Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss, by Carla Fernandez
I found this book to be incredibly helpful in my own grief - I lost my husband of 18+ years (and friend of 45 years) in August 2024 - by validating some of the things I had been intuitively doing since his death.
Author Carla Fernandez, who lost her dad to brain cancer when she was 21, is a cofounder of The Dinner Party, "a peer-led community of 21-45 year-olds who have each experienced significant loss." While I'm out of the range of the target audience of that organization, I found many of the suggestions in Renegade Grief to be meaningful for me.
Grief is renegade in this book because our current culture minimizes grief. We're expected to get over a death and move on. This book describes about two dozen grief care practices that help the griever honor the past, be in the present moment, and create the future.
Practices honoring the memory of your deceased person and the history you shared include gathering with others to share food (and experiences), making or locating a place (an altar of sorts) where you can find your person, expressing your grief story in the way that's best for you (for me it's journaling and blogging), using objects of theirs to honor the past, letting go of other things with dramatic flare (which can sometimes mean destroying stuff), grief quests (often travel), and handling holidays and other big days through re-creation, remixing, or revolt.
As an example, on making/locating an altar where you can find your person - I have more than one (and that's okay). Nearly-identical photos of my late spouse and I together - taken 42 years apart - surround a cap he used to wear when sailing, that has a "Corpus Christi" patch I crookedly sewed on it, also about 42 years ago.
Additionally, I feel drawn to long walks next to the nearby lake, because I feel he's in the water and the sunshine.
In contrast, his ashes have been sitting in a box on the table next to his side of our bed for almost seven months now - and it feels right to release them in Corpus Christi Bay next month, because he's never been in that box for me - it's not an altar. But I think I needed that time to figure that out for myself. Had I released his ashes any sooner, I might have always wondered if I should have kept them longer.
Practices that can help one be more in the present moment include escape (such as through role-playing games or superhero comics), crying, tending to your pain (sometimes through pleasure), meditating and breathing, dreaming (day or night), caring for a pet, even experimenting (with experts) with mind-altering substances, or doing absolutely nothing (resting).
Practices aimed at your future include creating your sense of home/sanctuary, caring for others (sometimes as a grief ally, sometimes by preparing for your own death), exploring spirituality (not necessarily religion), celebrating, but proceeding with caution.
Fernandez emphasizes that all these suggestions are not one-size-fits-all. For example, I'm not into role-playing games or superhero comics, but I'd consider trying mind-altering mushrooms - especially since my brother-in-law is an expert, degreed mycologist.
The book is well-researched and includes extensive endnotes, and Fernandez has an 88-page companion workbook and a two-pager of discussion questions that can be accessed through her website.
I can't recommend this book enough - five stars. I'm passing my LibraryThing Early Reviewers advance reader copy to a young grieving friend, and buying another copy of the book for myself.
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