We are grateful to Myrtle Sodhi for helping us deepen our thinking around what hospicing leadership entails and making connections between ideas that are important to us.
By: Myrtle Sodhi
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity (2021) is centered around the idea that hospicing is a necessary form of care to facilitate modernity’s death. Through this process of compassionate dying something new is able to be birthed in the process (Hospicing Modernity: A Conversation - Journal #139, n.d.). Andretotti explains, “You’re offering care that allows something to die with dignity, integrity, and compassion. You’re not trying to kill modernity, but you’re not trying to keep it alive either. At the same time, you are offering prenatal care to something that is being born out of this death” (Hospicing Modernity: A Conversation - Journal #139, n.d., para. 6). This approach to death and consequently birth is found in many Indigenous belief systems around the world where birth and death are part of the same cycles and inform the value systems that guide ways of being and knowing. In hospicing grief we could look at the way we acknowledge loss while also creating space for what needs to be birthed or re-born. A hospicing approach to grief also considers what we need to allow to die regarding death? Central to that could be the discussion that denies the social and physical deaths that oppressed people experience. In this way we are hospicing death and midwifing awareness, remembering, and knowledge that comes from the process.
Because hospicing in the way Andreotti uses it has to do with recognizing our attachments, complicity, and benefits we get (from modernity) it allows us to consider not only what we lose when we release these attachments but whether or not we are willing to part with a certain way of being. This leads us to ask what is with our current engagement with grief that we benefit from and are complicit with that needs to have its own death? Who does our approach to grief within educational institutions benefit in its current context? Further to the discussion is what is missing from grief that offers something new to be born? To approach these questions it is helpful to start with what we have lost with our current approach to grief, what keeps us in this place, and what is needed for us to hospice grief that facilitates something new. A Black feminist lens is useful for exploring loss, grief, and the idea of hospicing grief because of Black feminists interests in “remembering parts of ourselves we have learned to forget” (Dillard, 2012). So maybe it is not so much that something new is born by hospicing grief—maybe it is that something is reincarnated.
Grief as a palimpsest.
A palimpsest is parchment that has been inscribed upon several times. Each time it has been inscribed in order to make room for the new the old writing is washed off (Okello & Duran, 2021). However, the etching remains because marks of the former are always present. “A framing of time and realities as palimpsestic, or imperfect erasure suggests that the past is visible and acting upon the present. It signifies the ways current, new ways of being have already been inscribed in earlier positioning” (Okello & Duran, 2021, p. 1). There is a palimpsestic nature to grief that adds layers of complexity. Grief not only makes the current pain visible but it brings us closer to the etchings of losses of the past that is related to the current one. Recognizing the etchings of past grief within current losses brings awareness to the continuous and sudden nature of grief that Jennifer C. Nash (2024) and Bettina Judd (2023) reference in their discussions on loss, grief, and blackness. What makes the grief continuous is that “dead blacks (in particular) are part of normal life here” (Rankine, 2015, para. 5). You can include other oppressed groups into this statement and the meaning would not be lost. What makes it sudden is what Bettina Judd calls our inclination toward and the “seduction” of forgetting. This forgetting is built within the framework of oppression so it is not our individual doing. Hospicing grief requires that we read the etchings of the past that make certain deaths part of the quotidian and also forgettable at the same time.
Not only is the palimpsest nature of grief concerned with the overlapping of the past and present etchings of loss. It is also relevant to the overlapping domains of grief that can be felt through each other. Grief that is expressed and felt in the personal domain does not simply stay there. Personal, environmental, and various social forms of grief moves into the domain of the institutions and vice versa. Where things become challenging is when personal loss is part of a larger loss that requires collective grieving and grievances. This is often brought on by ecological disasters, war, genocide, and economic and health related pandemics. These losses force educational leaders to consider their role in developing infrastructures that can not only hold the grief but also respond to the complexities grief brings to the surface in order for healing to take place. The main questions then become what happens when the grief is oriented around what needs to die within the institutional processes and structures that impact the various domains of grief?
Okello and Duran (2021) posit that histories “bind ideas to environments” (p. 1). This is what makes addressing institutional grief so challenging. The ideas that created the conditions for loss in the past are often responsible for the experiences of grief we are witness to and bear in the present day. When the discoveries of mass graves on the sites of residential schools became a part of the national conversation this was both felt as an institutional harm that caused grief and a harm that current educational institutions that are built on the values that made these crimes possible have to navigate within. Within because there is no getting through it and past it. Leaders need to be able to demonstrate a way to support people in moving within grief and not see grief as something that is dealt with outside the walls of the institution or something that is given a set amount of time to “get through”. Rather grief is generated from loss that lives, ghosts, and moves with us throughout time. “Furthermore, historical legacies carry, for Black and minoritized folx, “living effects…of what seems over and done with” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xviii).” (Okello & Duran, 2021, p. 1).
Grief as a feeling through others and time.
The remembering of the mass graves on residential schools demystifies the notion that the losses endured in the past have no imprint on the present and future. More than that the search for the mass graves finds resonance in other histories that insist on visibility that spurs recognition. It is important to mention that this type of remembering is part of hospicing because it allows notions of innocence (which Canadian society is deeply entrenched with) to die to give birth to recognition that ongoing harm is connected to this type of “legacy of struggle”(Collins, 2022). Mamie Till Mobley’s efforts to make Emmet Till's death and dying visible to others is one such example. Her insistence on the body being seen through the brutality it endured was to create visibility that demanded the grieving of the larger community that Emmet Till now belonged to.
Emmet Till’s death and funeral are both spaces and events that signaled a collective loss that began as personal loss. Moving us from the individual to the community. Grief within the community offers a feeling through others–what Harney and Moten (2013) calls hapticality. It is a way to find the self within the other and the other within the self. So grief then is another opportunity for integration of self and community. Malidoma Somé (1999) explains, “Grief is a community problem because the person…belongs to the entire community” (p. 220). Somé explained that when someone has experienced loss of any kind the community surrounds them in water and acknowledges their loss while affirming their value within the community. In an Afrocentric approach water is an element that reconciles people back to their community when they are grieving. This leads to “visibility and recognition” which are important in validating the person to keep them within the circle of the community (Somé, 1999, p. 222). Educational institutions have an opportunity and responsibility to hold space for practices that support visibility and recognition.
Visibility and recognition are supported by rememory practices. Bettina Judd (2023) asserts that when we grieve we can recover some of what we lost, much of this through rememory (p. 59). This is a practice in re-integration of our loved one(s) back within the community fold. This is also a practice in justice–putting together what systems, regimes, and people have brutalized beyond recognition. Sethe, the central figure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved was consumed with a practice of rememory. Throughout the novel we saw her piecing Beloved back together again in what she calls her “rememory”. Dillard (2012) goes quite a bit further with this to claim that rememory and remembering is about bringing back the “members”—the actual parts of our individual and collective selves together again. Morrison through Sethe brought back the past and allowed the past to offer its wisdom, and the present to offer its vision–its hindsight. Through these acts we are able to move with the past and present into rebuilding efforts for the future—another way hospicing grief is demonstrated. When institutions are able to mobilize the opportunities of rememory to support grieving they are in effect allowing something to die while supporting the rebirth of another.
Grief as a practice in justice.
Sethe and Mamie Till Mobley remind us that grief can be a practice in rememory as well as justice. Judd (2023) argues that this exercise of grief is a way that a grievance could also present itself (p. 60). Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence on making the brutality of Till’s death visible is an act towards justice in two significant ways. The first injustice is his death and possible mishandling of justice within the system. The second act of justice is the act to grieve the loss. “Mobley’s refusal to keep private grief private allowed a body that meant nothing to the criminal-justice system to stand as evidence…The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse. “Let the people see what I see,” she said, adding, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me” (Rankine, 2015, page 1). Similarly, Indigenous communities commitment to making the injustices suffered by children and missing women from their communities visible through ongoing search efforts in school yards and landfill sites is an act of grieving through rememory. Part of this rememory work involves the inclusion of the stories in the education system. Some of this is done through the curriculum already but much of this unfortunately, is oriented towards knowing without feeling through others. Grief as a practice of knowing requires the recognition of knowing through feeling. How do educational institutions facilitate and validate knowing through feeling as a practice of justice?
Da’ Shaun Believes that an anti-Black (and one can argue an anti-Indigenous) world makes grieving difficult. Because we are in a revolving door of loss. The loss that makes up our world according to Nash (2024) is unrelenting, transtemporal, anticipated and sudden at the same time. The constant senseless death of Black and Indigenous people, the brutal violence of oppression on occupied lands here and across the world, apartheid and enslavement facilitates the unrelenting, anticipated, and sudden loss. The remembering of the loss such as what occurred with “discoveries” of the residential schools in Canada creates a feeling of sudden loss despite Indigenous communities insistence on their existence for decades. Consequently keeping Indigenous communities as those who are grieving but never grieved–yet another form of injustice that also keeps our healing at a distance (Nash, 2024, p. 101). When healing is offered there is visibility and recognition. This is the place where pain receives visibility and can be addressed with a response of beauty. Nash (2024) defines beauty in this context as about “turning toward the possible in the midst of temporalities of loss and landscapes of devastation” (p. 12). Beauty then to Nash becomes a practice of justice that signals that something new is being born. It will take us as a society quite some time to get there by rebuilding our institutions through the rememory of loss. When we go about tending to our loss by rebuilding around and within it we bring justice to a world that is often marked by physical and social death.
Grief is a practice in reclaiming ourselves
Dillard also reminds us that memory is about “being claimed as much as it is about claiming” (p. 12). I consider that Sethe’s attempt to remember is about claiming beauty, love, and loss. If she had lost her baby to another master, to another death other than one inflicted herself would she have to surrender to unending grief? There is more to Sethe’s rememory practices. In the novel, a character reminds Sethe despite her feelings of great loss and grief that she still holds value. And so Sethe is reminded that she is of value when we read the words, “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” Grieving offers something- a reminder that we–the ones left behind and the ones that passed have value. Without getting to the grieved part of loss we are forever in the midst of the suffering which does not leave enough room for us to recognize ourselves as “our best things”. Bettina Judd (2023) in speaking about grief explores the story of the marine mammal who carried her dead baby on her back for 17 days as part of what appears to be a mourning exercise. She reminds us that “grief is really a very visceral state of both being in between and being aware of being in between states of life and death, or remembering who is lost and–how we too, the left behind, might be lost too” (p. 33). Therefore, grief is about how we might be lost with those that have passed which bars us from seeing the value in those that are living. It is a way to claim each other. What does being claimed and claiming offer institutional leaders? It helps us recognize the humanity in the other which should support our disinvestment with the harm of each other. It is to remember–remember ourselves with the other.
Reflection Questions
- How do leaders create a vision for hospicing grief in the midst of crisis? How do Indigenous ways of knowing and being support alternate ways of hospicing grief?
- Covid 19, mass graves on residential schools, and systemic racism often place educators and educational leaders in the position as “first responders” (Rose & Bimm, 2021). What do early responders need to be equipped with to support their roles?
- What do leaders need to unlearn (lose) and (re) learn (remember) that hospicing grief can offer?
- What are ways we demonstrate grief over ecological losses of the earth that allow for a reading of what has been inscribed over and over again?
- How do schools and educational systems support students and staff in acknowledging and responding to a palimpsest nature of loss?
References
Collins, P. H. (2022). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.
De Oliveira, V. M. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
Dillard, C. B. (2016). Learning to remember the things we've learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms and the sacred nature of research. In Qualitative inquiry—past, present, and future (pp. 288-305). Routledge.
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study
Hospicing Modernity: A Conversation - Journal #139. (n.d.). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/139/561748/hospicing-modernity-a-conversation
Judd, B. (2023). Feelin: Creative practice, pleasure, and Black feminist thought. Northwestern University Press.
Morrison, T. (2004). Beloved. 1987. New York: Vintage.
Okello, W. K., & Duran, A. (2021). ‘Here and there, then and now’: Envisioning a palimpsest methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211042233
Nash, J. C. (2024). How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. Duke University Press
Rose, C. B., & Bimm, M. (2021). Children, schooling, and COVID-19: What education can learn from existing research. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 15(2), 3-20.
Rankine, C. (2015). ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’. The New York Times (Digital Edition), NA-NA
Somé, M. P. (1995). Of water and the spirit: Ritual, magic, and initiation in the life of an African shaman. Penguin.
Additional Recommended Resources:
Akomolafe, B. (2019, January 15). Grieving is how flowers bloom: An invitation. Bayo Akomolafe. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/grieving-is-how-flowers-bloom-an-invitation
Brown, A., M. (2021). Grievers: A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world. AK Press. https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/grievers/
Brown, A., M. (2022, January 1). Letting go: Wisdom from our grief. Truth Out. https://truthout.org/articles/letting-go-wisdom-from-our-grief/
Castrellón, L. E., Fernández, É., Reyna Rivarola, A. R., & López, G. R. (2021, April). Centering loss and grief: Positioning schools as sites of collective healing in the era of COVID-19. In Frontiers in education (Vol. 6, p. 1-15). Frontiers Media SA.
Coughlin, C. (2020, January 16). Love, loss, grief, complexity and resilience. Cultivating Leadership. https://www.cultivatingleadership.com/uncategorized/2020/01/love-loss-grief-complexity-and-resilience
Devich-Cyril, M. (2021, July 28). Grief belongs in social movements. can we embrace it?. In These Times. https://inthesetimes.com/article/freedom-grief-healing-death-liberation-movements
Dunn, S. (2019, February 15). The liberation that comes with loss. The Medium. https://medium.com/@sodunn01/the-liberation-that-comes-with-loss-c87c16d149ab
Godderis, R. (2023). My Feminist Grief. Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 44(1), 15-22. https://atlantisjournal.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/5650/4802
Jarrett, S. (2023, February 6). Finding joy in grief: A radical and mindful approach to grieving. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUiT0cpBPK8
Maté, G., & Taylor, Z. (2020, August 11). Understanding grief as an antidote to trauma. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_oo8yFj9h0&t=5s
Owens, L., R. (2020). Liberation through mourning. The Shift Network. https://theshiftnetwork.com/liberation-through-mourning
Peña, L. G. (2022). Community as rebellion: A syllabus for surviving academia as a woman of color. Haymarket Books.
Shah, V., & Shaker, E. (2020). Leaving normal: Re-imagining schools post-COVID and beyond. Our Schools/Our Selves. https://policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Leaving%20normal.pdf Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Amsler, S., Hunt, D., Ahenakew, C., Jimmy, E., Cajkova, T. ., Valley, W. ., Cardoso, C., Siwek, D. ., Pitaguary, B. ., D’Emilia, D., Pataxó, U., Calhoun, B. ., & Okano, H. (2020). Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures: Reflections on Our Learnings Thus Far. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 4(1), 43–65. https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.3518
Panelist Bios
Myrtle Sodhi is a Canada Graduate scholar and PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Education. She is an artist, writer, and researcher. Her research focus is Black feminist thought, Afrocentric thought, research-creation and their application in re-designing systems within institutions and organizations. Through her work with community organizations, she has been invited to be a guest speaker, facilitate workshops, and conduct research projects. Her latest publication, Trans-Temporal Collaborators in Research-Creation published by Brill explores Afrocentric orientation to arts-based research. Visit www.myrtlehenrysodhi.ca to learn more about her work.
Jennifer England supports soul-aligned missions for the collective good. As a Master Integral Coach™ and highly skilled facilitator, she helps high performing leaders and teams access deeper fulfillment, clarity and alignment to succeed in transition, uncertainty, and emergent collaboration. Weaving together her passion for personal growth, leadership and emergent systems she founded Spark Coaching and Consulting in 2019. Before founding her company, Jennifer was an executive public servant and non-profit leader in the field of gender equality and human rights for two decades. She produces and hosts the Tension of Emergence podcast and regularly writes a Substack newsletter, called Evolve and is writing her first book on embodiment, resilience and interdependence in the midst of suffering. Jennifer is a mother, student of Zen, founder of the Wisdom North Collective and an avid backcountry adventurer with her family in Yukon, Canada.
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray works at the intersection of social justice and climate emotions. An environmental humanist with a BA in Religious Studies from Swarthmore College, an MA in American Studies from UT-Austin, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy from the University of Oregon, Dr. Ray draws on an eclectic range of disciplines and epistemologies in service of climate justice. She is the author of two books. Ray is also a certified mindfulness teacher through the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center.
Breeshia Wade is the author of Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, recognized as one of the best books on grief and currently required reading in several graduate programs. Her work as a lay-ordained Zen Buddhist chaplain, with experience in hospices and hospitals, informs her unique approach to grief as a tool for anti-racist advocacy. Breeshia’s background includes a B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University, an M.A. in Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of Chicago, and specialized Buddhist chaplaincy training. Through her philosophy of "Elemental Grief™," Breeshia explores the impact of unacknowledged grief on systemic oppression and advocates for using grief to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. Featured in USA Today, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and more, she offers workshops, speaking engagements, and consulting on grief’s transformative power in social justice.
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the 2024 New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development's Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award winner. Her research has appeared in several top-tier academic journals. She is co-editor of five books and is co-author of the multiple award-winning book Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021) where she examines her concept of Archeology of Self ™ in education. For three years in a row, she was named one of EdWeek's EduScholar Influencers -- a list of the Top 1% of educational scholars in the United States -- a highly selective group of 200 scholars (chosen from a pool of 20,000). At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC, and the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, where for 15 years, national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity.
