything. So I was just like in bed with my own thoughts for 10 days, and uh I just sort of kept thinking, like, what if I didn't get better? And the work that I've done in the world was like paperwork for physicians, and no shade to anyone who does paperwork for physicians or loves doing that, but it sort of left me feeling like I wanted something different and more. And when I felt better, I talked to my partner about it, and he was like, Are doula classes online now because everything has moved online? And sure enough, they had moved online. So I did my first death doula training in the summer of 2022, and it was sort of um, it just sort of opened, it opened a door to what ended up being over the last few years, this sort of journey and exercise of figuring out what my life looks like when I build it around the expectations I have for myself instead of the expectations other people had for me. So yeah, I finished that death doula training and then I learned that grief coaching was also a thing. And I was like, oh, I've been doing that for years. So I did a really beautiful training class around that with the guidance of a really sweet dear friend of mine, um, Nyla Francis, who's also a Death Doula and a grief coach. She kind of helped me figure out that path forward, and then I put those things together, and yeah, and and those are sort of the basis of the work of my heart. So I do a lot of facilitation around that. I write about these things a lot. I work with people one-on-one. So yeah, that's sort of the little little story of how that all came to be.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

The spiraling journey, and thank you for your openness and your vulnerability around the death that you've experienced in your life. Yeah. It is so interesting to me because I am someone that has not experienced really big deaths in my life yet. And it's very, I have friends who have who have gone through similar losses as you. And I think about one childhood friend in particular who has had a similar experience where just a lot of significant deaths in her family have occurred in a short window of time. And it is difficult. Like we don't, like you said, we don't have those cultural scripts. We've really lost. And again, not all cultures, there are many cultures that do have um practices and scripts and and ways of showing up uh during a death, during a loss. Um, but I feel like for those of us, you know, who are racially white, descendants from Europeans, most of us, a lot of us, have been severed from our more folk and ancestral grief practices hundreds to thousands of years ago. Our lineage, our lineages kind of lost those. So I think it's really powerful that we do have, it does seem like a collective maybe awakening and coming back to it. Feels uh grief and death doula work feels more in the collective conscious and awareness field. It's something that you know deeply overlaps if you're in any type of spiritual healing. And even I feel like radical and liberation-based work or communities that uh do these doulas and the work that you do, Abby, is becoming more known and more sought after. And so I'm really grateful. I know that when the time comes, that I will inevitably uh experience a loss, a significant loss. I I used to deeply fear grief and uh especially the grief of a death of someone that I love and hold close. And I still have that fear. And uh, but I know that because I'm in real in community and in relationship with practitioners like you, that when that time comes, like I know that there are resources and support people available. And that doesn't quite make it feel like, yes, I'm like ready to wade into those waters, but I'm like, I know that there's support when that happens. And when that time comes, that there will be, I know where the lifeline is. So I really appreciate the work that you do.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Thank you.

Grief work as liberation work

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Yeah, I definitely see grief work as radical liberation work. And I think that grief work is always sort of subversive to the systems that would prefer we were quiet and maintaining our economic productivity and all of these things that don't really, you know, don't really go with what it's like to experience an exquisite human life where there is loss and change. And I think when we have the opportunity to hold those things sacred and understand what our new truths are after the old truths change, I think that I think that leads us on a path towards liberation personally, collectively. So I think, you know, I wonder if um, you know, that's why it's sort of becoming more prevalent in these spaces because we have to be able to sort of experience the wholeness of human life, which includes a tremendous amount of grief in order to move forward and become the people we want to become. When we close that part of ourselves off all the time, we just sort of keep making ourselves smaller and smaller. And I feel like the collective is disinterested in shrinking any longer.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

Absolutely. Yes. I think of how grief is like so inconvenient to capitalist uh economics and productivity, like you named. And there's no, I even think of in in most, you know, traditional workplaces, like I think my workplace has like a bereavement policy of like five days. Which is generous. Yeah. Because usually it's three. You know. Yeah. And it's like, oh yes, bereaving the loss of a beloved in five days and then get your ass back to work. Like that's what our culture has. And like you said, that's on the generous side of the spectrum, too.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Yeah, and and that's not even to, you know, not even to note the logistics of a body, a family member dying is so much more than like five days. So you don't even get the, you don't even get the time to actually like do the mechanics of what needs to be done, let alone sort of the, you know, the grief journey that we end up going on. So commuting with grief is very inconvenient, you know, to capitalism and the systems that we're all kind of enduring here at this time.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Absolutely. And that may it stay inconvenient and may it inconvenience the system. May that be the cracks into dismantling the system and being one of those

The relationship between grief, joy, and love

SPEAKER_01 35:05

cracks. So, Abby, you brought up, you know, you lost your mom when you were 31 shortly after you got engaged. And it was just this very complex time of holding joy and grief at the same time. So, I would love to talk with you about the relationship that you have experienced and that you have witnessed in your own life and maybe in your practice and being a grief coach and a death doula. What is this relationship between grief and joy and also grief and love?

SPEAKER_00 35:39

I really love that question. I'm going to start with grief and joy first because we are always sort of, we have a lot of sort of cultural, we have a lot of cultural attachment to grief and love, which is, you know, rightfully earned, but I feel like we have so many phrases around that. And we don't often talk as much about grief and joy. And I think what I have experienced, and then what I have like gotten to experience as like a grief tender, a grief guide with other people, is being able to understand, like in my body, that when we commune with our grief, when we are, when we sit with our grief, so that is to say, like when we slow down enough to allow grief to sit with us instead of always being busy or always going to another thing or throwing ourselves into something else to keep ourselves distracted. Grief tells us a lot of what the new truths are. So, you know, my uh my mom was the end of those 12 people. And that that 11-year door sort of of death opened with the death of my grandmother, her mom, and it ended with the death of my mom. And my mom was my person before my partner, and I was her person to the single mom. My older brother was 10 years older than me. So by the time I was eight, it was really just me and my mom. And she became disabled. She was she got really sick when I was 15, and she became disabled, and everything she didn't have insurance. And so everything that comes along with that, we were sort of we were living sort of like in deeper poverty than we were before. She had a very ingrained sense of her worth was very tied to her productivity. So when she could no longer work, she definitely thought she was worthless and useless. And so our story together really involved like there were so many things woven together. There was so much grief. There was so much loss. It was really just me and her, even after she got sick. And when my high school years were really difficult, navigating that was really difficult. And then when I was in my 20s, we found we found a place where we were able to meet and be really, really honest with each other. And it changed our relationship in the sense that um we really like held on to moments. Like one of my favorite memories with her is just sort of like a nothing afternoon where we decided to go to Cops and like split a cheeseburger and fries and cokes. And I remember sitting at Cops, our local one of our local custard stands, in case someone is like, What is Cops? K-O-P-S. Yes. And they have uh, we were at the one that has like an outdoor seating of like cement stairs. And we were sitting in the sun on this curve of these cement stairs. And I remember thinking, like, this is what I always wanted with my mom, this like ease of relationship, this like beautiful adult friendship. And I re I was like, remember this moment because what if you don't get this one again? And so it was like this snapshot memory of mine. And we did that a lot. So I say all of that to say when my mom died, it was devastating. It was the worst day of my life. I remember the entire day vividly, and we didn't know she was dead until late at night. And I was so sad she was gone, but I didn't regret anything about our relationship. Like we had so thoroughly made it to this place of truth and honesty that like when she died, it was really that like I just didn't have her body here with me anymore. But I didn't have things that I wished I had said or like things that I wished I had done because we did them. And after, you know, her being the 12th person in this long list of people who had died, my grief around her was it was so much that I just missed being able to do things like call her up. I missed holding her hand and like going to the mall because like she loved going to the mall when there were sales and we would like have a little gals day together and we would hold hands in the mall. And like those are the things that I missed, but I still had all of these like I had this beautiful relationship with her, just the language was changing around it. And what I have been able to understand is that like sort of ability to be with my grief instead of trying to hide from it, it increased my capacity to experience joy. So I think the, you know, the 11 people before my mom, I would like to think I learned something there that like we're not here forever. None of this is guaranteed. Sometimes people die by suicide, sometimes it's cancer, sometimes they die in their sleep, right? And we don't control any of that. And so I think by the time my mom died, I had so sort of like thoroughly internalized that lesson of like how fragile this all is. So we have to be in our joy when it arrives, you know. Like, doesn't Mary Oliver say, like, when your joy arrives, don't question it. Um because really truly being able to be with my grief in those ways has expanded my experience of joy in ways that I didn't that like I could intellectually assume that that would happen. But then when you experience it, it makes working through your grief so worth it. And we get taught that grief work is this big, daunting, sorrowful thing. Like, why would anyone want to do that? Like, stay positive, look at all the beautiful, happy things in your life. And there is like some merit to that at times, and also those things become more beautiful when you're able to be honest about the grief and the loss and the change, and that those what we lose and change is sacred, even if we don't hold it in our hands anymore. And being able to sort of be in the truth of that expands our capacity to experience joy. And I think each time we choose to do that, each time we enter into our own grief and say, okay, like let me wrestle with you here, let me hear what you have to say, let me cry on your shoulder. We expand our capacity more and more, which makes these human lives more and more beautiful. Um it's hard to say, like, oh, I hate it here when when you're able to experience joy in those ways. And I think that capacity comes from being able to be with your grief. And I think with grief and love, you know, it's true what everybody says. Like we grieve if, you know, grief is proof that we loved here, and we grieve to the depth to which we love something. And Francis Weller talks about the first gate of grief, that everything we love we will lose. And I think that that is just such a fundamental truth. And the sooner we are able to be right with that, the more we fill our lives with like those snapshots of eating cheeseburgers at cops and sharing Cokes under the sun, because we understand that it doesn't always come back around. I think, especially in white Western colonial culture, under capitalism, all of the things we always assume there's more time. We always assume we can get more. And that is not always the case. And so, you know, there has to be a balance between assuming every single Thing is the last sign, right? Like you can't live that way either, but there's the appreciation of the things that we love. And what really matters around them is sometimes not the day-to-day things we sort of fill our brains and and lives with and get irritated by and you know, hang on to. Grief and love are obviously like intimately intertwined. And I think being able to understand that nothing lasts forever, that things are fragile, that we get what we get and sometimes not more. It allows us to even be more present than in that love. Like I was so present in my love with my mom in probably like the last 10 years that she was alive, especially. Because I knew, I knew that she wasn't gonna be here forever. And we were very open about that when she was diagnosed when I was 15. She had I think it was like a 50% chance of living five more years. And she lived 17 more years. So, like what an incredible gift that was. And, you know, teenagers are teenagers, so I don't fault myself too much for not being mega present at 17, but you know, my my twenties with her, I was very, very present because I loved her so much. And I knew she was not going to be here forever. And she knew that she was not going to be here forever. And so we were just very, very present with each other. And I think it really benefited our relationship. It it changes how I am around the people I love and my presence with them. And those things are all gifts that I wouldn't have without having navigated a tremendous amount of grief.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Wow. I'm just feeling so deeply everything that you're sharing, Abby. And thank you for sharing more about your beautiful relationship with your mom with us. That is so special to hear. And I can just only imagine how your relationship and your story is going to just reach the hearts of so many listeners. And what you're putting to words and what you're conveying is something that I've felt within my own being as I've been growing and maturing. And I moved home to Milwaukee four years ago after being in Chicago, even though I never strayed too far from home. The farest I got was Champaign, Illinois for college. So I never strayed too far, but I did need to flap my wings a bit and I needed to get out of my hometown. But once I reached my late 20s, I just felt this like this um, I don't know, I don't want to say like clock ticking, but just this need, this intuitive need to be closer to family, physically closer, disclose that distance so that I could have more presence with my maternal grandparents. I have lost both my my paternal grandparents, but my maternal grandparents are still living. And we have such a deep, profound special bond. They really are almost like another set of parents for me. And I'm the eldest grandchild and their first grandchild, and we just have such a deep relationship, and they're both in their 80s now. And I just knew that we were not going to have forever together, and that it really was important for me to be physically present with them and to do the things that we love, which is playing cribbage and playing sheep's head as a family. And that was the biggest driver for moving home. And even with my mom, I

Radical honesty and truth in relationships

SPEAKER_01 47:48

have I really love that you talked about you reached a deep level of honesty and truth with your mom. And I want that for all of our relationships. I want us to be the most radically honest, truest expressions of ourselves with our beloveds, whoever that may be, familial, romantic, platonic, communal, whoever you just want that honesty and truth with. I really wish that for everyone. I feel like that is the foundation of a beautiful bond and relationship with others. And I, in my own adulthood, have reached that level of radical honesty with my own mom. I have like told her everything. I and I have, because I realized reflecting back on my teenage years in particular, I put up so many walls and shut her out. And then I was like, but I don't want that distance between us. And I'm the one who put up those walls. And now let me take those down brick by brick. And with each passing day and year, as I mature, we can have that adult relationship. And it is so meaningful to be able to do that because I do that with my mom. I do that with my with her parents, my maternal grandparents. And unfortunately, I don't do that with my dad. I am estranged from my dad and and for my own choice. And for me, it's I'm grateful to have this beautiful bond with my mom and my maternal grandparents. And I do, I've I've felt this like really big generational shift happening and within my family. And it, you know, like I shared, my grandparents are in their 80s. And so, and I just feel my own maturation happening. But there is almost this like premonition of grief on the horizon, or just knowing that the dynamics in our family are shifting as we're all aging, and that is just part of life, is growing older and the loss and the change that happens with that. And so there's almost, um, and we did very unexpectedly lose uh my uncle almost two years ago. Um, and that was a really big shock to the family, and just kind of out of the blue, most likely had a massive heart attack. And and his wife just passed away in the last couple of months as well. So, so I guess I should reframe I have had significant losses and and deaths in my family, and and they've rippled through the family. But they have losing my uncle and losing his wife in the last two years, and then losing a cousin of ours, one of my mom's cousins unexpectedly to breast cancer. We have had a lot more conversations about uh death in our family because, and we have had more of like preparing for death, preparing for my grandparents' death, them getting some more affairs in order, having more conversations with my mom and stepdad, and even my husband and I, us starting to have, we're only in our 30s, but like I think that preparation, like you said, there's a lot of bureaucratic logistics that you don't understand that you have unless you are actually the one going through the loss of someone close to you, and you have to be the one to manage their affairs. There is so much. And I got a glimpse of that with my uncle being there at the funeral home with my whole family, helping make decisions, and just there's a lot. So everything that you shared was just really reached me in a very deep way. And I just love your vulnerability and your storytelling. And I just really want that honesty and that truth for everyone in the relationships that mean the most to them.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

I agree. And I want that for everyone too. I realized after my mom died, because you know, we had had a very complicated, we had a fraught relationship when I was growing up at times, and um, as many of us do, right? And also, I was so, so lucky to have the mom that I had. And I didn't realize that until after she was gone that a lot of people don't have, you know, sort of when you're in, when you're in something, you kind of take for granted that it exists. And I did take for granted how good our relationship was. I assumed that's sort of how everyone was with their moms. And I know that uh, you know, a lot of people's relationships are far more complicated than that. And so when honesty is achievable, I think it's so beautiful and I think it just expands relationships in such an incredible way. And I also, you know, completely understand and know deeply that sometimes there are people with whom we cannot have that level of

The complexity and grief of estrangement

SPEAKER_00 52:43

honesty. And, you know, then sometimes estrangement is the option, and I have navigated that in my life as well. So it's it's such an experience, again, of being able to hold the both and because there's, you know, it's not fair to ourselves either to constantly throw ourselves on the altar of wanting to be understood and sacrificing our own truths or betraying our own truths in order to try and have that relationship with someone. If there's been real harm done, sometimes that isn't the option uh to have that like beautiful, radically honest uh relationship. But when it is achievable, it's so worth the steps and and the snags and the challenges that come along with trying to achieve that.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

Yeah. Well, and I was hoping we could talk a little bit about estrangement because, like I shared with you, it is something that I live, it's deeply personal to me. And I, before I even met you, I remember just this deep complexity of choosing to estrange myself and take a significant distance from my relationship with my dad so that I could go on a deeper healing journey that I needed to go on. And oftentimes throughout that journey, which has been several years now, there has been this complex grief of grieving the loss of a relationship and the loss of someone who is still living. That's very complex and nuanced. And then getting into the comparison of like, well, then I have friends who have lost their dads who also had troubled relationships with their fathers. And like, am I doing the wrong thing? Because what happens if he passes away while we're still estranged? And will I regret? So it's very nuanced and complex. So I'm just curious. I know this is something you do support community and clients with, and if you've experienced that personally as well. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about just this estrangement that happens in the messiness of human relationships.

SPEAKER_00 54:50

Yeah, for sure. I think estrangement to me is one of the stranger griefs to kind of navigate because, you know, that's the other piece too, right? In our culture, we all get taught to think about grief as something that happens only when someone dies. And really, life is full of grief in in so many areas. And sometimes there is this uh strange grief of, you know, mourning people who are still alive, but we aren't able to be in relationship with for whatever reason. And I think um, you know, often I see things from like online, you know, on social media, from parents whose children are estranged from them. And they sort of frame it as this trendy new thing that like the youngsters are doing. And really I think that we have entered a moment where people are less interested in shrinking and more interested in their in liberation, even if it's just for themselves. And I think that's when if someone is choosing estrangement, it's because they've tried just about everything else. And estrangement is the way that they are able to choose themselves. And that doesn't mean that estrangement comes with immediate relief and joy only, right? Estrangement is a thing that the liberation of estrangement is not not painful, you know? So liberatory processes are always they're always going to involve loss and change and shedding and dropping things we no longer want to carry. And there's a lot of grief just in that. And when it's a relationship with someone like a parent or a sibling, or you know, I find especially when it's people in that immediate primary sort of family constellation that we all grow up learning is supposed to be more important than everything else. And we're supposed to be held and loved in these ways. When we don't receive that or we don't feel that, we often sort of go through this process of self-betrayal to become the version of ourselves that that other person could love or could claim that we could belong to them. And that doesn't work either, right? It's that is not living a radically honest life. And it also becomes really, really exhausting after a certain amount of time. I know for myself, uh, the family members from with whom I am estranged, it was just too exhausting. And there was a crossroads where I had to be like, do I choose myself or do I keep pretending after decades and decades of the pretending never working? Am I gonna finally land on the magical version of myself that they accept wholly? And the answer is no. And so then when we choose estrangement, it is difficult because a lot of people see it as like, well, that's dramatic. Like family is everything. Family is family comes first. And there are moments and times where we need to come first. And I often I maintain that estrangement is pretty much a last resort for people. I don't think a lot of us are looking to just like not be with the people that we were raised with just like out of spite or pettiness or some like, you know, dramatic act. I think it is a version of self-preservation and choosing ourselves. But then that also comes with building found family around you. It comes with having to see, like understand the people who do choose you, even if the ones you wish would choose you are not going to. All of those things are a process and they come with a lot of grief. And what I have found also in my own estrangement experience is that sometimes the grief is more over what I wished had been and not even the person themselves. And I think you get to a place where even if those people would magically become what you always wished they would, you're maybe, you know, like I'm in my late 40s. It's it's a little bit late at this time. Cause like I needed you when I was eight, I needed you when I was fifteen, I needed you at these other times. And so that doesn't mean repair can never happen. But there is grief and understanding the relationship we wished had existed is not going to in the ways that we needed it to over the course of our lives. When when we felt harmed, when we felt like the need to betray ourselves, all of those kinds of things, you know? And so I think support around estrangement is really I think presence is so helpful because it's not a grief that a lot of people really understand because it is such a strange one. The person is still alive, but a version of the relationship is available. Estrangement means I've chosen no relationship because it's less harmful than the one that is available. And so then in an all-or-nothing individualistic society, that can really seem like you're taking something from someone else, like you're you're taking your toys and going home. And it's so much more painful than that. And so I think the presence and truth around that can be really helpful in in affirming and validating someone who is experiencing like needing to be estranged. Sometimes when we're understood, it just feels like it feels like a cushion to fall back on for a little bit. And so, you know, I think in addition to support around what is the story you want to have going forward? What are who are the people that you want to write that story with going forward? So you have like a network, you build a story, you build a found family when you're able to. I think there's also a lot of power just in in the presence and acknowledgement of the very, very real grief that estrangement brings up.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:39

Thank you so much, Abby. Thank you for adding such, yeah, the deep layers of nuance and complexity to the realities of estrangement. And I just know it's not something that's as openly talked about. It's a little taboo, like you said. And it is becoming, you know, maybe more again, we live in this digital age. And so people are authentically expressing their truths and their stories on the internet at a level that previous generations never had. And when we hear about the actions that other people are taking, like it just gives us more blueprints and like more options to think on about how we want to choose to live our lives. And so as more and more people are choosing estrangement, you know, whether it's our younger generations or not, millennials younger, or just, you know, if it seems more in the ether, maybe it is, and maybe it's just more that we're talking about it more and that we're sharing it more. And one of the things that I did about a year and a half after uh I initiated this severance of relationship with my dad is one, my ancestral uh connection practice really took off after that. And I was able to really grapple with the struggles in my relationship with my dad and view it through this deeper lens of intergenerational cycles and to like have a deep understanding of why my dad is the way he is, why he behaves the way that he does in this context and this story of our lineage and the struggles and the pain and the abuse that has just been passed down for who knows how long. I can only trace it back to my great-grandfather. And I'm sure it stems way farther back than that. And that at least brought some acceptance and understanding, but it it still, I still had to go through with the estrangement because I still had to do all this deep alchemical trauma resolution and healing work within myself that took years. And I needed the space from him to do that. And I did this really potent ritual that was very intuitive and very simple, but to this day, it is the most I regularly turn to solo grief ritual to process my grief. I have a hard time really feeling it in the moment. I really have to sense when things are coming up because my instinct or maybe my conditioning is to repress as like a perhaps a defense mechanism within myself. So I really turn to ritual where I have this specific container where I allow myself to go to those depths of the grief. And I did a grief ritual to grieve this pain that I felt in my relationship with my dad, this grief of our estrangement, but the grief of our lineage as a whole and the loss and the struggles that my grandparents faced, the struggles that my dad has faced throughout his life and back further in time. And I just sat at my altar that day and I made a playlist of songs that reminded me of my dad, huge Elvis fan, always associate Elvis with my dad. And I just played the music and I just sobbed. It was like that, those songs transported me to younger versions of myself. And they were able to like connect me with him in a way that I was having a hard time doing without being physically present with him. And it just like broke down a damn within me. And I just cried and journaled probably for five hours. But like I gave myself that time and that space. And I did a lot of journaling of like, my parents are divorced. So I was just thinking about I'm about the same age that my dad was when my parents got divorced, and like what that must have been like, thinking about him in his early to mid 30s, and not only going through a divorce, but like losing contact with me and going from being like an you know, being with me every day to only seeing me every other weekend. And I was only four or five years old, and I was just like, that must. Have been so like that must have been so much grief for him. And I never had thought about that before. And then I was grieving for my four and five-year-old self who was so confused by my parents' divorce, didn't understand it, was so young, and was just heartbroken. And so I was able to go to these places and then think about some of the losses and struggles that my grandparents went through. And just having that container and that space to do that alone was just so cathartic. And it didn't heal my relationship with my dad. We're still estranged, but it was like this alchemy. It was like this alchemical process and ritual that helped me like transmute a lot of anger and a lot of grief into like compassion and understanding.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:51

I love that. I I love so much that you bring that up. I love that you have that experience.

Choosing ourselves and tending our exiled parts

SPEAKER_00 1:06:58

I think something that's really important to consider with estrangement grief is it's not just the grief of the person you're no longer in relationship with, and it's not just the grief of the relationship you wish you had. I think when we're pushed to or where we find ourselves at a place where estrangement is the choice, there have been a lot of years of learning about what about us in that relationship was like unsavory or like unattractive or unworthy of attention and care. And so what I mean by that is, you know, as I would try and create versions of myself that could be held on to by these people I deeply wanted to be claimed by, I would learn over and over, okay, this personality trait doesn't fit here. This thing that gets expressed doesn't fit here. And so we shove all of these pieces of ourselves away. Francis Weller, I really love Francis Weller's Gates of Grief framework. I think it's very handy. And so, like he talks about in that second gate of grief, it's the places within us that have not known love. So those pieces of ourselves that we've banished or hidden away, because we've learned that they don't have a place in relationship with these other people. And so part of what estrangement asks of us when we do choose ourselves is to also then examine those places of ourselves that we have banished. And to do real repair for ourselves, like to do real grief work on our own hearts, we have to be able to welcome some of those pieces, if not all of them, back in and like hold them with love and reverence and either decide they're no longer part of us, but like we can lovingly let them go, or we welcome them back in and figure out how to integrate old pieces of ourselves into these new versions that we have become. And I think when we're able to do that, it is generational repair. That doesn't mean, like you said, there's this automatic, oh my gosh, happily ever after I am in relationship with my dad again.

Intergenerational healing and cycle breaking

SPEAKER_00 1:09:12

It's not that, but I like to think that the things that I repaired and healed within myself goes backwards in time, specifically in my matriarchal line, which is like women who never knew softness. Like not one day did they know softness. I like to think that me doing the repair that creates safety and softness for myself, even when that involves loss and change, it like ripples backwards and helps heal them. And it obviously moves forward and creates a different path for my children who are not having to pretend to be, you know, more savory or acceptable versions of themselves for people who are not ever going to claim them as their whole selves anyway. Um, and so I love that you bring in bring up the idea of ritual because that is so often how we're able to meet with our grief and commune with our grief. Whether it be in community or on our own or a combination of both. And ritual is another part of mourning that white Western colonial culture has done away with because it is again inconvenient. It keeps us from work, it connects us to other people. You know, all of the ways that that becomes inconvenient for the systems are the ways in which it actually like heals and repairs and then expands us, which is so, so beautiful. And it it just it it allows us to expand, to keep holding more of the both and we experience more joy. Our grief, the depth of our grief is is is deeper, but the joy is bigger, and you just keep expanding and expanding. And my my guess is that that goes backwards in time and heals the people who brought us to this place and gave us enough of a story that we wanted to protect, that we wanted to break cycles in, that we wanted to stop doubling it and passing it to the next generation. And so when we do that deep inner work of healing our grief, which often, like you also mentioned, comes with understanding other people as their whole selves and not just the people who harm us, which takes vulnerability, it takes humility, it doesn't mean there's an automatic, like happily ever after. But wow, does do things change when you're able to like choose yourself, have space, and say, like, oh, I see a lot of the pieces of your story where the way you treat other people became safety for you. It became protective for you. I don't want to be a part of that. I don't want to be the recipient of that, but I see who you are, and it doesn't have to be inherently bad, right? It can be like these are your practices, these are the ways you're in relationships. They don't work with the ways I need to be in relationships, but I see who you are as a whole human being, and I can offer that space and that truth. And I think often, you know, what we find there is a difference in like people. I have a teacher who talks about experiencing love as an ecosystem versus experiencing love as a form of domination and control. I think one of those has a high, a high probability for estrangement, and the other has a high probability for radical honesty. And when you choose which one of those you want to engage in, the people who want to engage in that with you stay.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:16

Beautifully said. And I really love and wholeheartedly agree about this. When we do this individual healing work, internal deep healing work, communing with our grief, processing. I really love, I hear you and other grief tenders use the word metabolizing when it comes to grief, which really resonates with me. I'm like, oh yeah, it's deep in there. It's in the cell walls, it's in the lining of my gut, it's in my chest, it's in the tension of my shoulders. And it is like a metabol, uh metabolization that needs to happen so that it can be released. And when we choose to do that work individually or collectively in these in these collective grief spaces, I wholeheartedly know in my bones to be true that that ripples back in time along our lineages and forward in time to the future generations so that we are not passing these domination uh stories on to the next ones. And I think that is some of the most liberatory work that we can do with our lives. And it's something I'm deeply devoted to and committed to. So, Abby, this conversation has been so amazing. And I really want to weave in a little bit of art and creativity. And there's so much more I would love to talk to you about, communal grief as well. But I feel like we should pin that. I already said Abby's gonna be like a regular guest on the podcast. There's so much to talk about. I feel like grief needs to be in the conversation more. But this season of the podcast is really devoted to Venus, and everything we've been talking about is Venusian and nature, our relationships, the grief of our relationships, the death of loved ones, and the grief and the love that we have for them that mingles together, the grief of estrangement and choosing to sever ourselves so we can choose wholeness. These are all in the realms of Venus. She's the one who connects all things, and she is the one who represents love and relationships and the complexities

Metabolizing grief through art and creative expression

SPEAKER_01 1:15:14

of those. And she also, of course, represents creativity and self-expression and art. And Abby, I I am just such a big fan of your writing. You are one of the most amazing writers that I have ever read. I uh subscribed to Abby's newsletter on Substack, which I highly recommend, listeners. If you really resonated with what Abby is sharing today, you are going to love her writing. You are just your pros. I'm like, I like take notes. I'm like, ooh, I want to like Abby could be like my writing teacher too. You are such a beautiful writer. So I would just love to hear from your perspective, you know, what role does art and creative self-expression serve in maybe like metabolizing our grief?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:04

Oh, I think it plays a huge, huge, huge role. I think the things that we often don't think of, because again, a lot of us don't have like frameworks for how to navigate our grief. I think the two things we often don't think of that to me are two of the most powerful ways to metabolize our grief is like letting the earth support us and using art and creativity to move through grief as grief moves through us. I think that's a very, very natural thing for people who already make like art and creation a big part of their lives. But for the for the people who maybe they've like dabbled in watercolor or they just never really felt like they were creative because it didn't fit what what story of creativity you know they grew up with. Like they think they have to be like a good painter or whatever. I think that these things can um, I think art and writing can not be as obvious to people as a way to metabolize grief. But what I have found in both facilitating like art, art classes around grief and doing my own writing to sort of move through my grief is it's such a powerful way to like access what's inside of us without always having to talk about it. Our culture is really big on talking about it, and that is not always the way that people want to process grief because grief is not just like an intellectual cerebral experience, like at all. It is a full-body experience, it's a physiological experience, and sometimes we need other ways that like uses our bodies to move through grief. And so um, for me, that's writing. I have never been particularly drawn to like visual arts, but I've always been drawn to words and language to create art. And so writing has allowed me to process so much of the grief that I've experienced because I'm able to like create what that experience felt like, or what healing in that experience felt like by arranging words together. And that takes effort and it takes me out of being in like this acute place of like sorrow or anger or guilt or whatever emotions grief is bringing to the surface, because it puts me in a place of creation which feels really nourishing to me. And it feels like I'm able to create something with words around my grief experience. In some of the classes I've co-facilitated where we're doing like art or folk craft, people are often working with their hands, they're sewing, they're using clay, and it allows the grief to sort of like move through them into the thing that they're creating, instead of only just having to talk about like their sorrow or their sadness or the thing they lost. And what happens in those group sessions is often that people at the same table, they're working on their own projects, but they know everyone around them is also a griever. And so they find connection in that as well. And so maybe they tell stories about the people or the things they've lost. Maybe they just tell random stories that have nothing to do with grief, but they're held in that space of creation together. And it just allows grief to move in a way that sometimes talking or just sitting or whatever doesn't. And I think movement is such an important part of the grieving process because grief is a grief is a thing that expands and contracts. It, you know, it has all of it ebbs and it flows, it has all of those sort of like movement contradictions. And when we keep it stagnant inside of us, it becomes unbearable. Grief doesn't leave because we don't pay attention to it, it stays until someone turns and looks at it. And so when we give someone the opportunity to turn and look at it with others or over an art project or through some writing prompts, it allows the grief to move in a way where it comes out as something other than what our sort of automatic ideas of like the expression of grief are. Maybe you don't want to have a public crying session, but you would love to make a ceramic altar. Both of these things move grief through you. And I think sometimes being able to do something physically is a really beautiful way to allow grief to move without it being this sort of like spotlight experience of delving into your story or your trauma or whatever you've lost.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:37

Yeah, I love the everything that you're sharing. And it really resonates with my own experience and figuring out how to process my own grief. One writing and journaling, huge outlet for me. Getting the thoughts, the feelings on the page through writing. I have a Gemini moon. So writing, communication is how I connect with my feelings and the art making with the hands. And like you, I too, I consider myself an artist, absolutely, uh, but not in the sense that I'm a painter, although I am intending to pick up drawing at some point. I just want to go out and draw and sketch the plants and sketch the beautiful earth landscapes around me. But collaging was a really big gateway for me. Collaging is the practice that helped me like compost the self-limiting belief that I wasn't creative. And collaging came into my life at the same time that I was really starting to grapple with the grief of the pain along my paternal lineage. And as I started venturing on this deeper inner healing journey, I would collage a lot. And when I didn't have the words, I would just sit down and let myself collage. And I would create beautiful works of art to me that were just expressing in ways that I could not verbalize at the time. And it was such a powerful practice. And to this day, I love collage. And I love it for many people who are maybe looking for an entryway into creative practice because it's very intuitive and you don't have to be the best drawer. You don't have to be super skilled. It's just cutting things out, pasting them together, and making something that you feel expresses or is beautiful to you. And I would love to hear a little bit more.

Mourning Altars community offering

SPEAKER_01 1:23:22

I am very fortunate to have attended one of your community um offerings here in Milwaukee, which you co-facilitate with Janelle of the Tooth and Nail Ceramic Studio, which, you know, are your morning altars uh offering. And the one that I attended was um like a community, we're building like community altars for liberation, for resilience, and to be in a group and hand building clay. And it's funny because my husband was a member at the time at Tooth and Nail. He is a ceramic artist and does wheel throwing. And I told him I'm not interested in wheel throwing. But when I was in the space with you and Janelle and everyone else who was there, I was like, this feels so good to be hand building altars while we're talking about the collective unrest, the grief and the struggle that is moving through the collective. It felt just, I'm like, it felt so natural and it felt so beautiful. And I was like, I want to go back and do more hand building. That is so enjoyable to me. So I'd love to hear more if you'd be willing to talk about morning altars.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:32

Absolutely. I love morning altars so much. So last summer, so I've been friends with Chanelle for a long time. Um, her kids went to the same school. My kids are ads, we've just been in community for a long time. And last summer we were talking about doing some kind of like grief and ceramics workshop. We did one a couple years ago where we made pinch pots, and everybody got like grief ally seeds, so like herbs that are really supportive in grief, and they were able to plant them in their pots after the pots were fired. And so it was just this little like one-off class we did on like a grief in public day that happens at the end of April every year. And someone who had attended that class saw her and said, Hey, are you ever gonna do anything else like that? It was so cool to be with other people who like were carrying grief, and then we like got to make things together. And so she was like, Do you want to do another workshop? And I said, Absolutely. So we came up with morning altars, in part because I have a little altar to like the women in my matriarchal line. It is called my little altar of mothers. And every morning I give them the first morning's coffee. Um, there's now a little cigarette on the altar for the three of them. I started dreaming about it and figured one of the ladies needed a cigarette. So it's this place where every morning I spend just a brief amount of time kind of like grounding into my day, meeting with my beloved dead, these women who like created the life that I was able to step into. And so I thought, what if like could we make like little altars? And Janelle was like, absolutely we could. That would be a great one-day class because it's hand building, like you said. And so we set one up for last October. And we over like one of our coffee meetings, we were like, if like four or five people sign up, we'll run it. So fingers crossed. And that first one got posted and it sold out in less than a day. So we quick added a November date. That one sold out in less than a day. So we just we kept adding dates until we were doing like two a month. And one of the things that that really told us is people really are craving this kind of space. Because you can take a ceramic wall shelf class. It's it's very similar, it just doesn't have the grief aspect. And so people were signing up for mourning altars because they were really looking for a space where it felt safe to be like, I have grief. Because there would be other people there, right? Like in the same boat. And so we started having these classes, and people have made like friend groups. They have like Instagram friend groups that they've made with the people who sat at their table, people have exchanged numbers, people started coming from all over the Midwest. We've had people from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, I think Minnesota. Like people were driving hours to come to these like beautiful classes. And Janelle talks about it. We do it as like a little grief sandwich. So, like in the beginning, Janelle explains the mechanics of the clay and has people cut their pieces out. And one of the things that she tells people that I love so much is how clay has memory. So when you're cutting your pieces from the slabs, you don't want to like wobble them because they'll go into the kiln and they'll bend. And so in this way, the poetry of that to me makes it such a beautiful way to allow grief to move through us as we move through grief. Because if clay has memory, as you're building your altar, you get to infuse that clay with like the grief and love for whatever, whomever you're building this altar for. So we do these, you know, we do these clay things in the beginning, and then in the middle, we talk about um Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief. We talk about grief in general, the purpose of altar and ritual and communing with the ecstatic energy of the universe. And then we go back to building the altars. There's space for people to share their grief in a small group if they want to. And if they don't want to, they just keep building. So there's a lot of option and choice there for how deeply you want to meet with your grief. But the whole time you know you're being held in this space where there is no wrong answer, and your grief gets to be present with you in that space instead of you having to pretend that like it doesn't exist. I'm just like I'm in an arts and crafts class. I don't want to admit I have this grief. And so they've become these like really beautiful, like community, little community containers where people get to create a functional piece of art for their home that's meaningful for them, that offers them sacred space for ritual, but they also get to like be with their grief in some ways, both in community or with me. Those classes are often like so full of laughter because like once we break through the sadness part of it and see how universal grief is, and everybody is walking around carrying really heavy things. There's like this amount of grace and joy that enters the room. And like every class is different, and each one is so beautiful. Um, and it's just really been like such an honor and a joy to co-facilitate those. And yeah, we were just really hopeful that five people would want to do it last October. And I think we finished our first season of those with maybe like 12 classes. We're taking a break for the summer, but they those will definitely come back to tooth and nail in the fall. Um, they've just been really well received and like such a joy to teach together. And I've learned so much about clay. Janelle has learned about grief. It's like really nourishing for both of us to do those together too. It's been a really beautiful expansion of our friendship and our like professional relationship in that facilitation space.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:07

I'm celebrating all of this. One for our community here in Milwaukee and the and the Midwest in general. I love hearing that people have been traveling because, like you said, it is so needed. And I love this relationship with you and Janelle and how this co-creative offering has deepened and expanded your relationship and woven and stitched your work together. It's just like everything I love and adore community connections, collaborations, deepening of friendships and expansion of friendships. And yeah, there is like nothing more joyful to me than like these community spaces, but then co co-creating a community space with another, another beloved. So thank you to you and Janelle for co-creating this and offering this. And when they come back in the fall, I will certainly be signing up because I will need to build another altar for my new home. And it was really fun when I got to go. There's different shapes and different kinds of like templates that Janelle has. And I did one style, and so I want to, I was like, I need to come back so I can do the other style of altar because you can never have too many altars, never ever. So

Outro

SPEAKER_01 1:32:22

you really can't. Abby, this conversation has nourished me so deeply and so profoundly. You are such a gem, and it is just like a gift to actually be connected with you, IRL tangibly in Milwaukee, and just the service and the love and the support that you provide for people here and and well beyond, because I know you are connecting with people and your work gets to reach uh so far. That is one of the gifts of the digital age is connecting locally and far as well. So I'm just wondering, you know, I will include all of the links to connect with you, your Substack, your Instagram, your website. Um, but I'm curious, uh I'll include those in the show notes. So, listeners, please connect with Abby and look at her amazing services and see what you might most need her to support you with. But Abby, are there any final reflections that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:19

Um, well, first, I do want to send a smidge of love to our friend Kate, who decided one day immediately that she didn't know why we didn't know each other. So I am very grateful to Kate for connecting us. I feel the same about you. Thank you, Kate. Um, I love knowing you in real life. And um, I'm just so happy that I got to be here with you. I love talking about grief. I'm always trying to help people sort of like lower the barrier of entry to grief work. So if that's like through a zine or a little workbook or an apothecary, little herbal support item, or it's working together one-on-one, or it's taking a class or coming to a sound bath, I just I love to, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to kind of like talk about grief, maybe make it a little less scary and daunting for people who know they're carrying things but they aren't sure where to begin and how to process or metabolize them. Um, but yeah, this has just been like such a joy to be with you and get to talk with you about all of these things.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:30

It has been such a joy for me as well, and I know I will be listening back to this conversation so many times. That's like the low-key. I feel like when um as an artist or a creative and you like really love what you're creating, like you want to spend time with it, and that's kind of what this podcast is for me. I'm like, I'm making this for the community, but I'm also making this for me because I need to like sit back, and I know there's gonna be moments in the future where I'm just gonna need to like sit and re-listen to this conversation we had because it's gonna support future me and through other just experiences with grief. So, Abby, thank you so, so much. And listeners, thank you for tuning in. It is truly just a really big gift to create and share this podcast. So until next time. Thank you to my dear friend Brie Legan for designing our enchanting logo. And thank you to Paul Krasnoshok for our music. To support the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a review, and share this episode with the people you love. You can also become a patron for $5 a month or $50 a year by subscribing to the Soil and Stars newsletter at of SoilandStars.substack.com. Your patronage supports the sustainability of this project and will help me hire professional support in the future. Thank you for tuning in. Visit the show notes for links, to connect with our guests, to subscribe to the newsletter, and for other resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you.