Financial Feminist - 218. Grief, Loneliness, and Community: Life After Loss with Carla Fernandez

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Grief is something we all experience, yet no one really prepares us for how to handle it—or how to support others going through it. And here’s the thing: grief isn’t just about losing a loved one. It can come from a breakup, losing a job, or even mourning the life you thought you’d have. In today’s episode, I sit down with Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party and author of Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss, to talk about what grief really looks like, why loneliness makes it harder, and how we can build stronger communities to support ourselves and others through loss. We also dive into something that doesn’t get talked about enough—the financial impact of grief—and why having a plan in place is one of the greatest acts of love you can give your family. This conversation is honest, raw, and surprisingly hopeful. Carla’s insights will shift the way you think about grief, loneliness, and community care, whether you’re navigating loss yourself or supporting someone who is. Carla’s Links: Website: carlafernandez.co Order Renegade Grief: carlafernandez.co/renegadegrief The Dinner Party: https://www.thedinnerparty.org/ Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/218-grief-loneliness-and-community-how-to-plan-and-move-forward-with-carla-fernandez/ Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Check out our exclusive community, The $100k Club: https://herfirst100k.com/100K-pod Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Quince Get cozy in Quince's high-quality wardrobe essentials. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.  Netsuite Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Gusto Run your first payroll with Gusto and get three months free at gusto.com/ffpod. Indeed Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at www.indeed.com/ffpod. Public Fund your account in five minutes or less at public.com/ffpod and get up to $10,000 when you transfer your old portfolio. (see disclosures: https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/218-grief-loneliness-and-community-how-to-plan-and-move-forward-with-carla-fernandez/) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grief is inevitable in life. Whether it's losing someone you love or processing a hard breakup or, you know, going through a global pandemic, you will lose. But like so many taboos, we don't know how to talk about grief, and we often don't know how to be there for ourselves or for others going through it. Hi, financial feminists. Welcome to the show. I'm thrilled to see you as always. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting feminist media in a very non-feminist fucking world.

I'm not bitter at all. It's fine. Everything's burning. It's fine. We are talking about grief today on the show, which is, it's very easy to think that's heavy. And there are parts of it that are. So a content warning right off the top. We are talking, of course, about grief and death, but also about cancer. So I would love for you to stick around because I really do feel like it's going to be cathartic and helpful. But also if you're just like, I can't do this right now, cool. Skip it. We'll see you back on the next one.

We're thrilled to have our guest, Carla Fernandez on the show today. We are talking about grief, but also about loneliness, which we talked about an episode all on its own as this like complete epidemic. So we're talking about grief, both in the traditional sense of like losing somebody you love, but also grief takes many forms. Grief can be I lost a job opportunity that I really wanted, or I am breaking up with my partner, or I just don't have the life that I thought I might have, and grieving that.

We also talk about the importance of building community, both while you're experiencing grief, and of course while you're trying to be there for friends and family who are experiencing grief. And if you've ever experienced grief or loneliness or loss, this episode will help you feel less alone and more empowered to discuss both grief and how to financially prepare for the inevitable. Let's talk about Carla.

Carla's work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. As a creative strategist and facilitator, she collaborates with impact-driven clients through her community design studio. She is also the founder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-supported circles for young adult grievers. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and cited in multiple books. She is a senior fellow with USC's Anberg School of Innovation Lab and a Katherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. And her new book, Renegade Grief, a Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss is out

now wherever you get your books. This is a powerful episode, especially one that would be really great to share with anybody you know that is processing grief or loss. And without further ado, let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. This episode of Financial Feminist is sponsored in part by Squarespace, Quince, Gusto, Rocket Money, Public, and NetSuite. Build a beautiful website to get your message out into the world with Squarespace. Squarespace was the first purchase I ever made for my business way back in 2016, and it's still my number one recommendation

for business owners or individuals building a website. Go to squarespace.com slash FF pod to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Treat yourself to everyday luxury at an affordable price with Quince. I just bought myself a new winter coat from Quince and not even with a gift card with my own hard earned money because that's how much I love him.

Go to quince.com slash FF pod for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. Did you start a subscription during the holidays to watch that one TV show or movie that you just couldn't find anywhere else and then you just got the bill because you forgot to cancel while Rocket Money's got your back? Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash FF pod. Take the headache out of payroll with Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com. slash ffpod. Fund your account in minutes at public.com.

slash ffpod and get up to $10,000 for transferring your old portfolio. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com. slash ffpod. netsuite.com slash FF pod. Tori, I was just creeping on you and I really appreciated your, how are we going to handle these next four years post? Thank you for that. Oh boy. Oh boy.

I know. And it's going to be interesting. I also created a TikTok that we're probably going to share on Instagram that I am treating Donald Trump as my ex boyfriend. Yeah. So I'm going to go out and get really hot. That's the one that I saw on TikTok, I think. Is that the one?

We're going to the gym. We're getting a fat ass. Yeah, I'm like, I'm gonna, exactly. I'm gonna get a fat ass, I'm gonna get a fat bank account. And every time I don't wanna go to the gym or don't wanna take care of myself, I'm gonna be like, well, I gotta get back at my ex who doesn't wanna see me thriving.

Sweet revenge. Yeah. I would love for you to tell us who you are, what you do, and why this work is so important. Okay. She goes straight to the heart of the matter. Always. I'm Carla Fernandez, and I do a lot of different things,

but today I'm here representing the book that I just recently wrote, Renegade Grief. I just got my advanced reader copies. They're smelling. Very exciting. Did you smell your book when you got your book? 100%. Books are the best smell in the world. Best smell. But I wrote this book after being a part of a community for the last 15 or so years called The Dinner Party. I'm one of the co-founders along with my sister wife, Lennon Flowers. And

we started this work when we both lost parents at a youngish age and realized that some of the cultural norms around grief and loss, frankly, sucked. And we were longing for a space where we could hang out, talk about how grief was impacting our lives and have the kind of friendship and companionship that we needed to kind of move through life, having one less parent present. And I think this work is so important because if there's a skill we need to be building, maybe in addition to financial literacy, to speak to your people, it's also how do we

navigate times of loss? How do we see grief not as this noun that we want to get over or sweep under the rug or not talk about or distance ourselves from, but actually as a verb, as this life skill that is essential to navigating the 21st century, frankly, life in any century, but especially now. SONIA DARA You talked about, you said losing a parent very early, what was that experience with grief like and how did it inform what you do now or what you're looking to teach people? So my dad was dope. His name was Jose. We had, you know, a great and complicated relationship. I feel like most teenagers do with their parents. And I was a senior in college when he started showing these

weird symptoms that like his doctors thought were probably just panic attacks. And then they ended up actually being brain cancer. And then he died about a year after he was diagnosed, which is common for the type of cancer he had, glioblastoma. And it was like a gnarly period of my development to go from like moving out of my college dorm to being a caretaker for him in his final six months. And it was a time of life for most of my friends who I kind of shared every experience with up until that time were getting their first jobs out of college. And I was about to say, I'm just going to say it being sluts, like hanging out, having fun, like doing the thing we do when we're 21. And I was doing a little bit of that on the side, but also pureeing vegetables and navigating

medication routines and really kind of sitting in the end at a time in my life that for a lot of people, it feels like the beginning. And it had a lot of different impacts on me, but one of the things that I thought about a lot during that time was why talking about what my dad was going through and the grief that I was anticipating was such an awkward subject. Like I remember going to parties and talking to people and feeling like I couldn't be real about what I was living through at that time and that sort of lack of literacy or comfort we have in talking about hard topics, money included, death being another big one, was really getting in the way of authentic relationships and me being in community with people who got it. Anyways, I think that in that experience,

I realized how critical it is to find circles of care or circles of people who got it. Anyways, I think that in that experience, I realized how critical it is to find circles of care, circles of people who can reflect on the life experience you're going through and can say the words, me too, which we've learned in the last few years have taken on even greater significance. When you mentioned, okay, everybody else in my life is having the quote unquote normal experience of being in their 20s.

And I am now caretaker to my dying father. I think that is one of the parts of grief that I would love to explore a little bit, which is like, the world keeps moving while your world stops. Yeah. I mean, there's that amazing David Foster Wallace essay where he talks about like, you never know what the person standing behind you in the checkout line is going through. It was a lived experience of that line and that essay of feeling isolation. And you know, Vick Murthy, our outgoing surgeon general, bless his heart, has really made it his number one

concern that if there's a health crisis our culture is going through right now, the same position that put the warning label on cigarettes is putting the warning label on loneliness. And I think that there's lots of different transitions in life where we might feel that loneliness most acutely and being a person who's experiencing a significant loss or extreme grief in a sort of out oforder time is definitely like pretty up there So what I realized was that the it wasn't that the grief was a problem. I love my dad I was super fucking bummed that he had died like just very plainly

And the emotions that I was going through at the time felt healthy and important to honor and not to try to segue out of or forget about or deny that I was going through. So it was interesting. Quickly it became clear that it was like the isolation that I felt or the stigma around death and grief that was the problem, not the grief itself, which is what got me so like hot and bothered to hang out with other people who are in my same age range and be like, are you, do you, is this weird for you too? Is this sucking more than it probably should be for you? And what do we do now? That was one of the big questions that I started exploring that I ended up spending the last many years writing about in this book was like, what do you do? How do you tend to grief in a culture where many of us,

you know, might not have the religious or social scaffolding that past generations turned to tend to grief and for lots of other reasons. Well, and it sounds like too, it was a bit like, well, maybe I'm putting what I would have thought if I had that situation. Let's hear it, project on me, Tari. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I can imagine you're going, this was not part of the plan. Like I know my parents are gonna die, but they die when I'm 40. They die when I'm older. They don't die when I'm 20. They don't die when I'm seven. Like that's not part of the plan.

It was super not part of my plan. Yeah, my dad was a super healthy guy and it was caught out of the blue. And yeah, and it was not my plan. Yeah, my dad was a super healthy guy. And it was caught out of the blue. And yeah, and it was not my, you know, and I was like, signing up for my major in college. I never was like, oh, anticipating that the thing that I would spend the next 15 years focused on would be building circles of care and community support for people who's had a, you know had a significant loss in their life. But I don't know, I mean, I think about the emergency fund. We don't know what

we're going to have to use it for. But we pivot and I think in that period in my life, it was an interesting time for it to hit because I was kind of at that precipice of what will I focus on, what will my vocation be? And I'd always been a community organizer. I studied this world of sort of social entrepreneurship, which is this idea that we can actually create organizational structures that solve sticky, challenging issues. And so a lot of my work had been in,

how might we take a stigma that people are just like, well, it's just the way that it is, a status quo, and how might we create community infrastructure to jujitsu flip it, to be something different. So in many ways, when my dad got sick, I was sort of handed this big fat assignment and was so lucky that I connected with my friend, Lenin Flowers, who's my co-founder

and was our executive director for many, many years. And we were like, cool, let's see if we can create something that offers an alternative pathway for people. You had mentioned before, and I would love to talk about this, because the taboos that we face in our life, especially as women, but just culturally too, we are not talking as a society about death or grief. We're not talking about money. I think we're more likely to talk about sex, but that's still a huge taboo. So how do you see this showing up? What was your experience of not being able to bring this

conversation up or feeling the taboo or the shame around it? I think that the taboo or the shame around talking about grief and loss, I mean, it comes from a lot of different places and it has a lot of different impacts. I think about, one of my favorite rants is that there is no federally mandated bereavement leave in America. So someone can die who mattered a lot to you and you can legally be fired. Like if you, you know, your kid can die and if you're not back to work in a week, you can get fired. And that obviously doesn't always happen, but like there isn't a lot of wiggle room or grace for doing anything other than like keeping up with the hustle. our grace for doing anything other than like keeping up with the hustle. So to me, that's a signal, like a cultural value signal that like grief isn't something that should slow us down or grief isn't something that should be honored or tended to or if it is like do

it between the hours of five and nine. Don't let grief and convenience capitalism. In fucking Deet. Yeah, that's the vibe. And it's interesting, I kind of, I am starting to say things that make me feel like an old lady, which honestly I love. It's like goals. When we started this work in 2010, it was like early days of Airbnb and the sharing

economy and like early days of the idea that we would invite a stranger to your house for a potluck sounded like a little risque. Uber is getting started at that time. Yeah, exactly. It was like an interesting moment in time when we kind of rode off the energy of that, like, oh yeah, we can actually use the internet to find people, not just to like deliver us a pizza, but find people who have, you know, not just to deliver us a pizza, but find people who have,

might live four doors down from me, but we would never know that we had both had a sibling die from suicide, because that shit's not coming up. So grief impacts us in so many ways of our life. And of course it's the emotional side, but how do you see grief extending out into other areas of our lives?

If you Google image search grief, which I've done because I'm a nerd, it's all like stock images of people looking really, really sad. Yeah, it's like head and hand. And that is one of like 50,000 bajillion colors in the technicolor spectrum that is how grief impacts us. Different emotions, obviously. And to your question, how does it affect us in other ways, there's incredible research that's happened about the actual physical somatic impacts of grief that it gives us. Foggy brain, like, can mess with our sense of time, can impact our sleep positively.

I mean, maybe not positively, but we can need to sleep more. We can have insomnia. Our stomachs, our guts. Our guts. Yeah. Right? Like, our appetites, our memory. There's this awesome neuroscientist whose name is Mary Frances O'Connor, who I have a very big crush on. And she also has a book coming out this year about where grief lives in the body. She's one of the first people to take nodes and strap them on people's heads and study

what is happening inside the brain of someone who is grieving. And she's discovering amazing things that like it's actually altered, it's an altered state. And that altered state doesn't last forever, but like the part of us that can feel shame that we're not on top of it because our, you know, maybe it's in six months since our partner died, but we're still struggling. It's because we're going through like a physiological process that our body knows how to do and we have to let it rip. But we don't often have the social permission to do that beyond the like the moment at the funeral or like beyond the first month or beyond the first year. So there's like the emotional impacts, there's the physical impacts, there's the

relational impacts. I hear a lot about stories around the dinner party table about how someone's death impacts the relationship with the person that died. But almost more surprisingly, and sometimes even more powerfully, it impacts our relationships with the living. Like, you know, you might have one parent die and the other parent is grieving or struggling in their own way. Having a sibling die can severely impact a family dynamic, a partner, a child. It doesn't actually matter who, it changes the ecosystem of a group of people. And what's been powerful about the dinner party community is that it gives people a place that feels like found family, where they can kind of unpack the relational impacts of grief, not just with the person that died, but with the people that are still here. Grief and loss impacts us financially. Like,

speaking to your audience, and I'm sure we'll get into it more, but it blew my gourd that 65% of families that filed bankruptcy in America, and like it makes me want to weep that 65% of families that filed bankruptcy in America, and it makes me want to weep, 65% of families that filed bankruptcy in America file it because of a medical emergency. It's like how many of, I don't know the statistic of the subset of those that result in somebody dying and then that family moving into a period of grief, but for many families, it can be the main breadwinner that has died. And not only are you grieving the human being, but also the stability that their income provided.

Well, and you can be grieving somebody who didn't die, you grieve your lifestyle changing or, you know, if that person is dealing with an illness that they're going to be dealing with their whole life, there's grief in that too. We're just, you know, we're recording this not long after the wildfires in California. And I'm talking to my cousin whose house burned down. And we're talking about the grief of losing all of his belongings. And- KSATRA Well, and that's, that's one of my questions for you is I think, even if somebody clicked on this episode and started listening, right, we as a society equate grief with death.

And there are so many other things we can grieve. We were all grieving during the pandemic, whether that was because we had lost people close to us or because we lost the semblance of normal we had or we lost our communities or our friendships or they changed. Can we talk about the other ways that grief shows up other than just someone dying? Sure can. I think that, and from the research that I've done and the conversations that I have,

I've had the verb of grieving is the thing that we as human beings do to process impermanence. There's a lot to say about that. There's whole religions and world philosophies where like the point of life is actually coming into right relationship with the fact that we're mortal. But when we think about what is impermanent and what do we have to reckon with the impermanence of in our lifetime, it is our youth, it is our childhood friendships that have changed over time, it is a sense of something that we wished we'd always had the chance to experience, but it's not going to happen for us in this lifetime. And I think in the kind of culture of toxic positivity that we find ourselves in,

it can be hard to admit the parts of the story that are like, that hurts. Or I'm feeling this overwhelming sense of grief because something is not how I expected it to be in my life. And I think that, you know, I was kind of forced to look at this part of my life when the most literal version of it happened when a human died, but I'm blown away on like a week to week day to day basis where I'm like, oh, that's grief too.

And the more we can know how to spot it and know what it feels like in our system and know how to ride it like a wave or a bucking bronco or however it ends up moving through your system, the more skilled we get, I believe, in accepting it and letting it do its thing. And I get so annoyed by people that are like, grief is a teacher, but there's shit that we can learn from it.

And if we just ignore it, we never get that download. Well, you can hear and believe that grief is a teacher after it's happened. You don't want to hear it while it's happening. You're like, shut the fuck up. When you're sitting drinking the piña colada being like, wow, that was a real breakdown in the grocery store. But like, I'm cool now. I learned a thing or two. But in the moment, it can feel like the floor is opening up underneath you. I've talked about my own grief on the show because I had something happen in 2020, 2021

that felt just life altering for me. And it was not the death of someone, it was the ending of a relationship. And I thought I was like, quote unquote, grieving correctly. Like Lord knows I was crying on the bathroom floor. Like I was taking good care of myself. I was talking to friends. I wasn't isolating myself. And yet, and again, I've spoken about this before.

We'll link it in the show notes if you wanna listen. But I was muscling through it and I kept thinking, okay, when I get to X point, I'll be okay. Like when I can picture this person with someone else and not feel devastated, that means I'm good. Or like when in a year, we can talk again and everything's going to be fine. And so I kept putting these like, benchmarks on myself of like, the grief can be done. And you'll finally feel okay when this happens. And finally, I realized that I was like, it felt like metaphorically putting my hand on a hot stove and being like, okay, I just need to keep my hand here.

And then when it stops burning, everything will be fine. But then it stops burning because I've literally burned all of the feeling out of my fingers. And so I just woke up one day and I realized that's what I was doing, is I was torturing myself as opposed to just being like, you know what? OK, we just have to sit in it and it's going to be really uncomfortable. And I don't know how much time it's going to take. And I don't know what's going to happen because I was a planner. I wanted the timeline. I wanted on March 21st, I could wake up and I wasn't going to be grieving anymore.

When we come back from a word with our sponsors, we're diving into finding a supportive community, the gender differences and how men and women are allowed to grieve, and the financial strain of grief. We'll see you back here soon. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is that all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. You know it, I know it, we love it.

And Squarespace was the first investment I ever made in my business, and it's the investment that you should make in yours. Couple of my favorite things about Squarespace. They make it I ever made in my business, and it's the investment that you should make in yours. A couple of my favorite things about Squarespace. They make it really easy to sell your content, so you can do online courses, blogs, videos, memberships, all within Squarespace sites. You don't need another site to go sell your stuff. There's also analytics built into Squarespace's intuitive tools

so that you can review your website traffic, you can learn where to focus your time and energy, and you can also do email campaigns through Squarespace. So you also don't need an additional email campaign software, which is like yet another fee, all of it's built into Squarespace. So whether you're a brand new business owner or a freelancer, or just someone who needs

a beautiful website, who doesn't know how to code, Squarespace is where you need to go. Head on over to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch your brand new website, go to squarespace.com slash ffpod to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. As a business owner, one of the most important decisions you can make is hiring. Hiring the right people at the right time. And typically when you need to hire somebody, it's because you need them really quickly. You didn't need them today. You needed them like yesterday. And if you're hiring, you need Indeed. You can stop

struggling to get your job posting on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out fast and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a massive difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. There's no need to wait any longer. You can speed up your hiring process right now with Indeed.

And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash FFPOD. Just go to indeed.com slash FFPOD right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast Indeed comm slash FF pod terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need Talked to me about The ways someone might quote-unquote grieve incorrectly and I know there's no incorrect but like isn't there though But like some of the traps that we might get it.

Like for me again, it was like muscling through it. It was like, okay, I'm doing the grief correctly, but when this happens, then I'll be fine. Like I kept trying to see the light at the tunnel to try to get myself through it as opposed to just sitting at it. So how did that, well, can I ask, can I ask you a question? Yeah.

How did that work for you? Like, what did you, what did you learn? Oh God, what didn't I learn? For your own future reference. Oh my God. Put this in the show notes for future Tory to look back at you and be like, oh, wait. Here's the thing. Speaking of the grief as a teacher, it truly is. But if someone would have told me that in the middle of it, I'd have been like, fuck off, politely. No, I don't need

to hear that right now. And even probably the advice I was getting, which is just like, you just need to sit in it. I'm like, okay, I sat in it. What's now? Like, what's next? Like I did my sitting, what's next? No, I think the biggest thing I learned is that, well, I learned a couple of things.

One is that it's not on a timeline and my life, which has been on a timeline or is at least just like, I have some control over it. The example I gave at the time was when I was growing my business, if I wanted to be on Good Morning America, I pitched people until I got on Good Morning America. I did that. With grief, you can't just call somebody and keep calling them until you get the thing.

The thing that happened to me, I did not want to happen to me. So then I had to sit with, oh, you can't pitch your way out of this, or you can't just ask for your way out of this. So I think sitting in it's really important and also realizing that you have no control over whether you get the thing or not and at what point you feel okay again. The second thing I learned is that the feeling I had of being joyful and alive, like I have a very distinct memory of being with some friends in college at midnight or one in the morning, and we were driving down a bridge with the windows down.

It was like a Perks Beano all flower moment. And I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to be alive. Or when I'm traveling, or like, oh my God, life is so incredible, and that overwhelming feeling. I was having that same feeling, but in grief. I was so upset and so sad. And it meant I was human. It meant that I had the deep capacity to feel.

And I wrote down to ask you about this, because I'm sure you've seen the Andrew Garfield clip when he went on Stephen Colbert. Have you seen that clip? Yeah. Yeah, I want part of it stood out to you? Well, the part where he's like, grief means that, you know, it's like love showing up every day. It's like, okay, if I am grieving,

it means I cared about this thing so fucking much and that I wasn't trying to protect myself from the loss. And so that was the other thing that was like weirdly comforting is I'm feeling so deeply and it means I'm really alive. It means I am capital A alive and living the capital H human experience. And so that was something that was really helpful.

If all of the times I felt alive because I was so joyful, I can feel just as alive in my deep, deep, deep sadness and grief. That's beautiful. It has that, can have that quality of being this like mystical experience of like, oh shit, this is, this is it. Well, and it gives me some sort of meaning because that's the thing I needed was like, why is this happening? Like, I didn't expect it to hit me that hard.

I was not doing well for a long time. And I was like, how is this ever going to get better? And so one, I had to sit in it. And I just pictured like, not me trying to like move through a storm and put on like 16 rain jackets, but just sitting in it and just being like, okay, we're going to get wet. And we don't know when the storms ending, we're just going to sit here. But then also being like, wow, the rain on my skin means I'm alive. Have you seen that Drew Barrymore quote or Drew Barrymore video of her encouraging you

to go out and dance in the rain? Oh, of course, of course. Just made me think of you. Iconic. Thank you for letting me ask you about that. Cause to me, that's like the- You're welcome, of course. The big part of my ethos is like,

we are our own best experts and that it is through like fumbling our way through these moments where we're welcome, of course. A big part of my ethos is like, we are our own best experts and that it is through like fumbling our way through these moments where we're like, oh, like, oh shit, this is I'm capital A alive and I'm also capital S fucking sad. I want to go back to the like girl with her hand on the stove, cinching her fingers. That's sweet, sweet girl. There is something to be said about giving yourself intervals at which you have to face the intense milestones that are coming up.

My dad was a marathon runner. We would occasionally go for a run together. And he had this technique that he taught me that has proven really helpful in my life, which is he would be like, I'm going to run to that tree. And if I want to stop at the tree, I'm going to stop at the tree. And then you run a certain length, and then you get to to the tree and you're like, I actually feel pretty good. And there's a song coming on my iPod or whatever one used when he was alive that is actually

making me feel like I could run to the next tree. So I believe in this giving yourself intervals at which you have to handle your grief, kind of like bite-sized pieces. And for someone listening, that might be, okay, I'm just going to get through the holidays, or I'm just going to get past a death anniversary, or the first birthday of myself that I have without this person here, or the birthday that is the age they were when they died.

I've also heard the, like, scheduling grief. I've just watched that episode of Shrinking. I don't know if you watched that show. And it's like, yeah, okay, you put a sad song on, you get 15 minutes to cry. That's your designated cry time. I'm a big fan of being like, okay, but like, what's the song that you put on

and how do you know what the song is that's gonna get in there, find the chink in the armor. I just started watching Shrinking on an airplane and I need to finish it. But I think the other question around the before and after that you're describing, and I think as a fellow type A girly, I don't mean to assume that you're a type A girly, but something's giving me that vibe.

She nods. It becomes this kind of complicated, frustrating thing that you can't just like make a Google Doc and like knock it out and there's not. That's what I meant by my Good Morning America example is it's like if I wanted something I went and got it and this was the one time I couldn't control the thing. Like I couldn't really influence the outcome. Which is like the most humbling true reality of what it means to be a human being on like a tiny marble spiraling through space. I write in the book, this won't be a spoiler for people who decide they want to read it, but I write in the book about the

theory of the expansion of the universe, which might sound like a sort of stoner tangent in a book about grief, but it was something that my dad talked about a lot. He was really into like Carl Sagan. And the thing that I write about it is that we live in a ever expanding universe. Like the horizon line is only ever getting farther away at any second. So in our attempt to be like,

cool, I'm gonna just be line for the edge of the world and try to get this thing done. The horizon line is always gonna be expanding beyond our ability to get there. And the vision that came to me as I was writing this, like the visual metaphor in my mind's eye was like, okay, cool, being a renegade griever is being this like cosmic motorcycle gang that's like, cool.

There's no getting out. The horizon line, there's no end point. There's no end game. This wild, expansive, complex life we're living is actually only gonna get more wild and expansive and complex. So like, let's fucking find the people that we wanna ride with and like learn how to ride

and like cruise. And that's kind of how I approached my own relationship to grief. Like, my dad died, it was on New Year's Day, it was 15 years. And like, for sure as shit, if you'd asked me 15 years ago if I thought that I'd be like, oh, over it, I'd probably be like, yeah. And the truth is that it's a feeling I can tap into at any time. And like, I totally think about my dad every other day and talk to him in my head in like some weird way that we all figure out our own way to do. My grief is more of like a companion or more like a channel that

I can tune into and I'm only going to lose more people that I care about and places that are meaningful to me that are no longer there because of climate change or possible life paths that like the doors have closed, like the grief is only gonna grow. So the question really becomes like how do we learn to cohabitate with it knowing that we can't check it off a box. We did some research with a social scientist, shout out Laura Brady, she's a badass, and we were trying to understand what is actually happening around tables of the dinner party, this nationwide grief support community for young adults.

Like, why does this thing work? And we had all kinds of anecdotes and gut feelings about what was happening. But what was cool was that she discovered that it's not that there's like, oh, you follow a certain number of steps, like a program. And when you graduate and get like the gold star at the end, your grief is over. It works because it's all about normalization. And it's like you, Tori, telling me like, did you have that phase where you like, we're crying on the bathroom floor and then you realize like, oh,

I actually need to take my hand off the stove. And now I'm more like here. That like, that's the moment I'm like, oh shit, me too. That's what I was doing. And like, huh, cool. You want to go get a martini and talk about it some more? And here's my phone number. And let's text the next time you find yourself on the bathroom floor, because whether it's related to that person, fuck them, or the results of the election, or a future relationship, these contractions and feelings of grief are going to come back up, and the important thing becomes, like, who is your ride or die that you can send the text from on the bathroom floor?

Like, that's what I'm really interested in and curious about. Do you find that men and women experience grief differently? You know, I do, and I also feel very wary of any kind of like gender assumptions. In fact, yeah, we had we had a early, we have like so many stories from being around the dinner party table that are like, oh, that was a learning moment. And there was a one guy at the table with a bunch of women. And one of the participants was like, well, you don't know. She made some comment that was minimizing his emotions because he was a man. And he very gloriously was like, hey, my frickin' mom, my mom died.

Yes, I'm feeling this too. I'm thinking more about women having to continue taking on the load of the household, right? Or they have to continue showing up in a way for everybody else, stereotypically, right? We know that women, if you're in a heteronormative relationship, tend to do more of the household labor. So I'm thinking about those instances where it's really, really hard under capitalism for anybody to grieve, but I think it's especially difficult for women. You know, I think about, oh, how challenging it was for me to experience a significant

loss and need to tend to my grief when I was a 21 year old who had no children to care for, who had some like cheap ass rent because I was totally fine living in like a busted shared home with like a bunch of random people I found on Craigslist. It was like paradise to me. While I had had one parent die, there was no other person in my life who I was required to caretake for at the time. And it kind of gave me a little bit of, now that I think about it, the privilege of space to be able to actually be like, wait a second, maybe there's another way.

I'm like, let me start hosting these potluck dinners. And so it's been interesting because in the time where we've kind of, a lot of our programming has moved online, COVID, et cetera, it's been interesting to see the types of people that can show up now because there's not the assumption that they're going to have to get in their car and drive across town or get a babysitter or all of the many things that can be really prohibitive to people having the space and time to get the support that they need. We were talking about the financial strain that grief puts on us. So medical debt, lack of bereavement leave. How do you think grief is often mishandled or ignored with financial planning? And what can we do to be more prepared

when a loved one passes? There's so much agita that happens because someone didn't have the foresight or want to face their own mortality or had like queasiness about talking about their death or their parents' death that creates like a big old mess that is super stressful on the other side of someone's passing. And where I've landed is like, if I am a grief ally, which I aspire to slash practice being

in my life, one of the things that I can do, not only checking in with my friends who've experienced a significant loss or taking note of death anniversaries of like, okay, I know that this is a big milestone for somebody, let me check in with them. It's also like having my own shit together so that if I, you know, like get hit by a bus tomorrow, Lord, Lord, I pray that I die in a more glamorous way than that.

But if that happens, like, let me make sure that I don't make the process that my husband and family will have to go to even more complicated because like, they don't fricking know the password to my computer, which it's the same thing for all my devices. And my husband makes fun of me all the time that that's the case, so he'd be able to get in. So there's sort of a sense of like, because we live in a death denying culture, where conversations about death make people so squeamish,

we fuck it up and we don't have our ducks in a row. There's a couple of incredible organizations that really focus on this, Get Your Shit Together is one of them that comes to mind, The Conversation Project is another one that comes to mind. There's a board game that's come out in the last couple of years. It's like, let's make some cocoa and talk about this over a board game. So this cultural norm, I think, is already shifting and changing. And I wonder in 25 years or 50 years, how different the stats will be related to this. But I hear about a lot of struggle from people who are having to untangle that knot for families,

for someone who died posthumously. And it's like, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. One of the community members, and I read about her a little bit in the book, her parents died and they owned a family business. And she was an actor. And then suddenly she was like, well, I guess I'm also now like a CEO of a company that

I never really was interested in and don't really understand. And you know, I was interviewing her, asking her about Shiva, which is this gorgeous Jewish tradition of spending seven days like actually just sitting and processing what happened. And I was like, so did you like sit Shiva kind of, you know, exoticizing this idea of like the best ever grief ritual. She's like, no, I was trying to figure out how to run payroll. And like, I was trying to make sense of a really complicated business that I just inherited. So I don't know, this is, I'm sure you have soapboxed about this

yourself, but like one of the things that we can do to like, look out for people and to be an ally for folks who've experienced a loss is like have our own shit together. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. We've done multiple episodes on the show about how to prepare. And again, we'll link those down below for anybody listening. But yeah, I mean, the thing that I always think about is I never want someone who is already dealing with the grief and the loss of someone they care about dying to now also have to figure out what they wanted, where their money is, what their funeral should look like. That's just so overwhelming.

I've said this in previous episodes, but my parents have what they jokingly call the binder. And the binder has every single password and the people I need to talk to and where their accounts are and what the insurance policies are and like they've done that, that's a huge gift to me. And I think that that's one of those, you know, I'm an only child, so it will be me. And so that's one of the things that I think you can do is even just having a small little binder or a folder in a safe place, you know, so in a safe or someplace where it's going to be found that is like, here's all of the things, here's all of the account information, here's what we want, here's what we don't want.

And I have said this before, but I really want to make sure everybody listening, you need a will regardless of whether you like have a lot of stuff or not, regardless of whether you have assets, whether you're rich or not, especially if you have children, because wills are how you determine legal guardianship. So especially if you have a fraught family dynamic where you don't want your children going to a particular family member, you need to have a will in place that assigns legal guardianship or the courts will choose for you. So really important. You heard me. Get those wills in place, everybody. We actually have a really great partner we'll link in the show notes. And when we come back, we're jumping into how to build new traditions on big days like birthdays, weddings and holidays after experiencing grief. And we also talk about different grief practices from different cultures, which was my favorite part of the conversation.

So stick with us, we'll be right back. White Lotus is back. We know it's back, it's here, I'm ready for it. I love it, it's one of my favorite shows. And if you, like me, are always trying to make sure you don't miss out on the show everybody's talking about, but then you sign up for the subscription services that you forgot to cancel, Rocket Money is the place to go.

Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you. They automatically scan your bills to find opportunities to save. Rocket Money has helped over 5 million users and has saved a total of 500 million, that is half a billion, in cancelled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features. Thanks to Rocket Money, I can see all my subscriptions in one place and cancel the ones I'm not using anymore, so you save more money. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and

reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash FF pod today. That's rocketmoney.com slash FF pod. Rocketmoney.com slash FF pod. I was just up in the mountains on vacation. I went on a little Valentine's Day getaway with my partner and it was 20 degrees. It was freezing. Then literally the next day I went to Mexico for a solo vacation and it was 85 degrees

and Quince had me covered both places I'm a big fan of quince you all know this I would be talking about them even if they weren't an advertisement I had a beautiful winter coat that I bought from quince that is so warm and then I had cute little tank tops that I Also have from quince and they were fantastic. They offer a range of high quality items at prices within reach They're my new go-to they have a 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $50. And they can do this because they cut out the middleman. They work with safe, ethical, responsible factories, and they're just my favorite thing in the world.

Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince. Go to quince.com slash FF pod for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince.com slash ffpod to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash ffpod. I love this that you talk about in your book of your family reinventing holidays after your dad's death. Can you share that story,

especially like how do we honor our grief while also breaking free from expectations on those like big days, the holidays, the birthdays, the anniversaries? I, it's funny, I'm recording my audio book this week and I just recorded that chapter yesterday, so it's fresh in my brain. So one of the chapters in the book is how do we navigate big days? And it's in a section of the book that's about honoring the past. And the sort of pattern that I spotted

through spending many hours talking to many people about how they've navigated grief experiences is like there's sort of three door A, door B, door C to handle these big days. There's like the, you can do your best to recreate them. Meaning the person's not physically present, but you're still going to make the same recipe, or you're going to go to the same church service, or you're going to make the same kind of cake. Just throw out some random examples. There's the example where you can remix. Like, okay, we're gonna where you can remix. Like, okay, we're gonna pull a little bit from tradition, but we're gonna shake it up such that it doesn't hurt so bad that they're not there and the empty seat doesn't feel so

empty. And then the third option is like just fucking revolt and giving yourself permission to just not do it, to opt out. The story that I share in the book that perhaps you're referencing is one Christmas, my sibling and my cousin and I were like, let's not. And instead of sort of the listening to Christmas music and cooking a long meal and doing the things that was the tradition in my household with my father growing up. We instead were like, fuck this, we're going to Harry Potter world. We ate like fat THC gummies and just let it rip. And you know, it was actually a perfect day.

I'm inviting myself to Christmas next year. That sounds incredible. Oh my God. It was a one-off. You know, it wasn't like that. This is how we do this every year. We should probably reconsider that, but. Disneyland next year.

Let's go, me and you. Perfect. I'll buy you some Mickey ears. Oh my God. Perfect. That sounds so important. And it sounds like too, it's like making new memories with your family where, of course, the absence

is always going to be felt, but it isn't as obvious because it isn't the way you've always done it. Correct. And there's some really good resources on the Dinner Parties website for how you navigate the holidays and I think, you know, more and more... the conversations that can happen around the Thanksgiving table can be less cozy and more cringy. And, you know,

it's definitely there's help out there if you are experiencing any kind of anxiety about approaching a big day. But I really see them now as almost like an invitation to be creative and have, you know, yes, I can't control this, but there are places within this experience where I find agency. And one of them is like, okay, am I opting into a holiday the way my family's always done it? Or am I going to try something completely different and are Tori and I going to eat gum? Is it Disneyland? Join us there. What if there is some resistance from other family members? Because I could see maybe a family member who is more traditional going,

no, like, this is how we honor this person. Like how do you navigate that? I mean, these are so the moments of like the work, the work of grief in your life ongoing becomes tending to relationships with the living, with this backdrop of the context of someone having died. I feel like it's a give and take, you know, I think we live in a cultural story right now

that's like so much about give and take. I think we live in a cultural story right now that's so much about boundaries and taking care of yourself. And sometimes I'm like, I don't fucking wanna do that, but I really love my fill in the blank person. I'm like, okay, fine. And the joy that I get is from making sure that they're getting their needs met

because I know that they have my back too. So I think it's a give and take. And, you know, we can, we can go to Disneyland on December 26th, you know, it's like, get that itch scratched, but I don't think that we have to do it. I don't think it's like a zero sum game. It's either like we show up for our people who need something different than us, or get our needs met. Like, let's find a way to be able to take care of each other. You mentioned Shiva as this great, like, grieving process, this beautiful experience. Are there others that you love?

I love so many. It's been, you know, I'm like armchair anthropologist over here, zero credentials, but I find myself, like, Googling crazy, like like funerary art from around the world. And I'm like, what people would make this insane jewelry just so that someone could get buried in it, like kind of goth, but like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider goth. Just, you know, I think about like, you go to the Met, for example, and you can walk through that museum and look at it through the lens of how have cultures over time conceptualized, made art

about related to death. And it's like, the stories just like leap off of the walls. In ancient Egypt, there were in the catacombs, which was where they would bury dead people. Adjacent to those rooms were rooms exclusively to have like big raucous dinner parties for the living. So that part of like burying someone was feasting to their life. I'm not like trying to put like a, you know,

restaurant in the graveyard so much, but I don't know, it's like interesting to look back across the wide span of human history and just like get some ideas about how humans have faced death in other moments in time. This is like an obvious example, but it's just so fucking cool. Day of the Dead and a lot of essential American and Mexican traditions around grief and loss is so beautiful. My sister-in-law is from Mexico City and she and my brother every year make an altar for everybody, all the homies who are no longer physically present,

grandparents, aunts, et cetera. And my niece who's a toddler but is starting to become a real person with a personality and cracking jokes and being cool and stuff. It's like a part of her year is to see pictures of her grandparents and of her great grandparents and to say their name and to... She like, you know, tottles around the house carrying her cool skeleton dolls. And I'm so stoked for her because it's like she won't grow up with death being this sort of like thing purely seen as being macabre, but it's a portal into her history and like who she is and who these people are who came before her that are literally in her DNA. And I'm stoked on that. I'm sitting here as a white person who I think like many white people are not often in touch

with their culture. And most of the incredible stories or the traditions that I hear around death are, yeah, Latin cultures, Hispanic cultures, are Asian cultures, are like, I'm like, I guess in Ireland and Scotland, there's like peening and wailing, but I'm like, I, I don't have any sort of cultural ritual around death. And I'm kind of jealous of everybody else's. I don't know. I just, I can imagine that other people listening

who don't have those are going, well, that sounds really nice. Can we adopt them? Is that cultural appropriation? I don't know. I don't know my question, but I was just like, those sound really healing and really lovely. And like, fuck, my family does not have those. My no, that's not a thing. We go to the we go to a Catholic funeral. And we then people get

embalmed, which is like, I guess the weirdest tradition for me in the entire world. Like I just my dad's side of the family is very Catholic. and they live in the East Coast. And like, I have seen so many of my family dead and balmed. And it's the weirdest fucking thing in the entire world. So like, I don't know. I don't know my question, but these just sound really nice. I'm listen, I think it's an important question, which is like in late state colonialism, like the spiritual orphans of the result of colonizers and colonization. A, this sort of rising spiritual, not religious, I don't have a faith tradition to turn to. My dad was also Catholic, East Coast Catholic, and he was like later after being abused in the Catholic

church in Brooklyn growing up. He kind of like thrown the baby out with the bath water. And I remember going to my grandmother's Catholic funeral. She died a few months after my dad died being like, what? Like, this is, this is, this doesn't feel like comforting. And I've really sat with this question of like, oh, let me like, you know, flip through Google and find all of these interesting customs that are oftentimes like the deep, incredible practices of oppressed people.

Oh, I remember I was in Hawaii. And I was just on a beach, you know, I'm in a bikini on a beach. And next to me at the sunset is this group of people who are sending lays into the wall. I'm going to cry even thinking about it. It was like the most beautiful. They all got in, you know, fully clothed and they sent lays out and I was just like, oh, that's how I want to go. I was like, that is so beautiful. And like everyone was like, they were like playing, you know, music and it was just so lovely. And I was like, I don't have that, but you're right. It's usually the cultures of oppressed people. Yeah.

And that's why for me, the deeper that I get into this work, I'm like, oh, creating space for people to grieve in the way that is culturally resonant for them is a radical act. Totally. It's like we got to, like these customs and practices are at risk of going extinct. And more importantly, like the people and the cultures that have cultivated this ritual technology are at risk of going extinct and like it's not okay. So it's been definitely, you know, I think like all roads lead to how do we fight white supremacy. It's like this work is also one of those pathways in and has been for me.

And I reckon with it in my book and different places and in my own life, all the goddamn time. I think my like, and you're not asking me for your advice, but my like... I am where I would encourage you to point is like each of us has in our own lineage a pathway back to an Indigenous self that or an Indigenous ancestor that had a native way to Tend to grief and I know you mentioned Keening. I ended up asking myself that same question. I feel like we're cut from similar cloth I'm like Irish Spanish Catholic, Catholic, European, Mutt person. And I did some research on Keening and kind of a revival

that's happening in Ireland now around Keening as not just being this kind of like weird folkloric thing that people used to do, but a fucking intense, powerful, somatic act to get it moving. And there's some great research being done about it and recordings and archives that you can still listen to. And I'd be curious for you to listen to it and see if it does anything for you.

And then I think the other side of the coin is like, yes, let's trace the breadcrumbs of our ancestors and figure out if there's anything that has resonance for us in that. And then the other thing is like, how do we continually fight for the liberation of people to be able to worship and practice and grieve in the way that is true to them? And I talk about in the book, a wiping of the tears ceremony, which is this exquisite Lakota ceremony that was made illegal, was it Lakota ceremony that was made illegal, forbidden, like, I don't know what the penalty was,

but for many decades in the 20th century. And it's no longer technically illegal, but there's a whole revival effort to try to bring back this really beautiful indigenous to the plains area protocol that I've gotten the chance to be a part of. And it's so awesome and beautiful and makes so much sense. And I'm like, this is the thing that I'm longing for. And I'm not saying that I'm hoping to participate

in a wiping of the tears or that that's everyone should buy a wiping of the tears kit online or, you know, all of the shitty things that capitalism does when we discover something that's useful, developed by an indigenous community and then try to like steal it and sell it back to everybody. Well, and that's what I mean is like, I would love to participate and also that feels wrong. So yeah, but I think we've lost so much of the beautiful process of grieving and in a collective because of capitalism or assimilation or whatever word, it's a white supremacy,

right? And yeah, I'm just, again, I don't have any answer, but I'm just like, oh man, these sound nice. And I don't have that tool in my tool belt. And I think a lot of white people don't. I will say that in the book, it's basically designed around a couple dozen, two dozen chapters that each double click on some kind of care practice that draws from a bunch of different, like these sort of things that humans have historically gone to over time, whether it's building an altar,

which is obviously made, you know, is most popularized perhaps from Day of the Dead, but it's not exclusively alter building is something that humans have done since forever in most places. And, you know, there are, I think there are some, I think it's important that we walk with like a lot of deference and respect and be really educated within ourselves of like, when something is appropriative and when we are overstepping and that's like work that we all need to be doing

all the time. And I don't think that means that we should sit on our hands and just like let our grief fester when the idea of having a feast or building an altar or writing a letter or singing a song or any of the things that aren't owned by any culture but are just like how humans have processed an experience like that. Like these are available to all of us.

Thank you for going there with me. I wasn't expecting to do that, but. Listen, I'm happy. And it's like, it's a, I'm 1000% a work in progress around this question too. And it's, I'm, I'm happy to, we need to talk about it. And I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah. Well, and for me and my family, again, I think my parents want a Catholic funeral. That is probably not what I want. And so I don't have any precedent of what I'm, quote unquote, supposed to do or supposed to want. So yeah, it's just really interesting.

Have you talked to them about it or would you ever talk to them about it? I mean, I am almost 100% sure my dad would want a Catholic funeral. And I guess we've never explicitly said, hey, what kind of funeral do you want? But I imagine it's in the binder. So, I mean, that's my fear. Per the binder. That per the binder, exactly. Per 20, page 26 of the binder. No, I'm going to be phone calling after this. So there we go. When we come back, we're finishing up our convo with Carla by talking about what we can do to support the ones we care about through their grief.

We appreciate you sticking around for the ads. They allow us to continue making the show for free. We'll see you back here soon. What does the future hold for business? Well, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. See what I did there? And until somebody invents a crystal ball and they really need to hurry up and figure that one out, you got to figure it out for yourself. You got to interpret what the future holds for every single part of your business. But until then, NetSuite is here.

Over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, all into one fluid platform. So when you're closing books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. NetSuite is one of those perfect products, especially for the larger businesses that continue to grow.

And when I get to that point in my business, that's who I'm using. I'm using NetSuite. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash ffpod. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash ffpod, netsuite.com slash ffpod. Nine out of 10 businesses are likely to recommend Gusto and I am part of those nine. We are big fans of Gusto at her first 100k both on the user side, the employee side, the contractor side, but also on the business owner side. Gusto is an easy online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR and it puts the joy back into

running your business because we all know we hate payroll and benefits in HR if you're a business owner. They have simple time tracking, time off requests and more and access to small group health insurance options for nearly any budget. They offer flexible benefits, simple onboarding and more. They'll even tell you how much your paycheck is worth in bananas. I don't know why that's my favorite thing,

but if you want to take your thousand dollar paycheck and go buy bananas, it'll tell you how many bananas you can buy. Gusto is trusted by more than 300,000 businesses, including her first 100K. And if you want all of this and more with no hidden fees, you can try it out for three months free at gusto.com slash FF pod. That's gusto.com slash FF pod. Ok, my last question for you. I can talk to you as always with the guest for another six hours. Ok, if someone's moving through grief or if you or yourself are moving through grief, how can you support yourself? How can you support other people without any sort of timeline or judgment or expectation?

So starting with how to support other people, there's a story someone told me once that I will never forget. And it's my friend Hannah was driving to the movies with a friend of hers and Hannah's dad had died and her friend was like, so your dad died. How's that going for you? And friend was like, so your dad died, how's that going for you? And Hannah was like, what? Oh, and was able to respond in a way that was like not comforting the friend or it wasn't, you know,

like there was no assumption or projection in the question. It was just like, how is this going for you? And I think about it because we get so sweaty about, okay, but do I say it this way or do I intone my voice in that way? Like, so worried about the, like, what is the right thing to say or I'm gonna fuck it up that we, uh, don't say anything.

And what I love about the just, like, straight shootin' question that Hannah got asked was like, oh, like, we can make this not, I mean, it is a big deal, but we can ask it in a way that doesn't have to take so much pressure or energy. So like checking in with people, how is this going for you? And not like I do this. And maybe this is like to the type A peeps listening. I know that you're like, put a money date on your calendar and like put a reminder

to yourself that like If someone's gone through a lost experience whether somebody died or it was a breakup or their house burnt down It's crazy that I can use that as an example right now and it's like not a rare rare occurrence Remind yourself that like it's not all over and done after the first month frankly Not after the first year like what is it? What kind of systems do you need to put in place for yourself so that you can be an ally and a support for them in the long term? So those are a couple of things. You can also ask them, like, you know, offer some specific ways

that you can show up and then don't be offended if, like, they don't follow up or they don't accept the help. It's not about you. Also, I'll just say Venmo. Venmo people money. They always need money. This is what I did. I had a friend of a friend. I don't even know her that well. Her house burned down. I was like, what's your Venmo? And I sent her money because I'm like, she needs to have food tonight and maybe needs a hotel to stay at. Like, no one's ever going to be like, wow, I couldn't use an additional 200 bucks. Like, so that's my other, that's my thing is if you are financially able,

even if it's just like, hey, what's your address? I'm going to door-dash you dinner tonight. Like, that's just really, really helpful. Because I think a lot of times, and I have learned this when you go, how can I help? They can't come up with how you can help right now. Because that is, then they have to assign you a task. So it's just like, hey, I'm buying you dinner. If that sounds good, are you allergic to anything? What's your address?

Or, hey, what's your Venmo? I'm just gonna send you money. Because that takes the, oh, I don't wanna be too much. I don't wanna ask for anything. I don't even know what I need. That takes that out of the equation. I get questions often from people, the techs. It's like, oh, what do I do?

And I'm like, well, who is it? Like, what are they like? And do they have kids that need babysitting? Do they drink wine? Do they have a house that needs cleaning? Yeah, exactly. Are they, is there somebody that they take care of, like an elder parent that like,

actually you could help them by helping somebody else, like scan the landscape of someone's life and figure out where you can kind of like, you know, insert the acupuncture needle that's going to release a little bit of stress for them. Right. Can I pick their kids up from soccer practice? Can I take them to their appointment? Yep.

So that's like, how do we show up for other people? And I think for ourselves, I don't know, so much of the stress I think I've experienced and I hear other people experience who've gone through a loss experience is fear that they're doing it wrong, that they're like, it's taking too long, that they have to hide it because it's shameful. It's like giving yourself permission to be exactly where you are, even if where that place is is like hot mess, or maybe that place is like sort of numb

and you feel bad because like you should be more sad. There's some really interesting research that came out of Columbia that studied, it was one of the first studies that happened that, that studied people pre and post, like before they'd experienced a loss and after they'd experienced a loss. And I don't remember the stats on the top of my head, but the kind of storyline was that actually a lot of people were, grief impacted them less dramatically than they thought it might. And they were kind of like, I don't know, I went back to

work in two weeks and like, is there something wrong with me that I'm actually functional? And the answer is like, no, we can anticipate that we should be responding in one way and our actual response in the real moment is another and we can make that wrong in some way. So there's that, there's the normalization and then the other two things of like, how do you care for yourself? And I loved in your book, you talk about like self care that is just like sort of soothing in the moment. And like, how do you actually what is like a long term

thing that you can do that's not just like putting a bath bomb? Yep, exactly. It's two things. One is finding your people, like finding the people with whom you can be open and honest about where you're where you are in your grief so that the vulnerability, you have a place to go to be vulnerable where you're not isolating. And that can be at the dinnerparty.org table. It might be a completely different local support group in your area. It might be like friends at the gym. It might be friends from high school. Like it doesn't matter who it is. It's people that you can actually answer the question, but like how is it going honestly to?

And then the other thing is this idea of practices. Like cool, grief is a verb. We grieve. How are you going to do the thing that is grieving? What are the tools that you can turn to and the rituals that you can borrow from your grandparents or invent because it kind of feels good to you that allow you to take the grief out from the closet and put it on the table in front of you

and tend to it and talk to it and be in relationship to it so that it doesn't come bursting out at the seams. So it's all about normalizing what you're going through. It's about finding people who get it, who have your back and you have theirs. And it's all about practices and rituals to allow yourself to move through it. One, two, three, there's a checklist for you. Thank you for your work.

Thank you for this focus of grieving and community because I think it's just so important. Plug away, my friend, the book. Where can people find it? Dinner party. Plug away. Bang, bang, boom. OK.

My website personally is carlafernandez.co. You can find out more about the work that I do with the dinner party and the other community strategy that I do with clients, mostly foundations. Lots of information there to check out. On my website, you can pre- of information there to check out. On my website, you can pre-order Renegade Grief. It comes out on March 11th. I'm not sure when this will air in the end,

but sometime around then, I assume. Pre-order the book. If you pre-order it and you drop us your email, we're creating a bunch of additional resources to go along with it, sort of a week-to-week companion guide to not just read about these practices, but reflect on them and research them and go deeper on them in your own life. So make sure you sign up for that because it's really juicy.

There's a lot of good stuff in there. And if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm ready to find the circle of people with whom I can be my realest self in my grief, come to thedinnerparty.org. You can sign up there for a table. You can host a table. We're always looking for more people to open tables as hosts. Your table can be in person, in your home. It can be online.

Your table can be specific to an affinity that you identify with, whether it's related to your loss type. Like, I only want to meet with people who've experienced both parent loss or sibling loss or loss to suicide. You might come to us and say, I really want to meet with people who are also BIPOC or who are also LGBTQ, and you can create a table specifically for that identity. And the caveat is that our age range is people in their sort of 20s to mid to late 40s, 20 to 45 is the range we have. The age stipulation for us is related to the fact that we find it's really important that people are gathering with folks in similar life phases as them.

And when whoever is listening to this podcast and wants to like give us a humongous grant, we will expand the age range. But for now, we're 20 to 45. If you're outside of that age range, if you're looking for resources for kids or you are in your finer years, I'm about to be 45 in 15 minutes probably, so I'm almost there. But we have other resources on our website for anyone that's grieving of any age. So the final, final plug, and I just kind of teased this as the dinner parties of 501 C3. We're a nonprofit.

We are always looking for financial resources so that we can pay our staff so they can continue doing this very important work of training hosts, matching people to tables, developing resources, allowing for this community to continue growing in a way that's really strong and considered and thoughtful. And I'll shout out Mary Pauline Diaz Frassin is our executive director and is an incredible human and someone that I recommend rallying behind. I think that's, those are the plugs I will leave you all with today. Carla, thank you for being here. Thank you, Tori. I love your podcast and I'm so glad that you exist in the world.

Right back at you. Thank you. Thank you so much to Carla for joining us on this really powerful episode. You can get her brand new book, Renegade Grief, wherever you get your books. We appreciate you supporting local independent bookstores, but if you want to buy through Amazon, you can do that. Thank you so much as always for being here, Financial Feminist. We hope you have a kickass week and we'll see you back here very, very soon. Bye. Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100k podcast.

Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant, research by Sarah Shortino, audio and video engineering by Alyssa Medcalf. Marketing and operations by Carina Patel and Amanda Lafue. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K. Kaylyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmakeva, Taylor Chil, Sasha Bonar, Ray Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Karonen, Darrell Ann Ingman, and Megan Walker.

Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolf, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100k community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100k, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you're confused about your personal finances and you're wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com slash quiz for a free personalized money plan.