Renegade Grief with Carla Fernandez

Carla Fernandez, author of the book "Renegade Grief," was just 21 years old when her father José died. She felt ill-equipped to handle her grief alone, so she started reaching out to friends. What began as a simple potluck dinner with other young adults who'd also lost parents grew into The Dinner Party, a nationwide movement with tables in over a hundred cities. At these gatherings, grievers share food, stories, and the complicated reality of loss. In this episode, Carla talks to Sarah about the power of normalizing these conversations, the rituals that help us continue bonds with those we love, and why tending to our grief can be a renegade act.

For more information on The Dinner Party and Carla's work, please visit www.thedinnerparty.org or www.carlafernandez.co

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Carla Fernandez: What's really happening is a process of normalization, that people come into the room being like, I'm doing this wrong. And they leave a few hours later exhaling realizing, oh, this thing is super hard and super uncomfortable. Bu,t like, that lady across the table from me looked me in the eye in a way that made me know that she totally gets it

[00:00:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is Carla Fernandez, author of the book “Renegade Grief.” Carla was just 21 when her father José died, and she felt ill-equipped to handle her grief alone. What began as a simple potluck dinner with other young adults who'd also lost parents, grew into the dinner party — a nationwide movement with tables in over a hundred cities. At these gatherings, grievers share food, stories, [00:01:00] and the complicated reality of loss. In this episode, Carla talks about the power of normalizing these conversations, the rituals that help us continue bonds with those we love, and why tending to our grief can be a renegade act.

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:01:19] Carla Fernandez: Thank you, Sarah. Happy to be here.

[00:01:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: You write that you'd never been to a funeral of a family member before your dad died. You were about 21. Is that right?

[00:01:26] Carla Fernandez: That's right.

[00:01:27] Sarah Cavanaugh: What had your experience with death been before that point?

[00:01:32] Carla Fernandez: I think the most vivid death loss that I'd experienced — there were some pets, but there was a boy in the high school that I went to who died in a car crash. And it was one of those like way-too-soon tragedies. The night that he died, a bunch of us gathered in the kind of cul-de-sac behind his house to be together and make sense of what had just happened. And I remember hearing his mom crying inside the house and I remember [00:02:00] that being like a real baptism by fire of realizing that we cannot take our time here for granted. And to also feel into the part of that moment that was like a human instinct to come together.

Sarah Cavanaugh: What did losing your dad reveal to you about yourself and about grief?

Carla Fernandez: I think I'm still learning the answer to that question, but I think at the time it showed me that I had a real hunger to not avoid what, to me, was like the big question in the room. And I have an incredible family and they took real care in the weeks and months after my dad died. But I felt like once everybody had kind of returned to their life as normal, I was left with these really big questions that I couldn't get out of my head. And that's sort of what led me to reach out to other people who are my age, who are going through similar life experiences. What I learned about grief early on was how multicolored it is, how multifaceted it is, that the sort of impression that I had [00:03:00] of what grief looked like was, like, from movies like Ghost or Stepmom, or these sort of one note Hollywood depictions that oftentimes are very oriented around like the sadness, the tears. And I remember in those first few months going through such a wide range of expressions and reactions and feelings, and not just like Elizabeth Kubler Ross's five stages, but you know, hysterical laughter and the desire to like be bad and break rules and missing my dad desperately and being mad at him at the same time. And I think it made me realize that it's really one of these experiences that until you're in the beating, bleeding heart of it, it's hard to know how it actually feels.

Sarah Cavanaugh: At what point did the real weight of grief hit after your dad's passing, and why do you think the first 40 days following a major loss feel different from the time that comes after?

[00:03:56] Carla Fernandez: I have a real stark memory of the night before his memorial when [00:04:00] my family had gathered, and I remember being upstairs in his bedroom and hearing the sound of chairs getting pulled out from the dining room table, and plates getting set, and the din of a family gathered. And there's something about being in his room and kind of hearing what he would've heard and realizing that that was one of his favorite sounds — the sort of the soundscape of a family gathering to enjoy a meal. And in the same breath realizing like, oh fuck. Like he won't ever, as far as I know, he will never get the corporeal pleasure that is preparing to sit down with his favorite people. And I will never get the corporeal pleasure, spiritual pleasure, relational pleasure that is, like, joining him around a table for a meal. And I remember that being like, not just like a little wave of grief, but like a tsunami of grief of kind of like, oh, that's what we're talking about here. The finality. And then I think once the sort of the festivities, if you were, wrapped, [00:05:00] and I was like back to work — I remember it feeling a little bit more like of this constant companion. This thing that was always on the tip of my tongue to talk about, the lens through which I was seeing every interaction and grocery store visit and date that I went on. But I just didn't feel like I had someone who I could really relate to around that kind of the consistency of its presence

[00:05:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: And what changed for you after the 40 days?

[00:05:26] Carla Fernandez: I think about our, like, quickly depleting attention span, and like how long can any person focus on like one disaster? Whether it's a disaster happening within an immediate family unit or within a city or within a country. For me it felt like that was when the shock was wearing off and the dust had settled and I was looking around at this new landscape of my life wondering, like, what now?

[00:05:49] Sarah Cavanaugh: What was your dad like at the dinner table?

[00:05:51] Carla Fernandez: He was one of these, like, still waters run deep. But when he got a glass of wine in his hand — he was in the wine business — [00:06:00] he would hold court. He's like a gentleman philosopher. There's a lot of like discussion of culture and politics and Carl Sagan type cosmos things. And yeah, he was someone who would often take the devil's advocate position just for, like, the sake of a good conversation. That felt like his congregation or his church or the place where he could really kind of exhale and really return to presence. The older I get, the more I appreciate someone's ability to really be in conversation in the way that he could.

Sarah Cavanaugh: What did you feel was specific and unique about losing a parent as a young adult? And why did you feel compelled to surround yourself with peers who'd also experienced the death of a parent during this particular time in their lives, and I'm guessing under 30 maybe?

Carla Fernandez: I remember right around then was when my dad and I were really starting to get each other and see each other, 'cause I had kind of entered the adult world. And I was no longer just the little kid, we had just begun being like companions to one another. And I really admired his counsel. [00:07:00] I really valued his point of view and his take on what I was going through. It was precisely around the time when I and many peers of mine were facing these big questions that one would call home for council around, you know, getting jobs or entering relationships or moving cities or kind of in this brain-not-yet-fully-developed, early 20-something, but living on your own, trying to figure out how to move through the world. So I think in the, and then my dad dying and then in feeling this, like, magnetic pull to other people who got that because they lived it too — what we were creating was our own little council where we could come together and talk about, yes, the accident or the diagnosis or the death, but also the like, the what now? The how do we make these decisions and move through our lives when the people that we would have gone to, assuming we had that relationship in the first place, aren't available to us in the same way.

[00:07:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: What do you feel you gained from these dinners?

[00:07:55] Carla Fernandez: I think like in the simplest friends. People who I could not hide in front [00:08:00] of, who I could, when they asked me like, how are you doing really, I could tell them without having to do the mental calculation of, ooh, is this gonna be too much for them if I share that I'm worried about this family dynamic or that I'm nervous about this anniversary that's coming up? Like friends with whom I could be, like, truly vulnerable with. And I think what we also all started to get was more confidence and clarity in talking about grief as a part of our lives. Not as this sort of shadowy thing that we needed to hide when we went back to work on Monday and people asked how our weekend was, or a part of ourselves that had to be concealed. It was interesting to watch us over time, as this group gathered regularly, change how we were interacting with the external world in relationship to our grief and becoming over time better advocates for ourselves, but also like for grievers in general as we move through the world, like with our heads held a little more high.

[00:08:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: Grieving in community. So powerful.

[00:08:58] Carla Fernandez: So simple, so powerful, [00:09:00] it's like no big deal, but it's a big deal.

[00:09:02] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's a big deal. Let's talk about food for a minute. my friend, Chef Braveheart, she talks a lot about food as medicine. How do you see food as part of the work you do?

[00:09:16] Carla Fernandez: In the early days when I, I went to some more traditional grief groups, which are lifesaving places, and I'm a big fan — oftentimes the story that we all led with in describing our loss was about the death, the cancer, the accident, the addiction. And in hosting our first version of The Dinner Party — which was a dinner party, a potluck —the invitation was, introduce us to your person but tell us what it was like to be with them when they were alive. Share a recipe. that brings their memory into the room and tells the story of your people, of their people, of an inside joke you had with them. Food became like a storytelling vehicle into not just the heartbreak, but in, [00:10:00] in most cases, like the real love and memory that's present. And something transmutes when we're in a moment of silence after someone shares something, you can lean forward and refill their glass or you can ask what's in the dish? Or you can pass a plate or serve someone. There's all this other sort of relationality that gets to happen that's not just like, I'm verbally explaining to you the heartbreak that is my father having died. There's like a webbing of weaving together that gets to happen through the sharing of food.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. And you're referring back to their lives and what they loved.

Carla Fernandez: It also gave me the assignment to actually figure out like, how do I make this thing? It's both the sharing of the dish, but it's also the, like, shit, I've never, I never had to make this. I helped grate the cheese, but like I never had to do anything other than that. So it kind of felt like a spiritual assignment on me and on the people that were gathering to find the recipe card and like, [00:11:00] not just share the dish, but see what it felt like to be shopping for those ingredients or smelling those aromas in your kitchen. To me that is, like, an incredible way of continuing bonds as we talk about in the business, like the clinical term of continuing bonds. I think food is like a way that culture lives on generation after generation after generation. And the dish that I made that night wasn't my dad's recipe. It wasn't his grandfather's recipe. It was like his great, great, great grandfather's recipe. There was something cool to me about getting the chance to make that my recipe too.

[00:11:32] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's really beautiful how you have this concrete thing to talk about regarding that person and your ancestors going way back. So how did those initial, those early dinners, first lead to The Dinner Party?

[00:12:06] Carla Fernandez: The very first one felt like it was going to be a one-off social experiment that we would do and be like, that was cool, and move on with our lives.

[00:12:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: And I have new friends.

[00:12:16] Carla Fernandez: And I have some new friends and I like, got this off my chest, made the dish. And it was a dinner that I hosted and it was five other women who were there who I had connected with through different corners of my life who'd all lost a parent. One of them was Lennon Flowers, who would become my co-founder and our executive director and really grow The Dinner Party into this nationwide movement that it is today. But at the beginning we weren't, like, there was no business plan, we were not setting out to start a 501c3. We were just young, creative, curious people who wanted a space where we could talk about this major headline in our lives. And at the end of that first night, there was this moment of huh, this was really cool. This was the best blind date any of us had ever been on, we should do this [00:13:00] again. So that group started to meet monthly. It's funny because over time the food became less and less important. The food was like the Trojan horse icebreaker that kind of got everybody oriented. And then it was like, who's gonna pick up pizza and who's gonna pick up pints of Ben and Jerry's? It's a Thursday and we're busy, let's keep this really simple. But over time people started to hear about this dead parents supper club thing that we were doing, because we were starting to talk about our loss with friends and our therapists and other family members. And we started to hear from other folks that they wanted to attend or join, or heard from friends in other cities that they'd be curious to start one of their own. I remember at the time feeling kinda like, well, it's not like rocket science, you just host a potluck. However, like we need —

[00:13:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: Some structure

[00:13:48] Carla Fernandez: Some structure, some scaffolding, an invitation. And more often than not, we were hearing that people didn't actually have four or five or six or three other folks that they knew who they could invite [00:14:00] So quickly what we started to realize was that the role that we could play was almost in like a Grand Central Station matchmaking effort, where we could identify hosts, volunteers who wanted to be the person that was opening their doors, and we could match them to other people in their city, and over time their neighborhood, who were looking for this kind of space and helped form what we called “tables,” which are sort of like the small groups. And that those tables would self-organize and meet regularly over time and kind of, to the best of our ability, help recreate the magic and the stickiness that happened in that first table. And there's now, you know, tables in over a hundred cities across the U.S., many tables happening virtually. And yeah, it's been cool to be a part of watching an idea that seemed so strange and wild and renegade in many ways become, you know — realize that so many people were kinda looking for this at the same time. We just like started to lay the tracks for it to exist.

[00:14:58] Sarah Cavanaugh: So how did your work as a budding [00:15:00] community organizer begin to influence the way you thought about grief culturally, how you might change the conversation?

[00:15:08] Carla Fernandez: I remember around that time was the feeling of like, and this will sound not novel to you, but the kind of like — oh, by the end of the first year you should have been, you should be over this. And realizing no, honestly, year one was like a blur and year two was when I was like, oh shit. And then I started to get kind of fired up about the ways in which we're not culturally set up to honor the major rite of passage/logistical nightmare that someone dying can often be. And the ways in which, like, there's such little literacy. I hear so often from folks that they just don't know what to say to their best friend, to their teacher, to their coworker. And so end up not saying anything at all. So a lot of the work of the dinner party has become: how do we normalize this conversation, and just say [00:16:00] something, reach out, refill the proverbial glass across the table?

[00:16:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: Talk about the research that you participated in through the dinner party, and what these studies have found.

[00:16:10] Carla Fernandez: Lennon led a research study. We brought in a social scientist named Laura Brady to look at, like, what's happening here? Like what is the impact of these dinners? It's hard to measure 'cause, like, no one's taken a test at the end. And yet we've learned that what is happening there isn't that people are gaining new skills exclusively, or it's not that they're even meeting their new best friend. What's really happening is a process of normalization. That people come into the room being like, I'm doing this wrong. And they leave a few hours later exhaling, realizing, oh, this thing is super hard and super uncomfortable. But like that lady across the table from me looked me in the eye in a way that made me know that she totally gets it and she doesn't think that I'm a weirdo. [00:17:00] And I think I'm actually gonna be okay because this experience has been normalized. Within that normalization cascades, like, all these other positive factors of people feeling less alone, they're feeling more confident in themselves. They are making friendships with people. We're kind of always listening and poking around and trying to figure out like what is the magic that happens in spaces of collective grieving? And we kind of know it instinctively, like that it works and that it's deep and that it's powerful and it's medicine. And it's also helpful to have percentages to present to the fancy people and the funders and the folks that are like, but what is actually happening here?

[00:17:40] Sarah Cavanaugh: I do feel like science is starting to catch up with our intuition. These are things we know to be true, and how do we prove it? That's beautiful, 'cause I think people, especially in a home setting, their hearts are open, they're feeling vulnerable. Do you feel like sometimes the ability to share with strangers is easier than familiars?

[00:17:58] Carla Fernandez: [00:18:00] 100%. It's an interesting nuance of like, you know, I'm very close with my family. I share a lot with them. I adore them and there are things that I can say in a room full of strangers that I probably wouldn't say out loud in a room full of family. And there's ways in which I'm not having to filter what I'm saying, knowing that my experience is directly related to, impacting, knotted with their experience. There's something about the, like, spaciousness that you can feel in sitting with a group of people that are not deeply tied to your emotional experience and landscape. It's been fun over the years to see the ways in which, like for Lennon, my co-founder and I, how our siblings have or haven't been a part of The Dinner Party. Everyone needs a little bit of a different type of medicine and oftentimes within a family it can create friction that not everybody's on the same page, or is looking for the same salve. But there's a beauty in, like, allowing folks to find their own way.

[00:18:53] Sarah Cavanaugh: Where can we find out about The Dinner Party and maybe create our own?

[00:18:58] Carla Fernandez: So thedinnerparty.org is the website and we are currently accepting hosts. The age range that we work with is 18 to mid-forties, and we have tools and resources for people younger than that and older than that where you can start a table or join a table. And my website is carlafernandez.co. And on that website you can find links to the book and lots of companion tools I've created to go along with the reading of it.

[00:19:28] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I loved reading your book.

[00:19:31] Carla Fernandez: Oh my gosh. There's nothing that makes me happier than seeing my book with a bunch of little tabs in it from someone else and not me, and them not being like typos or things I need to go back and fix. So, yay.

[00:19:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: So, it's called “Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss.” And I love talking about language. Some of my guest are poets, who think a lot about language. Can you share a bit about why you choose the word “renegade”?

[00:19:58] Carla Fernandez: Originally, the book was gonna be [00:20:00] called “Finding What Feeds Us” and the, the phrase “Renegade Grief” was in the sort of the subtitle And a couple different publishers that I talked to were like, what is that? Finding what feeds us could be a book about like nutrition or fill in the blank. And the more that I sat with the phrase renegade grief, the more I realized it sort of was like two words that have never, as far as I know, or are rarely put in relationship to one another. But that really summarized to me the invitation of the book, which is, in order to grieve well in a culture that would have you deny death — to actually tend to our grief in this culture requires you to be a renegade. It requires you to deviate from the status quo, requires you to swim against the current a little bit, to actually find the care practices, the relationships where you feel like your grief is honored. I've sat in conversation with so many people who are going through the craziest shit you could ever [00:21:00] imagine. And more often than not, I walk away from those conversations being like, holy cow. We are so strong and resilient and multifaceted and brave and courageous and, like, just really moved by the human spirit's ability to face the unknown, face mortality, face heartbreak, face instability. And the other thing that I like about the language of it is that we can be renegade grievers by finding care practices that work for us, or advocating for bereavement leave policy changes at our organizations, or becoming activists by changing laws or policies that resulted in someone dying before their time. But grief is the biggest renegade, meaning it's always shape shifting. It's always changing, it's always defying our expectations of it. Part of the, kind of the work of living with it, living in this renegade grief idea or [00:22:00] experience is like how do we resist the cultural pressure to conform and ignore our grief? And also, how do we appreciate the fact that the way our grief might meet us in November of 2025 might be very different than how it greets us in January of 2026?

[00:22:17] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was thinking about the wild ride. So the subtitle of your book, “Renegade Grief,” refers to Grieving as a wild ride. Can you talk about what has been so wild about grieving for you?

[00:22:27] Carla Fernandez: It's sort of the feeling of like, I remember watching my dad take his last breath and being like, that is just — that kind of wild, incomputable, out there, hard to wrap your head around. And I think about the wildness of grief being the fluctuating emotions of like, crying in the grocery store aisle or not feeling anything for multiple days and then being walloped by a memory that comes up while you're, like, shaving your legs. Sort of the unpredictability of it. There's sort of this like, initiation into a club that [00:23:00] happens when you've experienced grief that I think for many people becomes a lens through which you inevitably look at the rest of your life and no longer is mortality, like, a hypothetical concept. It's a very lived, ticking clock. And there's something to me wild about computing that, about integrating that, about how does one's life change when, to quote Mary Oliver, like, we really can ask this question of what will we do with our one precious life? Not in the abstract.

[00:23:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. So I lost my father as well. He didn't suffer. He died peacefully. Still, being there and being with that death is life changing.

Carla Fernandez: And what was your dad's name?

Sarah Cavanaugh: George. What was your dad's name?

[00:23:44] Carla Fernandez: José.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I loved reading the section on fantasy games. So my youngest plays Dungeons and Dragons is a dungeon master.

Carla Fernandez: Great.

Sarah Cavanaugh: How did Dungeons and Dragons help you and your siblings grieve your father's death?

[00:23:59] Carla Fernandez: So [00:24:00] the story I share in the book is about how my — I have, I have two siblings — about how my younger sibling was really drawn to fantasy worlds. And they got really into Dungeons and Dragons and our older brother and I were like, can we, like, can we play? It seems cool. And what it did for us in playing a campaign together where my younger sibling was a dungeon master, it gave us a way to spend time together that was not the sort of like, so how's work? What's going on with who you're dating? Like the kind of on the nose catch ups that happen when you haven't seen someone for a little while. But it gave us this, like,whole imaginary landscape within which we could play and get to know each other in different ways. We were not dealing with the paperwork and the logistics of having a dead parent. We weren't like trying to parent one another through life transitions. We were just like goofing off. And it was so powerful because it gave us this sort of escape hatch through which we could exit the sort of intensity of being [00:25:00] three siblings without a father and just hang out in a time where that felt hard to access, where we needed, like, structure and like a mission, a quest to get us out of our heads and into like another place. So it's what I loved about this experience, the more I started to look into it, there's really interesting people talking about this research. It's like a, a perfect way to experience the, the dual process model of like, I'm gonna really tend to the grief and then I'm gonna take a break. What's cool is learning that the taking a break is not like a denying, or avoiding, or ignoring or, like, doing anything wrong. It's actually essential. More and more Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy games are being used in therapeutic settings like a third place to explore complex feelings that can be hard to be talked about, head on. I think it's very cool.

[00:25:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: I interviewed two therapists, Justine Mastin and Larisa Garski, and they use fan fiction in their practice, so they [00:26:00] have their client write a fan fiction about themselves, as a way of metabolizing grief.

[00:26:06] Carla Fernandez: There's so many doorways in, and I think for a lot of people the doorway of fantasy world is the way in. And in a lot of fantasy storylines, the hero's myth of Joseph Campbell, there's a moment where the kind of the sage elder dies or disappears like the Gandalf, the Dumbledore. And in many ways, that's how it felt when our dad died

[00:26:28] Sarah Cavanaugh: I think it's a requirement in Disney movies that they kill off the parents before anything happens in the plot, the parents have to die.

[00:26:34] Carla Fernandez: No self-discovery can happen if you have a living, a living family. So brutal.

[00:26:39] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's brutal. It's brutal. So speaking of brutal and destruction, like, why does it feel so good for some people who are grieving to indulge in destroying things?

[00:26:51] Carla Fernandez: So there's a chapter in the book that you're alluding to about destruction and I learned a lot about this from a friend of mine named Kim Strouse, who's an artist whose sister died by [00:27:00] suicide. And Kim was like, went to all these suicide support groups and it was like, hold hands and sing kumbaya and Kim was kind of like, this is not what I want. Like my world feels broken, my sister's dead. The world feels broken, and I want to break something back. So she started this incredible art project called The Rita Project, named after her sister, where folks would come into an open studio and do all different types of artistic things. But the station that folks were always drawn to was a big bucket full of plates and ceramics and a huge hammer. And folks would just come in and shatter something. And then oftentimes take the shards and make something beautiful like a mosaic situation. But I remember going to her open studio once, early on in my own grief experience, and felt like, whoa, how come this hasn't come up yet? This feels really good. We hold so much in our bodies, so much anger and pain and emotion that can't be expressed through pure cerebral [00:28:00] expression. And that to actually get it out requires like, chest beating and screaming and punching and breaking. I think about how much violence happens in the world because folks haven't had that kind of outlet in safe conditions to release that rage. And instead we see it being taken out on other people.

[00:28:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: What are some other specific actions people can take to become more renegade grievers?

[00:28:29] Carla Fernandez: There's a whole chapter in the book about activism, and I think too often we see grief as like giving us baggage. But if you look at the root of any major movement that has changed culture. changed laws. changed policy — oftentimes there's a grieving person at the inception of it. We look at like, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We look at the movement for Black Lives. So often a loss experience can become [00:29:00] jet fuel towards change, towards mobilization. Another thing that feels radical is resting. I struggle with giving myself permission to actually slow down. I've had to do a lot of work within myself to be like, no, my grief requires me to rest. And it is renegade. It is radical. It is against the grain to actually create space where I'm not doing, but I'm just like being with how this all is.

[00:29:27] Sarah Cavanaugh: You talk about being a grief ally, to walk beside someone who's grieving. How can someone be a good grief ally?

[00:29:35] Carla Fernandez: To me, the act of being a grief ally is being present with the hardness of it. I write in the book about this friend Hannah, who was asked, so your dad died — how is that going for you? And Hannah was taken aback because it was exactly what she wanted to be asked. It was like, neutral. It wasn't like, ugh, it wasn't avoiding the [00:30:00] check-in. It wasn't overly sappy. It wasn't assuming that she was a pile of tears all the time. It was just like, wow, you had this crazy thing happen, like, what's that like? You know, I have a lot of death anniversaries in my Google calendar because I like to just be like, thinking about you today. We can’t do it all for everybody. But I think the more we can kind of like get out of our own way and our own worrying that we're doing it wrong, and the more we can just like neutrally, lovingly let people know that like our eyes are on them, can do so much beautiful things.

[00:30:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love it when people remember a death anniversary. Turning to you, where are you in your grief right now?

[00:30:41] Carla Fernandez: It's, it's a wild ride. My dad died on — New Year's Day was 16 years since he died. There are now other losses of people who have died, losses of relationships with the living, grief of no longer being in my twenties, grief of all of [00:31:00] these different moments where we reckon with impermanence that have stacked on top of what was sort of like the foundational loss of my life. It rarely takes my breath away and I am often checking in with his memory. I think my brother and I are both entering into this phase of life where we are starting our own families. And my brother just had a son a year ago who he named after my dad. So there's now a new José in the mix. This is José Fernandez the fifth, and I was, on my dad's death anniversary this year, was kind of like, okay, what might I do? Am I gonna make the recipe? Am I gonna, like, how can I honor him? And the message I got was like, I'm having a baby in a month, and I need to spend an entire day turning my office into a nursery. And I was like, wait, is that honoring him? And I was like, yeah, like we're making room for the next generation. My grief ritual was like, going to target and, like, buying a bunch of diapers,

[00:31:53] Sarah Cavanaugh: Is there something in the nursery that reminds you of him?

[00:31:57] Carla Fernandez: So I have a, an email that he wrote me that I [00:32:00] write about in the book. It's been framed and hanging on my office wall. And I'm leaving that up because I'm like, this is a, this is a through thread. And it's a letter that he wrote me about the expansion of the universe and how we live in this universe where the horizon line is always receding faster than our ability to get to it. So how do we live with this reality that there is never gonna be a finish line? The unknown will always get bigger the more we know. And I have a feeling that it's a sentiment that will be useful in the times of becoming a parent

[00:32:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yes. I was pregnant when my mother died. I gave birth five days after she died. I'm curious how you think about death now that you're giving life.

[00:32:43] Carla Fernandez: It's interesting to feel like I've kind of Benjamin Buttoned and spent, like, my early years thinking about the end, and now I'm in my late thirties thinking about the beginning, and it feels a little bit backwards in some ways. I've been very lucky to have a very healthy pregnancy, and there's moments where I'm like, this is [00:33:00] really intense. But there's a lot of similarities, I would say, in the whole like, oh, I couldn't have ever appreciated what my pregnant friends were going through until now. Similar to like, I could have no idea what my grieving friends were going through until now.

[00:33:17] Sarah Cavanaugh: So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:33:20] Carla Fernandez: I think about the, in the year that my dad had to prepare for his death, where I know he was able to have some conversations that he probably wouldn't have had if he had been hit by a bus. One night when he was in his cancer journey, I remember the feeling of like, of course I would rather have had him around for another 40 years or 30 years. But there's also peace that we found in anticipating his exit. It kind of forced some reconciliation. That's what it means to me is like, the chance to right the wrongs. The chance to like, be honest. The chance to come to terms with a life imperfect, yet well lived.