Full Transcript:

Emily Race 0:13

Welcome to the Founding Mothers Podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race.

Today's guest is Naila Francis. Naila is a writer, grief coach, death midwife and ordained interfaith minister. She holds space and offers ritual for people at many of life’s sacred thresholds, including birth, marriage, death and other transitional passages. Her work is often informed by her love of poetry, the gifts of healing rooted in nature and community and her commitment to expanding our grief literacy and death awareness. Naila is the founder of Salt Trails, an interdisciplinary Philadelphia collective making grief shared, public and visible through community rituals.

Naila Francis 0:57

I mean, when you think about in the last couple of years, how we've still been forced to go to work and to do all this in the midst of such immense loss, and not just people dying to COVID. But you know, all that racial violence and all these other things that we've borne witness to and it's like, “Show up and get on your Zoom camera”, or whatever it is, and “Smile and do this work.” I just don't think that there's room for our humanity, and grief is such a natural human response to life.

Emily Race 1:34

For many years, Naila worked as a journalist, interviewing prominent artists from all backgrounds. She found her way to the vocations of companioning others through grief and dying after suffering several personal losses in her own life, including the consecutive deaths of a beloved father figure and her father. She considers herself an ardent joy enthusiast and brings a compassionate presence and open heart to all she does.

Welcome Naila, thank you so much for being with us today. I'm looking forward to this conversation very much.

Naila Francis 2:05

Thank you so much, Emily, I am too. it's really an honor to share this time and this space with you.

Emily Race 2:11

Why don't we start with the basics, if you could share with listeners a bit about who you are, and the “work” you're doing in the world?

Naila Francis 2:21

Okay. That's such a tricky question. Sometimes it's like, “Who am I in this moment?” I am a grief coach, a death midwife, and a writer. I was actually a journalist for many, many years. But writing is still sort of at the core of so much that I do. And I'm also an ordained interfaith minister, which I hold with reverence, and I also hold very loosely. I think people have a lot of preconceived ideas of what that means. To me that's always been more of a way I walk in the world and carry myself in the world. People are always like, “Do you have a church?” “Do you preach anywhere?” and to me, it's more about how I want to live in the world and the ideas that I want to carry forth. Overall, I'm a space holder. Because what I do a lot of is hold space for people at life's thresholds. I'm also a wedding officiant. So, in addition to funerals and grief and sort of those more tender-hearted spaces, I also hold space for people's joy and celebration, birth as well, a lot of life's meaningful passages. I'm also the founder of a collective called Salt Trails, which offers community grief rituals in the Philadelphia area.

Emily Race 3:52

I want to spend time definitely talking about that, so bookmark. (Laughing) Thank you for sharing all of the bits of who you are in this moment. I agree; it's not really a defined thing, right? We're constantly evolving.

Let's then look at how you got to this place; are there any key pivotal moments or a story you'd like to share about how you came to be doing or being these different things?

Naila Francis 4:21

The writer part of my identity, that's sort of from my childhood. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so that's always core and central to who I am. But the grief and dying piece definitely came from my own experiences with loss in my life, even though I always say I never knew I would be heading here. I don't know that any of us, when we go through these huge periods of loss, can see where our life is heading, if it's heading somewhere completely different.

In 2011, my mom's partner died very suddenly of pancreatic cancer. And she had been with him for 18 years. So he had been in our life as a father figure for a very long time. And then the year after that, my dad, who had suffered for a really long time with many ailments and different conditions, but he always had such a fighting spirit and a resilient spirit, it just never occurred to me that he would die. He seemed invincible and that he would make it through whatever came his way. But he had been diagnosed a few years earlier with esophageal cancer. And so he finally succumbed to that. Which it felt like I barely had time to really register that Lou, who was my mom's partner, that he was gone and start working with that before I was thrown into this other huge loss with my dad.

One of the things that really stayed with me from my dad's death — so I'm in Philadelphia right now, but my family is originally from the Caribbean from St. Lucia, and my dad lived in St. Lucia. I was able to go back and be with him for his last days, because I got a call the week before he died from his sisters saying, “We think you really better come because we think this is it.” I was still kind of in denial like, “Oh, yeah, he's still gonna pull through.”

But I'm so, so glad that I went. Because to be by his side, in those last days of his life, it was a gift to me on so many levels. But also to our relationship, because we'd had sort of a, it was a very loving relationship, but also very complicated. And so to be at his side as he was dying in such a tender moment, really felt like a place where I could begin to heal our relationship. It was also beautiful to me, how I showed up in that space, and was able to be present, which I didn't think I'd be able to, because that was my first real intimate experience with death. I hadn't been there, when my mom's partner died; he died in the middle of the night.

And to actually be in the room with his body and see what was happening. But also, all the emotion, I thought that I would feel because it's my dad, and I'm talking about thinking I might be hysterical or desperate, or like, “Please don't go”, like all these things I had in my head of how I would be, to feel the quieting of all of that. And me opening up to, “I'm just going to be here and love him. And maybe that's all that's required of me.”

So that's really all that I did. And they were definitely some tough moments. I remember asking him if he was afraid to die, and he said, “No.” And when the priest came to give him last rites, and was like, “He doesn't really have long now”, sort of that “Oh, my gosh, is it going to be tonight? Is it going to be tomorrow? When's it going to be?” But I really spent a lot of time just sitting next to him, the time that I had— because the hospital had very strict visiting hours, and I couldn't be there for the duration of the days, which was very challenging— but being able to sit there, to hold his hand, to kiss his face, to just sit; it was such a gift. And then the day he died, I was in the room with him, my cousin, two of his sisters and a brother, and then a childhood friend, who just happened to hear that he was in the hospital stopped by. We were all there at the time of his death, singing and praying, I feel like loving him through the other side, wherever he was going, whatever that would look like.

I know, obviously, not every death is a good death. And he definitely deserved better care than he had gotten and maybe there were some things that could have been done to, I don't know, extend his time. He was in a hospital where the care was subpar. It's not like he had what so many of us in the death community call a good death. But it felt peaceful. It felt beautiful. It felt loving. And I remember looking at his face on the last day and thinking how light filled and tranquil it looked.

And so, that whole experience was so huge and powerful for me, in terms of shifting the fears I didn't realize I had about dying. I wasn't walking around actively thinking about death, but I'm sure if somebody tried to start a conversation with me, that fear would have come up, but seeing how he died, and what it could look like, I don't feel that I really have that fear anymore.

And also what can be possible in the realm of dying, how it doesn't have to be — even though he was in a hospital — a medical event where people are doing everything they can at the last minute to try to save him or where people are hysterical, like I thought I would have been. To surrender to the moment together and be like, “How can we make this transition as easeful and loving for him as possible?” That stayed with me and worked me as I was going through my own grief journey, eventually leading me to the work that I do.

I was even before that, drawn to being a hospice volunteer, but I had never done it. I don't actually know why there was this pull to people who are dying. (Laughing) But that definitely fanned that fire, if you will. And then walking my own grief journey and bumping into the things that I had done with friends and family who'd lost loved ones, and realizing “Oh, my gosh, that was actually really not the right thing to say”, or “That was probably hurtful”, or becoming more aware of our grief illiteracy as a culture, and how little space there is for grief.

You know, I had a woman tell me six months after my dad died, that it was time that I move on. And I was like, “He's my dad, how does one move on from their dad dying?” So, all these moving pieces in my journey. It wasn't like I had this “aha”, where “I'm going to become a grief coach, and then a death midwife.” But when those two vocations surfaced in my life, it did feel like, “Oh, this is what I want to do next.” And so that's kind of how that all came together.

Emily Race 12:44

Wow. Thank you. One thing I love that you just ended with; “This is what I'd like to do next.” Because again, this may just be a stop in your journey, or who knows how this will evolve.

But I will say, as someone who's listened to some of the things that you've spoken about before, and I find that just by hearing you speak and how you weave poetry into this, I find myself becoming less afraid of death. I wanted to share that because I think you're right, there is this illiteracy in our culture. To have my own experience of feeling more settled and less afraid, and being like, “Wow, there is something actually really beautiful, about what that passage could look like.”

Naila Francis 13:31

Oh, I'm so glad.

Emily Race 13:31

Thank you. And I do want to shift to the vision piece, because that's a huge part of this podcast, but you mentioned something about a good death. Can we talk about what that looks like? Is there really just one way, or how would you define that?

Naila Francis 13:51

There's definitely not one way. I think this is a concept that has also gotten some pushback among death midwives and death doulas, because people die to violence, people die to white supremacy, to systemic injustice, all these things that make it impossible, really, for people to have a good death.

But what I would love in a perfect world is if everyone could have the death they wanted and part of having these conversations— like you said you felt a little releasing of that fear — if we had more conversations around what it is to die and to die a good death, people could see that they have more choice and more agency and it doesn't have to be the standard root of what we may know as, “I come to the end of my life, something horrible happens. I'm in the hospital, people are making frantic decisions and then I die and then I’m buried and I have a traditional funeral home death”, and all these things.

Maybe you want to die at home; maybe you want your death to be a big party where everybody comes and there's music and laughter and your favorite food; maybe it's more quiet and soothing. Maybe you want children as part of your death, and also, what's the atmosphere you want to create? If you like candles, or wind chimes, or, there's so many little things that could contribute to making death almost a “pleasurable experience.” I'm doing the air quotes for people who can't see them.

But it doesn't have to be this tragic, horrible, painful thing, which is part of the reason so many of us fear death, I think it's because that's what we see in the media and what we see on TV. So, I feel like a good death is one where you're able as much as possible to die, the way that you want to die, surrounded by the things and the people you want to be surrounded by with dignity and love and care.

Emily Race 16:15

One thing that's right in my face, as someone who's recently given birth for the first time, is this parallel that in the birth world, there is also society's depiction of what birth looks like. And there's a lot of fear and panic and hospital settings. And I get that can be a path, and for sure, honor if that happens; how can we support birthing people in that situation?

At the same time, we have more agency, we can start weaving in more agency to shape how we'd like that birth to look like. Not much is in our control, but as much as we can. So to bring that same filter to death, this other part of the lifecycle; it's really inspiring. How do you balance that piece that's out of our control, in the work that you're doing?

Naila Francis 17:08

You mean, in terms of people not having a good death?

Emily Race 17:11

Yeah. If I use the analogy of birth again, I had my intentions for how I wanted the birth to go, I had the intentions to set candles, and play this playlist and have these people here. But then my baby came on the timeline she came in, I didn't actually have any midwives there to support me, she came too quickly. And the same with death; we may have all these intentions for the party or the children there, which I think is so beautiful. But there's also that factor of what's out of our control.

Naila Francis 17:40

Yeah, like how we could die. One of the things that I always say to people is, you don't have to wait till the end of your life where there's some crisis looming to make a death care plan. I think the pieces that are just as important are having an advanced directive for, “If this happens to me, and I'm unable to speak for myself, this is what I want.” Having a power of attorney for your legal affairs and your financial affairs, all these things that are more like the paperwork of it, so that when things happen that are out of your control, there’s still structure in place; you've had conversations. And maybe people can't do all the things that you wanted. But if you've written your wishes down and expressed what's important to you, they can still weave some of those values in, even if it hasn't gone exactly as you envisioned it.

Emily Race 18:37

Beautiful. Yeah, that comes back to the word I used earlier about intention. It sounds like “values” is another way to put that.

Naila Francis 18:45

Yeah. Because so much of the questioning that I do with people is, “What do you value? What matters to you? And how do you want that to inform your death?” But also, “How do you want that to inform your life now that you're willing to hold the possibility of your death in your body and your spirit in your heart?”

Because so much of these conversations, and so much of what many of us do as death midwives and death doulas, is hold space for living. That's such a big part of it. When you're really present to the fact that you're going to die, it definitely begs the question, “Well, how how am I going to live?” And I think a lot of the fear around dying comes from people who haven't lived fully because they're afraid to live. So if you're afraid to live, of course you're going to be afraid to die, too.

Emily Race 19:44

So then, in this ideal world, is it that we're having these conversations not just when the possibility of death feels like it's looming closer, but anytime, at any age or stage?

Naila Francis 19:56

Yeah, any time. In your 20s, whenever it's possible. I would actually advocate it as early as possible to get everybody on the same page. Especially after being through this pandemic in the last few years, and how much death we experienced and witnessed, you just don't know. You really can't afford to delay having these conversations and putting these kinds of plans in place.

Emily Race 20:29

And to bring it back to what you said so beautifully, about in the same breath and same conversation, we're looking at how we want to live; you know, looking at those two things holistically, again, I feel my body settling more and more as you speak. I'm like, “Ah, yes.”

Naila Francis 20:49

Good, good. That makes me so happy.

I keep saying to people, I think nourishment is one of my favorite words for this year, because I didn't actively choose it. I don't know if you have a word for the year, you know, that you do. But I have been returning to that over and over. Wishing people nourishment. Wanting nourishment. “Have a nourishing weekend.” “I hope you find nourishment.” So thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me that people somehow feel nourished in these exchanges and not fearful or anxious or that they have to perform or anything.

Emily Race 21:28

This is a bit of a tangent, but to me, there's no coincidence that this other part of you that's the writer and that loves poetry— that feels like it's such a necessary and beautiful complement to the conversations around death and dying and grief, because the way that we have these conversations feels just as important, right? Versus just having them.

Naila Francis 21:50

Yeah, that's so true. And sometimes when people want to have the conversation, maybe with their mom, or somebody elder in their life who they think that it's important to have that conversation or even if they want it for themselves, but don't know how to start, I will often suggest, “Well, is there a movie that you've seen that was about death and dying that really made an impact on you? Could you watch that movie together? Or could you talk about that movie? Or is there a book that you read or a poem?” To have a point of entry that doesn't come from, “I think it's time we talk about your death care plan. What would you like?” I can't even imagine really starting that way, even though I'm sure that maybe there are people who do, but if you are anxious around it, or not sure how to approach it, pulling from those other places of inspiration as entry points can be really helpful.

Emily Race 22:56

Yeah, that brings up a question that I've had, and I've seen others in my life have. If you want to bring up this conversation with other people in your life, it can be challenging because then you're dealing with whatever their relationship is to death.

This is a quick story that I want to share and get your feedback on it. I had a friend, she'll remain anonymous, who lost one parent earlier in life, and then has another living parent and realized that she doesn't have much footage or videos, photos of the earlier dying parent. So she wanted to create a beautiful documentary of her living parent’s life now and use the fact that he's still alive to create something as a memory. He initially was very on board with this, but then showed up that day to film this documentary and was like, “I'm not shooting your death video, I'm not doing this.” So he had obviously a very strong reaction in the final moments, it seems, to doing that. Eventually he came around to it, after he processed things, and they did create something very beautiful. But as I heard the story, I was like, “Wow, that's so amazing that you had the idea to do this.” But then again, there was some messiness in between, that maybe is just part of it. Do you have any thoughts on that whole story?

Naila Francis 24:21

I do think what you've said resonates as true for me, that it is just part of it. Because that really forced him to confront the fact that he's gonna die, his mortality. And maybe at first it was like, “Of course, this is a great idea. I want to do this, it'll be beautiful.” But then what comes up for you once you get closer to whatever that is.

So many times when we do Salt Trails rituals, I will notice the week of the ritual that I have a big grief response around something. Sometimes I don't even know what it is in response to, but it'll come because I'm moving closer to the ritual, and I'm always like, “Oh, I guess the ritual is really working for me right now.”

So similarly, I would imagine the closer you get to something that's going to really presence you to your mortality, the more that's going to come up for you. Which circles back to having those conversations beforehand, so it's not so distressing or alarming. It could be in the reframing of it to, “Not that I want to do this, because I want to have these memories and you're gonna die. I'd like to have this for when you're gone.” But, “I want to capture the love between us, I want to capture what makes our relationship so special and meaningful to me and the joy that we share together, I just want to have this time capsule of what it means to have you in my life.”

Emily Race 25:59

Yeah. You mentioned the grief rituals; I'd love to talk about the other side of the coin. My husband and I were discussing this in anticipation of our conversation last night, and we were both saying how it is actually harder, it seems, for the people that you leave behind, death itself. Once you've embraced that it's going to happen to you at some point, and then you transition to whatever, wherever, however, that looks. But then everyone else is left with this gaping hole it feels like. Can you talk more about grief and how you would like, in an ideal world, grief to look like or care for grief?

Naila Francis 26:41

Yeah. I would like everyone to feel honestly that it's okay for them to grieve. I feel like grief is still very private, and tucked away and stigmatized and invalidated. It's not something we make room for in our lives. Even as we're grieving. the way that society is set up with that sort of capitalist lens of labor, labor, produce, produce; there's no accounting for the human experience, there's no space for us to bring our humanity to our jobs. When you think about in the last couple of years, how we've still been forced to go to work, and to do all this in the midst of such immense loss; not just people dying to COVID, but all the racial violence and all these other things that we've borne witness to, and it's like, “Show up and get on your Zoom camera”, or whatever it is, and “Smile and do this work.” I don't think that there's room for our humanity, and grief is such a natural human response to life.

I don't know if people have even even have that awareness. There's nothing wrong with you, if you're grieving, there's nothing wrong with you if whoever your person or people are died 20 years ago, and you're still grieving because it's a natural response to loss and change. And it's not only the death of someone you loved, it could be the death of a dream, the loss of a job, a move, a transition, climate change, witnessing what's happening in our communities; there's so much that we have to grieve, I really would love a society where that's talked about more openly and with greater vulnerability and where people are allowed to show up as they are.

I have found in my work that honestly grievers are so incredibly hard on themselves. They so beat themselves up about they're not being able to function or they're still crying or, why can't they just get it together? And it's like, grief is such a full body experience. It's not “this thing happened and how am I going to think about moving forward” or whatever; you can't really intellectualize grief. It's a whole full body spirit mind experience. And there's so much happening in our biology and our chemistry and all the spaces we inhabit to try to integrate and process that loss, to somehow think that we can just get up and step back into life. I mean, it's kind of absurd. (Laughing)

Emily Race 29:45

(Laughing) Oh, for sure.

Naila Francis 29:51

Yeah. So I really would like us to become more grief literate as a society less grief avoidant. And I think some of what I'm also doing, maybe not as consciously, inviting people, is to reclaim our tenderness. I think grief touches so much in us that requires gentleness and softness and inherent nourishment, again. And the way that we think maybe we have to perform or show up in the world or put our masks on, or whatever it is we do to make it through and again, there's always very real challenges if you're raising a family, if you're struggling to pay your bills, all the other things that understandably pull people away from space to grieve.

But if we allowed ourselves that space, and allowed ourselves to be tender and vulnerable, and to also give ourselves the care that tenderness requires. And how are we also making space for other grievers? How are we making space for other people to show up in the fullness of their humanity? How can we be more kind and compassionate and tender with each other?

Emily Race 31:20

First of all, I resonated so much with what you said about the lack of grief literacy, specifically in corporate spaces or work settings. I was actually intimately working in corporate settings in 2020, and I was doing my best to hold space and normalize the need for holding space. But yeah, there's a discomfort that happens, especially if you've never really been intimate with your own grief. How do you hold that space for someone else? You don't know how to hold it for yourself.

Naila Francis 31:51

Yeah, yeah. That's so true. And I think that's part of the challenge is that so many of us haven't held space for ourselves. So we are the ones then trying to rush people on with their grief or fix them or make them feel better or doling out all the platitudes that do more harm than good, whatever it is, because we're made so uncomfortable by grief that we just want to get the other person to the other side somehow. And that does no one any good.

Emily Race 32:27

So in the spirit of moving away from illiteracy and moving towards literacy, or comfort, I would love to focus a little bit on what could grief look like? What have you witnessed or in your own grief process that has supported you or others in that cycle?

Naila Francis 32:48

One of the first things I would say, which can be very tricky for people, is to really spend time in your body. And if you've been through something that's obviously very traumatic, I know that being in the body can be incredibly triggering. And so that's something I wouldn't advise, if you're having these intense, overwhelming feelings, but because grief is an experience that's felt in the body, how can you come back to your body to allow yourself to actually meet and touch the grief that's there? And to do it with curiosity, and gentleness? Again, just like people fear death, like, “Oh my gosh, if I allow myself to look at this grief”, I think a lot of people imagine that they'll never recover, that they'll be sucked under by this huge wave, and then they'll be incapacitated and won't be able to function.

Emily Race 33:47

That's terrifying. (Laughing)

Naila Francis 33:54

But if we just made the space, I think our grief is always wanting space, if we just need the space, it doesn't have to be, “Today's gonna be my grief day, I'm going to spend today with my grief”, but just these incremental moments of space in our lives to touch in and be like, “What does my grief need in this moment? How am I really feeling?”

And so much of grief care is basic fundamentals that we don't think of like, are you eating well? Are you sleeping? Are you hydrating? Are you moving your body? Are you getting out in nature? And because so many of us are in such a rush to move forward, we're not even paying attention to that. We're thinking, “Oh my gosh, I'm so exhausted, but I don't know why I'm exhausted.” Well, could it be because you have this ton of grief sitting on your shoulders weighing you down?

So dropping in to the body and being really willing to notice what's happening in the body and what we may be needing, and for me, meditation is a big part of that, for me, dancing is a big part of that. I dance for joy, and I dance for grief. And sometimes one leads to the other. Sometimes I'm dancing and I'm thinking, “I'm having a great day. I feel wonderful.” And then all of a sudden, I'm in tears. And I'm like, “Okay, well, something needed space to move.” And just spending time in nature, I think is so so healing and therapeutic.

Emily Race 35:26

Wow, yeah. What you just touched on with the dancing example.You can't control or predict or schedule the grief. And then what I really was confronted with, as you're sharing all that, is how our culture in the United States specifically is, as a result of capitalism, so much about overscheduling, over producing, cramming so many things into our day. We don't have that spaciousness when something shows up to be like, “Oh, how do I deal with this?”

Naila Francis 35:58

Yeah, there was a moment actually, just this past week, where I noticed that I was feeling griefy, one of my terms I use a lot. And I wasn't sure where the grief was coming from, but I was really present to the fact that, okay, something was moving through me. And so I took a few minutes. And I sat on the floor, to give me sort of some connection to the earth. And I started humming, and humming activates something in your vocal cords, shifting the energy. And as I started humming, I started crying. And that released the grief for me. This wasn't even 10 minutes, maybe five minutes. It wasn't like I took this huge chunk of time to devote to my grief, it was just, I noticed this, what can I do? How can I allow myself this space? Okay, I feel the release. And now I'm going on to the next thing. And that doesn't mean I've left my grief magically behind. But just that small moment of care, we also learn in these moments, “Oh, I can do this.” “Oh, I do intuitively know what I need in my grief.” “Oh, it's not going to completely undo me or unravel me if I just let myself have this.”

Emily Race 37:23

I see almost this inner child metaphor, but what you're doing for your body in that moment to affirm, it's “Okay, whatever's coming up, I can be with this.” That must do something somatically to your body, I'm sure.

Naila Francis 37:39

I'm sure, yeah. I would imagine. (Laughing). Yeah. ‘Cause the body is our container for our emotions. So yeah.

Emily Race 37:47

So then on the side of supporting others or being with others in their grief, as someone who's watched loved ones in my life, go through their own grief cycles, you're always gonna fumbling, “How do I support you here?” I think that's a common thing that most folks go through. So how, in an ideal world, could we support one another in our grief?

Naila Francis 38:09

I think showing up in presence is really huge. I think what keeps a lot of us from supporting other grievers is we're always fumbling for the thing we have to say or the thing we have to do, that's going to make it better. But for that person, just to know that you are there, and you will listen to them. And it's going to be a listening really just to receive them and whatever they want to share, not to fix them or make them feel better or try to talk them out of whatever it is they're experiencing. But to just be there and be a presence. I think that's the most healing thing we can do.

Practically speaking, one of the things that's so often said to grievers is “Let me know how I can help.” Grievers don't have the bandwidth or capacity or even awareness sometimes to know what would be helpful to them. So really make concrete offers, like, “If you're home on this day, I'm going to drop off some soup for you.” Or “If you need your kids picked up here, I'm willing to do this for you” or “Can I come over and clean your house at this time” or just make active offers of concrete things that you're willing to do instead of waiting for them to step forward and say “This is what I need”, because that will never happen.

Emily Race 39:35

You gave some great examples there. I'm also linking it back to what you said about caring for our bodies in our grief, like going out in nature, staying hydrated, staying nourished. Is that “the list” that someone could pull from? If you want to offer support, and you yourself don't know what that looks like, it sounds like providing nourishment of some kind would be great.

Naila Francis 39:59

Yeah, “I'm available on Wednesday afternoon to take a walk with you, I'll pick you up at this time”, or you know, whatever it is just really concrete support that you can give and to also remember that we just want to be witnessed in our grief.

Even in a lot of my sessions, with clients, yes, I'm doing meditations and giving them writing prompts and doing all the things but so often, they just want a space where it's okay for them to say all the things they haven't been able to say in other spaces, to be able to cry and not have anybody hand them a tissue or try to stop their crying to just be witnessed exactly where they are is so, so powerful, because to witness somebody, to me, is almost like inviting their own intuitive listening forward. Because as they're talking, as they're doing whatever it is, so often, they come to the conclusion of what they really need in that moment, instead of me saying, “Well, you know, I think it would be really helpful for you, if you just, I don't know, maybe you need to leave that job, maybe you need to” whatever it is.

From the big things to the little things, we really do know, we're so smart. There's so much wisdom in our bodies, we really do know, very often, what's right for us, but there's so much cultural family, societal conditioning, and then all these messages, we've internalized that we don't have access to that inner wisdom.

Emily Race 41:39

I love that. Yes. That just reminded me from my coaching training that handing a tissue to someone signals to them that their emotions are too much, and you need to stop. So yeah, it's such an important message where regardless of the topic, but especially with this focus on grief that, we can move away from trying to fix and jump in with the solution prescribed and just give space for someone to know that they have the answer within them.

Naila Francis 42:07

Yeah, yeah.

Emily Race 42:09

Yeah. Well, I wanted to go back to my bookmark. (Laughing) I just remembered, as we're talking about holding space, you have created this beautiful container for people to grieve in community through Salt Trails. Did you want to share more about that?

Naila Francis 42:28

Yeah. So last year, I sort of had this vision that kept coming to me, because of how frustrated I was being aware of how much grief there was. And you know, there have been so many articles about “we're in a grief crisis, we're in a grief crisis,” but I'm like, “Okay, we're going to grief crisis, but what are we doing about the crisis?” And I kept having this vision of a grief precessional. And I didn't really know for sure what this would look like, but I was like, “We need to be out in public with our grief, like, hey, people, we are grieving. And this is what it looks like.” And then I kept shelving it like, “what, what is this? I don't really know is this for me to explore?” And it just kept coming back.

I was talking to a friend and she was like, “Naila, people need this.” So I gathered some of my favorite healers and artist friends and minister friends and I shared this vision and I said, “Would you be interested in doing this with me?” And they all said yes. And over the course of working toward this grief processional, we then evolved into this collective because we realized it was bigger than the grief processional, because we actually had events that we planned leading up to the processional.

The whole idea with Salt Trails is to make grief public and visible, to remind people that they don't have to grieve alone, but also to validate the myriad grief experiences that we all have. People show up to our events and they're grieving so many things and expressing it in so many ways. And it's all beautiful and perfect. And also to reclaim community grieving, which is the way that we're supposed to grieve, we're not meant to necessarily grieve in isolation. I think again, that witnessing is so important and, all the tools that we have at our disposal, doing them together creates maybe a more powerful healing container than doing them alone.

So we had the grief processional where we actually marched through a neighborhood. People were invited to show up wearing their grief, whatever that looked like. We had the Philly Threshold Singers, they sing at the bedside of dying patients, with us singing in the processional, and then we ended at a local park where we did a ritual inviting people to come and lay down a flower, share whatever they wanted to express their grief in any way. And they were singing, and it was just so beautiful.

But everything that we have done and that we're planning for the future is really like, “How can we have this communal experience of grieving?” We have done some Zoom things and we have done some things that are indoors with the city of Philadelphia, but we're also very mindful of making these offerings in nature, to draw on the healing that nature brings, but also to connect people to the sense of how supported we are by the Earth, and we sometimes don't remember that connection. And also to presence that the Earth is grieving too. Yeah.

Emily Race 46:13

It always comes back to nature and the Earth.

For myself, I relate to the art of ritual, the use of ritual, I guess you could say, but some listeners may not be as intimately familiar with what ritual looks like. You gave an example of someone laying down flowers; how might people work with ritual? What does that really look?

Naila Francis 46:42

I know, that is that is actually interesting, some people are sort of perplexed or even put off by that term, especially if you've come from a religious background, you might just think of ritual as things that are done in churches. But so often, they can be very small practices, like, I am going to light a candle, and then I'm going to take out my journal, and I'm gonna write a letter to my dad right now, because I really miss him. That can be a small ritual that you can incorporate.

One of the things I did after my dad died, he always used to say to me in college, before I was freaking out with exams, he would always be like, “you have all the resources you need.” And at the time, I was always like, “that's kind of a cheesy thing to say”, I never said that to him, and I always thought of it in the context of college but and tests and all of that.

But after he died, those words would come back to me, if I'm facing a big life change, if there's something I'm scared of doing whatever it is, “Naila, you have all the resources you need.” So I wrote that on a rock. And I have that rock sitting somewhere very visible in my home. And sometimes if I am having a hard time, I take the rock and I hold it in my hand. And I think about those words, and let them flow through me as a reminder that I do have all the resources I need.

So those are small rituals that can be done by anyone. And I feel like going back to this idea of the grief process as an intuitive one, as we learn to trust our grief more and make space for it, we might come up with our own ideas for things to do for ourselves that feel good in the moment or feel like they're connecting us, whether we want to be connected to our higher power or our person who died, connected to the land.

Very often one of the things I do is go give flowers to the creek that flows near my house as a ritual of my own release. Something I started doing in the last year, I think part of it comes from, I've been studying this Andean indigenous tradition, it's called the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, and it's very much based in honoring the land, and since I started studying that, sometimes songs come to me spontaneously, and I am not a singer, I would not even sing in public normally. But often when I'm in nature, songs just come to me so I sing to trees, to water, sometimes to myself, that feels very ritualistic to me.

So it can be these simple things that come to you as something to do that feels honoring or healing or like you're making space. It can be having an altar in your home, laying out some items that remind you of your loved one or your ancestors or whatever it is.

And then community, we usually have bigger ritual containers together. One of the things Salt Trails did earlier this year, we had an event that was called, I think we called it grief alterations, playing on the word altar. It was really building an altar to grief. We went to a park, and we set up an altar. People could come forward with whatever they brought and share something about their grief and leave it on the altar. We sang, and we're in community together. And that was the ritual.

Emily Race 50:35

Beautiful, thank you for sharing some of those examples. My takeaway from that is that I love what you said about allowing your intuition to guide you. There's not a right way to ritual. (Laughing)

To close out our beautiful conversation here. in the breadth of everything you just shared, is there one takeaway or one inquiry or action someone could leave this conversation with?

Naila Francis 51:06

I feel like I could give so much. But I'm gonna try to just stick with one thing.

In light of everything we've talked about, if people would think about, what are the messages that you've received around grief? And do they feel true to your experience? What can you start honoring as your truth? As you look at these messages, and if they don't feel true, what really is true for you about your grief experience? And how can you then instead, start living into that and honoring that for yourself?

Emily Race 51:49

On a personal anecdote I believe you had posted something on your Instagram about grieving friendship. Do you remember?

Naila Francis 51:58

Yeah, that's been something I've seen so much in the last few years, so many friendships falling apart or dissolving or just kind of disappearing with no one really making any conscious acknowledgement that this friendship is over.

Emily Race 52:16

Yeah. When you ask what's true for you around grief, versus what the messages you've received, I personally am like “Wow, to remember that grief is a natural, almost daily process of life.” There's so much, it's not just when one of your parents passes away, we are constantly grieving different things.

I really appreciate throughout this conversation, and the work you're doing, the space you're holding, how much you're normalizing what it is to grieve and and I think we need it, our planet needs it. So thank you.

And on that note, how can people work with you or partner with you if there's space for that?

Naila Francis 52:59

Yeah. People can always reach out through my website, https://www.thishallowedwilderness.com/ or Naila, my email is naila@thishallowedwilderness.com. And I offer one on one coaching sessions, I do grief support groups. I'm also available for one-off support groups, I do extended groups, but also I've had people reach out to me and say, “There's a death in our community, can you hold space for this”, or “We're coming up with this really hard holiday, can you hold space for people to come and process their feelings around the holiday?”

I encourage people to expand their realm of what they could be grieving. And I'm willing to offer support for that to work with people to co-create rituals. And of course, be there along the dying journey. I'm always happy to collaborate. I think so much can come out of melding energies and thoughts and practices; that's one of my favorite things to do is to collaborate in this sphere.

Emily Race 54:08

Amazing. Thank you for that invitation. And to kind of close out, how can we support you?

Naila Francis 54:18

You know, I'm gonna be very honest and say, Salt Trails we have been doing for free. The whole idea of Salt Trails was to offer free community grief rituals. So if anybody wants to donate to Salt Trails, we're on Instagram at @SalttrailsPhilly if you want to send us an email, salttrailsphilly@gmail.com, we will happily receive funds. I feel like social media is such a funny place. If you want to follow me there, follow me there.

But I think the biggest support is let yourself grieve. Let yourself be open. Stay open. And know that it's okay for you to grieve, to not be okay, to be tender and to allow yourself all the compassion and gentleness that your grieving heart needs.

Emily Race 55:11

Thank you again for normalizing that and the space you hold. As far as donating, is there a specific way on the Salt Trails Instagram?

Naila Francis 55:22

If people email or reach out through Instagram, then yeah.

Emily Race 55:26

Wonderful. Naila, thank you, again, this has been such a settling, nourishing conversation for me, and I hope for anyone, regardless of what stage they are at in relationship to grief. I hope that everyone feels a little bit more nourished out of it. So thank you.

Naila Francis 55:42

Thank you so much, Emily, for holding this space and for asking such beautiful questions.

Emily Race 55:47

It was easy. It was easy with you.

Naila Francis 55:51

Well, it's been a joy to talk with you. Thank you.

Emily Race 55:53

Thank you.

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 can email emily@founding-mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.