Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Emily Race: Welcome to the Founding Mother's podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. Today we're in conversation with Valenca Valenzuela. Valenca has her Master’s in Social Work and has been holding space for people in grief and end of life since 2007. Valenca is the owner of Raven and Rose, a grief counseling, death doula, and lifecycle celebrate business in Portland, Oregon.

[00:00:39] Valenca Valenzuela: The veil is thinning at that time, so they really believe that we can connect with them in that moment. I've taken those ideas of what the Day of the Dead is, and for years and years celebrated that day. In more and more recent years for myself, I've brought it into the whole rest of my life. So all year long, I have an ancestor altar now. I don't just have an ofrenda on the Day of the Dead, and that is it. I now have an ancestor altar that I work with.

[00:01:14] Emily Race: Additionally, she currently works at a national center for grieving children and families.

Valenca was born on Día de los Muertos, so it was in the stars that Valenca would work with death, grief, and ancestral healing. Valenca believes that the life cycle is our greatest teacher, and we can change the way we live by changing our connection to how we die.

Welcome Valenca. I'm so grateful to have you with us today, and for what I am imagining is going to be a very useful, fruitful, nourishing conversation.

[00:01:43] Valenca Valenzuela: Thank you for having me, Emily. I'm really excited to be talking about this topic. It's one of my favorites.

[00:01:51] Emily Race: I feel like this all really begins with who you are, and I'd love for you to share who you are today.

[00:01:56] Valenca Valenzuela: I do a few different things. I wear a few different hats, even though they're all really related. I currently work full-time at Dougy Center, which is a national center for children and families who are grieving. I also have my own private practice as a grief counselor, a death doula, and an lifecycle celebrant.

Those are all the hats that I wear. They're all very much related in the end of life world and the grief world.

[00:02:25] Emily Race: We've connected prior to this conversation, and you shared with me a bit about how your origin story started with your day of birth.  I'd love for you to share with listeners; how did you get to where you are today?

[00:02:36] Valenca Valenzuela: It was a long journey that has taken the whole span of my life so far. But it did start with my birth. I was born on Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. I often joke and say that it was in the stars that I do this work. I didn't know that, of course, in the first many decades of my life. It really was a process. My father died and my grandfather had died in the same year as my father when I was a teenager, and that had a lot to do with where I was going with my social work career. Eventually I went to school, got my Master’s in Social Work, and I knew at that point that I really wanted to work with grief and loss because of how impactful my teenage years and my childhood was around a lot of the grief that I had experienced.

I really started in the grief and loss world, then probably 10 years ago I started getting this internal calling of going deeper into the death work. I had found the term death doula.

A lot of people didn't know it yet then, I feel like a lot more people know it now, which is so exciting. Back then I feel like there were very few people talking about it, but I had found it and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I should be doing that.” But I wasn't ready. I was like, I can't be the death person. I'm not ready for that to be my thing .

For some reason I could claim the grief person, but I couldn't quite claim the death person yet. Then, I had this incredible trip, a pilgrimage to Ireland, back in 2019. It was this incredible experience where I feel like my ancestors called me back there.

I have Irish ancestors and Mexican ancestors, and I really feel like they called me back there. The way that it happened was incredible.

I live in Portland, Oregon, and I had a couple friends who had just moved to Ireland, and they settled in this tiny little village called Ballydehob in West Cork, Ireland.  I wanted to go visit them and I'd made plans to visit them. Then a couple weeks before I was going to Ireland, I was talking to my mom and my uncle and said, I want to know more about where our Irish ancestors come from. I really want to know before I go so that I can walk the lands they walked and all of this, and nobody that's alive anymore has that information.

My uncle was like, “Why don't you go on ancestry.com?” So I went on ancestry.com, and put in a couple surnames and all of a sudden, five or six generations pop up and I start clicking on their names. They all were born, died, lived their whole lives in Ballydehob, the little village that my friends lived in.

It was so affirming. Then I learned so much more about them while I was there and about how my great, great grandmother Catherine had moved to Massachusetts and she was the one that brought us to the States.

She died young as a young mother. And then her daughter died young as a young mother, which was my grandmother's mom. It was affirming. I felt like there was this deep sorrow around death and grief and so I told myself, okay, I'm not putting it off any longer.

This was so affirming. I'm becoming a death doula. I did immediately after that, and then also became certified as a lifecycle celebrant in end of life.

[00:06:10] Emily Race: I want to ask about this end of life celebrant piece of your work. Do you mind defining that or sharing what that looks like?

[00:06:15] Valenca Valenzuela: Life cycle celebrants can do a lot of different things across the lifespan. Some of them do more weddings, but some of them might do baby blessings or empty nesting things. There's all kinds of things across the lifespan, but I got certified specifically in end of life ceremonies, so I know from beginning to end how to create an end of life ceremony that could be a funeral or a memorial or a celebration of life.

It could also be a smaller intimate ceremony, like ash scattering. It can be anything that's involved with end of life. What's really cool about the life cycle celebrate piece is that we're taught how to create a soul sketch for somebody. So instead of in an empty way saying, “Oh, they moved to Chicago when they were 25 and they became a doctor,” or something like that, we interview people, and we find themes throughout their life and we weave it in, and it's called the Soul Sketch. It's really cool.

[00:07:19] Emily Race: I feel emotions rising in me as you say that, because to me that feels like something I would wish for any of my loved ones, including myself, to honor their life in that way versus an obituary or whatever that feels very dry and almost like a bio on your LinkedIn profile.

I'd love to hear more about how you go about shaping these end of life ceremonies. I'm assuming there are times when the person who's passing knows that they may be passing soon and other times they don't.

[00:07:49] Valenca Valenzuela: The nice thing is because I do the death doula work as well, on my menu of services I am able to provide where the person I'm working with that is dying may also use my services for the ceremonies. Sometimes those ceremonies can happen before the death as well. Somebody may decide they want to do some kind of get-together with families beforehand; some people call this a living funeral or a living wake. That way you're kind of saying your goodbyes when the person's still alive so that can happen as well, but oftentimes I'm contacted more by families where the person has already died and they've just recently died. Then it's a quick rush to try to interview as many people as I can and get it done right. Sometimes you only have a week until they want to actually do the service. Sometimes you have longer.

[00:08:39] Emily Race: I want to start to step into your vision for the world and I'd love for you to take this wherever you feel called to first, because I know there's a breadth of areas that you are focused on. When it comes to the multi interconnected worlds of death and dying and grief and everything in between, what is your vision for the world around what that could look?

[00:09:02] Valenca Valenzuela: I know one of the things that we had talked about previously was this idea of continuing bonds and ancestral reverence. That is also incredibly important to me, clearly being born on Día de los Muertos, which is truly the day of all days for this kind of ancestral reverence and continuing bonds idea.

My vision for the world is this idea of how we can take this continuing bonds and how it can help us through our grief, how it helps us to honor the dead, how it helps us to stay grounded in the life cycle.

I often say that the life cycle is our greatest teacher and continuing bonds can really help with that. A side note to that, but very related, is making sure that families are still a part of the death experience. We've come so far away from that. It was only 150 years ago when the death experience was centered in the family home. They used to call the living room the parlor, where the dying person would usually be, in the parlor dying. Then they would lay there in a wake fashion for friends and families and neighbors to come and give their respects after they died.

That's where the term funeral parlor came from, since it was originally the living room parlor.

I believe that we were connected more with death then, and we've lost that connection and with that loss has come an extreme amount of death phobia and an extreme amount of death anxiety. We live in a society now that wants to push death away and deny it. But here's the thing, it's literally going to happen to all of us. We can't deny it. I think the denial of it is what brings a lot of problems.

[00:11:03] Emily Race: I feel this for myself, and I've witnessed it in other people. I'm curious how you would say that we get closer to being okay with it. You mentioned just now bringing families closer to that death experience, and are you actually suggesting that we go back to the parlor type setup? Or, are there other ways you've seen even beyond that?

[00:11:20] Valenca Valenzuela: I would love to see it be more in the homes again, for sure. I think that people get really scared. For instance, somebody might already be dying. They literally have a terminal illness and they are in the last weeks of their life.

Then if they start struggling with something physically, their family calls the ambulance, calls 911 and gets them whisked off to the hospital. But, these people are dying; what do they need to go to the hospital for? They don't need to be there. They literally don't need to be there.

I think it's because families are scared and they don't have the support that they need. And that's understandable. It's easy to say, let's just bring it back to the home, but we need support. And that's what death doulas are here for.

That's why we're trying to change how we do death and dying.

[00:12:10] Emily Race: I feel like I always go on this tangent because I had a home birth, so I always see the parallel right between. I ended up having a home birth where the midwives didn't show up in time. It happened quicker. I had a free birth with just my husband there, and had I not been preparing for home birth, with all the things that started to ensue, we would've called the ambulance.

We've been panicked; we don't know what we were doing. But we had been prepared for a home space. We had been working with doulas and midwives leading up to this. I just share that to say there is a paradigm where an emergency can look like certain things and then there's another paradigm where, no, the home is actually the safest place to be right now.

You do need to prepare for that mentally, emotionally, physically. Aside from that tangent, I'd love for you to share more around what the death doula, death midwife piece looks like in your work.

[00:12:58] Valenca Valenzuela: It can look like so many different things. This is the part that a lot of us death doulas are finding to be really hard and sad right now, that we really want to change and educate society on, and that is people aren't even thinking about us until the very, very end. It's almost too late. If you're going to call us two days before, I mean, it's not too late. We can absolutely come in and sit vigil and help through the whole process and even help afterwards. But to really get the most out of it, we could be helping months and months in advance.

The reason why people aren't calling us again is the death phobia and the death anxiety because they want to deny that the death is happening until it's so clear that it's happening. 

To bring it back to that birth scenario that you're saying, it's not until you're feeling those labor pains that you're like, Oh, this birth is happening. It's the same thing, until they're literally seeing the death labor happening, they're like, Oh, this is happening. Think about it– You had doulas that you probably started with as soon as you found out,  nine months before you were going to have a baby. And you saw them all the way through.

That's what should be happening here as well, as soon as somebody gets a terminal illness. Even before that, because we can help with pre-planning, we can help with advanced directives and any paperwork type of stuff. It’s having a whole plan; sometimes we'll call it a comfort plan, and this might look similar to a birth plan in a way. This comfort plan is like, what do you want the environment to look like? Who do you want there? That's really important to think about; some people don't want everyone there, and some people do want everyone there. It really depends on the person. So the more we can preplan, the better we can create this beautiful death at the end. That's one of the things we can do. We can also help with legacy work. Again, if we get in months and months in advance, it's too late in the last few weeks or even in the last couple months sometimes.

But if we can get in as far in advance as possible, we can do legacy projects where we can get involved with the person who's dying and do something with them that they can leave for everybody behind. It's beautiful, beautiful work. That's some of my favorite stuff.

Then of course we can help sit vigil. When the dying time is actually happening, we're there to help support the family through that and being another person. I think what a lot of families don't realize is that hospice is wonderful, and the nurses and the social workers are great. I'm not saying anything about hospice nurses or social workers. They, love their patients and they do the best they can, but they work within a medical system that is taken down by the insurance system too. They have to be able to bill.

It's like, oh, well we can only bill one hour a week, or something like that. So the families don't realize going into those last few weeks, Oh no, it's on you, family. It's not like you're going to have some nurse there 24/7 helping you out. It's on you. And that's when they get scared and want to send them to the hospital. When really, that's not what they need. If they had more support, like a death doula there, then the person could really have their death at home.

[00:16:14] Emily Race: I'm bridging what you said about this fear, the avoidance of death that we have culturally and then what I'm imagining sitting vigil looks like, and I'm actually curious to hear from you as someone who's been there and maybe can bridge that for listeners who've never witnessed death. What ideally would that look like? As witnesses or family members sitting vigil, what would that look like in an ideal world?

[00:16:39] Valenca Valenzuela: I love that we can think so deeply in that vision space and not have to think about what is reality at the moment, okay. My vision for the world would certainly be that we create this incredible space for the person who is dying. I would get to be kind of a curator of the space to help with that. The dying process is very sensuous in the way that all of our senses are pretty involved. People don't think about that. When you think of dying, you think, Oh, everything's shutting down and you're dead and you're not there. But that's not true.

Yes, people are starting to sleep a lot more, but their senses are still there. And actually their sense of hearing is the last to go. It literally there until the very last breath. People need to realize that, that you can talk to them and say things till the very last moment.

In an ideal world, the room would be filled with these sensuous things. Colors and textures that the person that is dying would love, maybe pictures of loved ones everywhere, or pictures of things that make them feel calm and make them feel at peace. Is there music or sounds that they like? Are there smells that we can put into the room that they like? Do they want a lot of light and like to look out a window or do they want it to feel more like a cave and just really cocoon in? In an ideal world, we're creating this beautiful, beautiful space for the person because it's their death.

It's none of our death. It's their death, and let's create the best we can for their transition.

[00:18:17] Emily Race: The bias, at least that I have, is that a light turns off. But it feels like there is this gradual transition to co-create with that person, versus shoving them away in some corner because we can't be with it.

[00:18:35] Valenca Valenzuela: Maybe adding to that too, what would the experience be like for the family? What did they need? What kind of comfort do they need, in that home as well so that they can be a part of the process too.

[00:18:51] Emily Race: I have so many more questions on this, but I absolutely want to go back to what you said earlier around continuing bonds, because that is something that I think we want to hold space for.

There may be folks who know what you mean by that and others who don't. So can you define continuing bonds?

[00:19:03] Valenca Valenzuela: Continuing bonds would be having a relationship with any of your people who have already died, but having a relationship with them after the death has occurred. Some people think, Well, how the heck do you do that? and to others that might feel intuitive. Again, let's look at my favorite day of the year, my day of birth as well. Día de los Muertos as an example of what continuing bonds looks like.

This is a holiday that does originate from Central Mexico and it's all about honoring the dead. They talk about how the veil is thinning at that time.. They believe that we really can connect with them in that moment. I've taken those ideas of what the Day of the Dead is and I for years and years celebrated that day.

But in more recent years for myself I've brought it into the whole rest of my life. All year long I have an ancestor altar now. I don't just have an ofrenda on the Day of the Dead and that is it. I now have an ancestor altar that I work with, and I have my father's picture on there, my maternal grandfather and grandmother on there, my paternal grandmother on there as well. I have my Irish ancestors, the ones that I had learned about that had come from Ballydehob and moved to Massachusetts. They are on there as well. I'm really picky and choosy about which ones I put on there, because those are the ones I wanna continue my bonds with.

You may have some ancestors or people that you knew in your family that die that maybe you don't want to continue bonds with them because of who they were in this world. And that's okay too. You get to pick and choose who you continue your bonds with.

I think some people worry like, Oh, am I inviting everybody in? I hated my uncle Carl because he was awful or whatever, you know what I mean? And that's just not the case. You don't need to put Uncle Carl's picture on there. Sorry if your name's Carl. It is just the first word name that popped into my head.

It's just about that continuing relationship, and it doesn't have to be this big ancestor altar thing like I have, but I do think some elements need to be there. Generally the pictures of the people or the person, and then usually having some candles or incense, some way to light something or Interact with it a bit.

And then sometimes, putting food or drinks on it. That's what you do for the Day of the Dead. You have your ofrenda and you make food and beverages of the favorite things of the people who had died, and you put those on the altar and that's your offering to them.

You can do the same thing all year round. I can't tell you how much closer I feel to them. Out of all the people I listed that are on my ancestral altar, the ones that are with me, no doubt every single day, are my father and my maternal grandmother, Jane, who was my Irish grandmother. My Mexican father and my Irish grandmother. Those two people are with me every single day, and we have a relationship still. I can't hear them auditorily but I can feel them and their presence and I get affirmations from them when I'm struggling with something and need to know what path I should go down. They're there. They're there. And that's because I've built that relationship.

[00:22:40] Emily Race: I'm curious because this feels important even in terms of the grief process, but I'm curious why you would say this is important for anyone who's curious to do this.

[00:22:46] Valenca Valenzuela: I'm so glad you bring up the grief thing. Going back to your theme of the world that I would love to see around this, something that is currently happening is that there are some people that maybe in the psychology world, counseling world, maybe medical world, that actually believe that continuing bonds is a sign that you are having "disordered" types of grief, that you're having a prolonged grief disorder, which is in the DSM.

I need to be very clear: there is no disorder about grief. Grief is as natural and normal of a process. It is built in us. It is part of who we are. It is natural when we lose someone to have that grief process.

The fact that there are some people out there that think continuing bonds, having these relationships with people after, is a bad thing. It's disheartening because I do think it's so helpful to the grief experience.

As for some of the ways that I think it's helpful to the grief experience, I'll share more personally for me, I have always craved coming from a huge family.

I've craved it my whole life, and I come from huge families. That's the thing. My father was one of six or seven. My maternal grandmother was one of six. My maternal grandfather was one of six. These big families, but pretty much everyone had already died, honestly, by the time I was around. There's just a lot of death there. I really just have my mom and her brother, which is my uncle Eddie, not Carl, who I adore by the way. And then my brother who lives in New York. My uncle and my brother live on the East Coast, and luckily my mom moved out here with me 10 years ago in Oregon. So I have her nearby, but that's it. That's literally all I have for blood relatives, really. I mean, I have some distant cousins, but we're not that close unfortunately. I'd love to be, but we just never have been.

There's so much grief there that I have, not only for the people who have died, the fact that I don't have my grandparents around anymore or my father around anymore, but even the generations that I didn't get to meet, and so having these continuing bonds and these continuing relationships helps me to not feel so alone.

It helps give me a sense of belonging somewhere still. It was also incredibly healing for me. I grew up with my white, Irish mom in New England. My Mexican father was from East LA and I used to visit LA a fair amount. I did end up moving there when I was 18 and lived there for seven years before I moved to Oregon, but I hadn't been around my Mexican family all that much. Growing up, especially being mixed race, had this issue with Who am I? What do I get to claim?

As soon as I started working with my ancestors more, I realized my ancestors are just as Mexican as any other Mexicans ancestors. And so it really helped me to reclaim that part of myself: you are just as Mexican as anybody else and that was really healing as well.

[00:25:58] Emily Race: What I'm hearing is one, in helping with the grief process also to feel connected and to feel that relationship with family members, and then also to connect with parts of yourself that are here living now.

[00:26:10] Valenca Valenzuela: Yeah, exactly. Understanding your roots more, so that you can understand yourself more.. Again, it's grounded in that life cycle piece.

[00:26:20] Emily Race: This is in part shaped by my own lived experience, but also from what I've heard from others. I feel disconnected from some of my ancestors in the same way that you mentioned with the Irish ancestors, that you had to then go on ancestry.com to discover. Do you have any advice or guidance for folks who don't even really know where to start in doing this?

[00:26:43] Valenca Valenzuela: If people know some surnames that is really helpful to go on ancestry.com. I always feel like I'm doing a commercial. I don't get paid. I promise. If you know surnames and can do an ancestry.com, I paid for a while for the more expensive one that's international, because otherwise there's the basic one that's just in the United States, but all my people are immigrants that really haven't been here for many generations. So I needed to branch out to the rest of the world to find my people.

I think what was helpful too is I did 23 And Me. I think ancestry.com has one as well. You could do either one of those, and that helps because it really does hone in on where your blood comes from. It's gotten better and better since I did it. When I first did it, it basically said, you're 50% Mexican. And I was like, Yeah, I already knew that. Thanks .

But in the last couple years, they have changed their database so much that now they highlight what parts of Mexico my blood comes from, which is amazing. Now I know the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, and even though there's no one alive to tell me anymore, I got that information.

[00:28:00] Emily Race: I imagine if you do have living relatives who could share, there's also a path to take in asking questions and building the relationships with the living now, so that you could start to understand information.

[00:28:12] Valenca Valenzuela: Absolutely. My last living, older person on my Mexican side was my Tia, my aunt Polly was her name. She died seven years ago now, but I went and visited her because I knew she may not have too much longer to go.

She was 92. I visited her and it was really important to me to ask her a bunch of questions and she shared with me at that time, which I thought was such a gift. Her grandfather, who would've been my great-grandfather, was a Curandero, which is a Mexican folk healer. I would've never, ever known that. And there's nobody alive at this point on my Mexican side that would've known that either.

It was such a gift, just that one thing. Even though she told me a bunch of other things too, that one thing felt like such a gift. I just say to people, do not wait.

If you've got elders in your life, ask them questions now. They would be so willing and want to share those things. So ask, ask, ask as much as you can. Record if you can. Even if the person isn't terminally ill, think about legacy projects already. Think about creating these ways of understanding your roots and understanding the relationships and all of those things.

[00:29:34] Emily Race: Aside from the altar practice, which I think is really beautiful, part of me wants to understand more the tangibles of setting that. I'm assuming there's not one right way, and yet there's some basic things that people could incorporate, like the pictures, the offering, the candle.

Aside from an altar though, are there other ways that we could continue bonds with loved ones that have passed or is it really through that altar that we connect first and foremost?

[00:29:58] Valenca Valenzuela: I definitely don't think it's only through the altar. That can be a really beautiful way of giving offerings to the people who have died. I think that that heightens the relationship. It depends on how woo woo you are. If you're willing to really go there and think about this stuff, I would say absolutely build an altar and do this, but it can be a bit witchy and a bit woo woo. But I'm telling you, I mean, the way that I feel deeper with my ancestors, I know it's because I have that altar. I know it is, but there's certainly ways to do it without it.

It just comes down to intention. Maybe you're walking around and you find a beautiful rock or a beautiful flower and maybe the color of it reminds you of your grandmother or something and you're like, Wow, I'm thinking about her right now. Maybe you come home and you set it in a special spot. For a couple days, until of course the flower dies.

It's more about the intention and the thought and allowing that to become something, taking a pause for it.

[00:30:56] Emily Race: It can really be a moment by moment thing, and I'm all the way woo, so I'm happy. I want you to tell us how to set up this altar but the reason I ask that too is because I think there are different points of access for everyone and what feels most important is to find one that feels authentic to you in this moment so that you can really have that relationship. Versus feeling like, am I doing this right?

[00:31:18] Valenca Valenzuela: Exactly. There is absolutely no right or wrong way. It really does come down to that intention of I'm going to take this intentional space to think about this person.

I got COVID in March of 2020. I'll have no way to ever tell anybody and confirm that I had it because this was before testing. It was literally the week that the world shut down. I got really, really sick.

I mean really sick. And it was all in the same exact pattern, the same exact symptoms as other people that were getting COVID. So I know I had it, there's no doubt in my mind.  I literally was in my bedroom for two weeks and would get food delivered to the door. I wasn't able to see my kids. I didn't hug my kids or kiss them goodnight for two weeks, you know? It was terrible. And being in the room alone, there were moments where I don't think I ever really thought I was gonna die per se, but there were moments where I was scared and I was like, I don't know if I need to go to the hospital. My chest is awful. I had a fever of 103 for 11 days. It was awful. And during that time I kept getting visions in my brain of Ireland. I could have just passed it off as being, Oh, you're just thinking about Ireland and wish you were there. Cause you were there last year, you know?

This was 2020 and I'd been there in 2019, but then I started thinking about it and I realized when I get random visions of Ireland, it is my Irish ancestors with me. Hands down. So not only taking the pause to maybe notice the things around you and what's happening and does it remind you of your people that have died? That is what I feel like you could do. That could be a really easy thing to do and then going back to the altar thing, you could make it as big as you want, and put all kinds of elements on there of all the ancestors that I have on there, I have special pieces of them. When I was in Ireland, I collected rocks from the beach and ski glass from the ocean, different things that I had brought home with me. I have some of those near my Irish ancestors that came from Ireland.

I'm like, I'm giving this back to you. This was from your land that you were born on. On my Mexican side, during the Day of the Dead time, I really spruce it up and make it look incredible with all the sugar skulls and marigolds and the Catrina dolls, all of that. All year round, I do have one little one near there to represent the Mexican side of things. I also have some Frida Kahlo stuff on there because, although was not my relative, I find her to be an ancestor to me because she just moves me so much, her strength. She's incredibly inspiring. And so I have that on my Mexican side as well. And then different elements, right? I have a cup or a dish, a really special one that I can pour water into or wine or whatever liquid you'd wanna put on there. 

I'm bringing all the elements in, so I have a water place, I have fire, I have candles on there. I've got incense, which can be considered air. I have feathers on there, which are also considered air. I've got the rocks and different crystals which are considered earth. I bring all the elements onto there too.

[00:34:21] Emily Race: Then the way that you interact with this altar, again it's not just on one day that we interact with our loved ones that have passed.  Is it a morning practice, for example? Do you find that it's a ritual that looks the same each day, or does it evolve?

[00:34:35] Valenca Valenzuela: This is a great question. It went originally from, Okay, I've learned how to do all of this because of Día de los Muertos, and then I expanded it to, no, I'm doing this every day of my life. That is my vision for sure. But I am a really busy person, I have my full-time job at Dougy Center.

I have my side hustles, is what I call them. I had forgotten to mention in the very beginning, I'm also an instructor for the Going With Grace program, which is a death doula training program. I do that as well. So I'm super busy and then I've got my death doula clients, all this stuff.

I'm busy. There are days where I don't get to interact with it, and it is okay. And my ancestors are okay with that too. I want to say that to the audience because when you are a mom of a young child days go by and you're like, I don't even know. Did I brush my hair today? I don't want to put any pressure on anyone to think that you have to do this a certain way or every day in order for it to work. I just don't think that it's true in that respect.

I just moved into this home that I'm in, maybe about nine months ago, and the first month or two I kept saying to my friends, I was so sad. I was like, My ancestors are in a box. My ancestors are in a box. And they were, they were in a box for a while because I just couldn't get to setting up my altar, even though it was one of the most important things to me. Life was so crazy then.

They were literally in a box for a month or so, and all of my witchy friends were like, It is okay. They will let you know when it's time. And they did. They let me know when it was time and I was ready and I had the energy to do it. I decorated the whole space around it and it's great. I have a real dedicated space for them and I go down there and I talk to them, but I don't have to necessarily sit with it and find time, every single day.

[00:36:24] Emily Race: And something I'm really taking away from our entire conversation is the role that listening is playing in all this, like listening to those signs, those little whispers, what you're drawn to, and also seeing that as part of that relationship. You're not crazy, this means something. 

[00:36:40] Valenca Valenzuela: Exactly. Everything is meaningful, and slowing down and listening can be really important. 

[00:36:45] Emily Race: So this segues us towards the end. In terms of an action or an inquiry that you would really love folks to leave today with, what would that be?

[00:36:53] Valenca Valenzuela: We touched upon a few different things. We touched upon what death and dying could look like differently and how we could bring family members into that. Then we really touched upon this continuing bonds and ancestral work. With both of those things in mind, my hope is people just take a step, this can be baby steps, but a step into understanding how important death is to the life cycle so that we do not continue to deny that it's there.

It is incredible to me since I've gone down the death road– I don’t know why I'm calling it the death road since I've started the death work– I look at life so incredibly differently, and this is what I would love for other folks that are listening too, because the more that I embrace the fact that death is part of our life cycle, and part of life in general, I no longer take things for granted. I was walking through a corn maze with my kids and it was a beautiful day and the sun was out and it was just one of those perfect fall days where you're in a corn maze with your kids.

I stopped for a second and I put my hand out and I touched the corn husk and was like, I'm going to feel this right now. I'm going to be in this moment, because what if this is the last time I'm in a corn maze with my children? I'm not taking it for granted.

I was like, I'm going to really feel this. I'm going to smell this. Sometimes when I'm hugging my kids, I take an extra whiff of their hair. Because I'm like, what if I never smell it again? You know?

And then the whole idea that I'm just not willing to put up with certain things in life anymore.

Life's too short. If something's not working for me, I'm not going to continue to do it. Why would I do that to myself? Through death I really enter life in the fullest way, so I really hope that people could take a baby step into this idea that the more you can really embrace death as a part of our life cycle, the more you'll be able to fully live life.

[00:38:57] Emily Race: I love that. It's like the gift that death gives us is life in many ways.

[00:39:01] Valenca Valenzuela: Exactly. Life is the gift that death gives us. I love how you said that. You sum it up better.

[00:39:12] Emily Race: If folks want to work with you or just stay in contact with you, what are some of the ways that they can do that? I wish we could talk more about the Dougy Center, but maybe that's one of the ways folks can connect.

[00:39:20] Valenca Valenzuela: People can connect with me through the Dougy Center for sure. Most of the stuff that I've talked about today is certainly more my side hustle work. If they want to reach out to me, they can go to www.ravenandrose.love. Not.com but.love. I didn't find that a .com worked well for my work. It's more heart centered work. I'm also on Instagram and then my website would be a great way.

You can find all of my information on there and how to email me and things like that, but you certainly can find me at Dougy Center if that is where somebody's at in their life right now and really thinking about grief and bereavement. I'm also at valenca@Dougy.org.

[00:40:03] Emily Race: If you were to summarize briefly the Dougy Center, what they do, and what you do with them.

[00:40:08] Valenca Valenzuela: It's a major national center. We were the very first one of its kind, ever. And we have since trained hundreds of places all over the country, to adapt our model.

We have a peer support group model. I'm a group coordinator, so I help to run grief groups. We have children, kids, adults, teens that come in and we do peer support groups. They help each other through peer to peer. It's a beautiful space. We have all these expression rooms, like a music room, an art room, a theater dress up room, a room that even looks like a hospital, a game room, a volcano room, which is totally padded and they can go crazy with their body.

All these rooms that the kids get to go choose and play in. It's a beautiful, beautiful model. That is what Dougy Center provides. We also do national and international training on how to do grief and bereavement. I'm also the volunteer coordinator there, so I help to train any of the volunteer facilitators that come to work with the families.

We have hundreds of them that come and work with us, because we could never do it just on the small staff. We're a non-profit, it's small. There's no way we could serve as many families as we do without that. Definitely look up dougy.org. It's a wonderful organization as well.

[00:41:24] Emily Race: I wanted to make sure folks, if this applied to them, had that resource.  I'm in so much gratitude for your energy, your time and, and a lot of the wisdom that you share today. I wish we could keep talking, but I'm excited for folks who got a little taste of you today to continue to follow that thread if they feel so inclined. Thank you so much.

[00:41:48] Valenca Valenzuela: Oh, thank you for having me, Emily. This was a wonderful conversation.

[00:41:54] Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mothers Podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric Weisberg. If you want to support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life.

We'd also love to hear from you. If you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the world. You could email Emily@founding-mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.