Kaylce Carter (they/them) and Carmen Galvan (she/her) are the co-founders of BIPOC Death and Grief Talk, a collective care group located in Tkaronto that supports racialized and Indigenous folks through grief and loss. We spoke to them about the care group and how the experience grief, sadness, loss can be different for Indigenous and racialized people.

Tell us about yourself and the work you do 

Kaylce: I am a grief educator as well as a disabled artist and advocate. My disciplines are writing and theatre; a lot of the work I do is centered around disability justice facilitation and activist work. 

Carmen: I am an immigrant, originally from Mexico. I am a death doula as well as a grief therapist. I have been a social worker for 11 years and I have my own grief therapy practice. I teach in the disability studies department at Toronto Metropolitan University, I engage in policy work and labour activism. 

What is BIPOC Death and Grief Talk, how did it come to be and what services/programs do you provide? 

Carmen: We were both members of a board of directors for an organization that supports LatinX women, Trans and LGBTQ folks. We were asked to deliver a workshop similar a death café and it went really well. This happened before the pandemic, so during the pandemic, when people were not ok, I reached out to Kaylce to see if they wanted to create something together to support people. 

We both identify as chronically ill, disabled folks who are also neurodivergent, so we wanted it to be as accessible as possible. We drew on disability justice principles and aimed to make it unique and available to groups who are often not considered. 

Once a month we host a free, virtual session via Zoom where we discuss different themes about grief, death and dying catering specifically to racialized and Indigenous people. Recent themes have been Death and Bereavement, Grief and Social Work, and Grief and Neurodivergence. 

We can also offer one-on-one peer support when we have time to help people with death preparation, paperwork or even just to vent and grieve. 

Kaylce: We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks who’ve attended our sessions who say that they appreciate that they do not to have everything figured out. I think this is because we approach our work from the understanding that for a lot of us, we do not have an understanding of grief. We’ve never been able to sincerely engage in it in ways that are good or in ways that grief is actually meant to be engaged in. We always say during our sessions, “This is not a corporate retreat, you do not need to have your camera or your microphone on and, in fact, if you spend five minutes with us and you realize I’ve had enough, it’s ok to leave.” 

Can you explain how the experience grief, sadness, loss can be different for BIPOC and racialized people? 

Kaylce: Grief is not always about death. For racialized and Indigenous folks, we deeply understand that grief is not something that we’re always going to experience based on what we’ve experienced in our lifetime. We experience grief that our ancestors felt, we experience grief from the racism our ancestors faced and that we face today, we experience grief in relation to the land that we exist on. There’s a nuance that I know Carmen and I always attended to when we’re talking about grief. Unfortunately, this nuance is not talked about socially. 

We’ve been told that there are these five stages of grief and when you get through them your grief is done, and if you go back, you have somehow failed. There’s a very specific way that society wants to compartmentalize things and grief really pushes up against that – it’s the messiest thing you’ll ever have to deal with. 

Carmen: As a racialized or Indigenous person, there is a colonial barrier between being able to access your grief. The ways in which we express grief can cause us unsafety – we can be criminalized or pathologized for the ways in which we experience grief. I’m thinking of Indigenous folks across Turtle Island, the ways in which they experience and express grief would result in the police being called; how they process grief is not how white settlers express grief. “I’m going to be sad. I’m not going to be quiet and we’re going to sing for an entire week straight.” 

The grief we experience ripples across our communities. It’s not lost on us that statistically when immigrants move to Canada, their health declines. Everybody thinks their health gets better; it is a white supremacist assumption that new immigrants will be healthier, and it’s actually not the case. A lot of new immigrants end up with mental health challenges, chronic health, and chronic stress related issues which is its own type of grief. One of our most popular talks is “Grief and Immigration” where we talk about the violence we experience as different communities when we enter this country and have to come to terms with the fact that the positive PR about Canada is actually not the reality. We’re experiencing racism and systemic violence for the very first time. How do we contend with that and how do we contend with the fact that we’re grieving what we thought we would be coming to and what we ended up coming to? 

An action you share with your participants is to decolonize grief. Can you explain this and what is involved? 

Kaylce: Decolonization is a deliberate process. The action here is taking grief away from a colonial context. However, it’s incredibly hard to do because the context of colonialism is all around us, at all times. When we’re sharing this with our participants, we’re actively questioning these systems that have come to define grief. 

A prime example that we use when we’re defining grief and how we can decolonize grief is looking at bereavement policies in our workplaces. Most of us have bereavement policies that clearly outline and state, based on the member in your family who died, how long you can be off work. 

You’ll probably get a longer amount of time if it’s your spouse or your child but essentially it needs to be someone who they’ve defined as being your immediate family. For a lot of us, your immediate family is usually none of those people that they’ve listed. And when you also are somebody who experiences things like gender diversity, if you are not a straight person, if you are not a cis person, if you are a racialized person, if you are just a person whose family bonds do not look like the nuclear family — you will start to quickly realize that your bereavement policy is not going to be on your side. 

Carmen: We also talk about the ways in which grief has now been medicalized. White supremacy has created this idea that any sort of emotions that aren’t neutral and or good should be pathologized. This is just not the case for a lot of us ancestrally, and now we use the Diagnostic Statistical Manual to diagnose things like complex grief disorder or prolonged grief disorder when people “grieve too long.” 

My master’s thesis was about white supremacy in bereavement leave policies and one of the things that came to light was this idea that there are so many systems working against us grieving in a way that feels good. If we were able to grieve in a way that felt more natural for our bodies, I think there would be a lot more people off work. If we stopped gaslighting people and instead empowered them to grieve how they want or how their ancestors grieved, they would realize that they had this knowledge all along and there is nothing wrong with their grief. 

Everyone’s experience of grief is different, but are there some common reactions, outcomes or feedback from participants who join your sessions? 

Carmen: We often hear, “I thought it was just me” or “I thought it was just me who was feeling like this.” The sessions are very validating to many. 

I remember somebody in the “Grief and Immigration” talk said, “This whole time I thought I was homesick. But I guess it’s just grief.” The concept of homesickness is something you eventually get over, but grief doesn’t ever go away. Many people in those talks felt ashamed because it’s been 10 – 15 years and they still miss home; they thought there was something wrong with them. If the narrative is instead that it’s grief and not homesickness, it makes it a lot easier for you to be okay with those feelings. 

Kaylce: Two things come up: 

1. In a society where people don’t have conversations about grief and we’ve all but negated the topic in general, participants feel as though you are not good at grieving or that they’re doing it wrong. There is a fear of grief because colonial constructs make it impossible to grief uniquely.
2. The feeling that the gaslight has been turned off. People feel affirmed and that their way of grieving and what they are grieving is okay. 

If you could get a message to every BIPOC and racialized person about their own grief, what would you say? 

Carmen: I would say, I know we feel like our tools were stolen from us, but they’re very much there. We just have to figure out what they look like and use them unapologetically. 

Kaylce: I would remind racialized and Indigenous folks that grief is also physical and you’re not lazy. There’s a very specific way that racialized and Indigenous folks vacate our bodies in order to survive. However, grief is an inherently physical process and it’s an exhausting one. We quickly just assume we’re lazy because we are having a hard time moving or getting out of bed and that’s not the case. It’s the grief. You are, in fact, tired and you don’t need to question if you are.