Renegade Grief

From grief quests to altar-making, to dinner parties to Dungeons & Dragons, Renegade Grief is a profound and vulnerable exploration of care practices and rituals that empower grievers in a culture that expects us to simply ＂give it time.＂

So, you’ve lost someone. At first, there is an outpour of support and phone calls and care packages. But after the services are done and the phone stops ringing, there is a quiet in the air and an expectation to get on with your life as previously planned. The problem is that death has a way of making all plans go out the window. Renegade Grief offers the support in this next stage of grieving--when you feel isolated in your loss and are figuring out how to navigate it.

Shaped by her own experience with the death of her father and her time cofounding The Dinner Party, a leading peer-support organization for people who’ve experienced a major loss, Carla Fernandez pushes back on the death-denying culture we live in. For too long, grief has been treated as something pitiable, simply sad, to be gotten over as soon as possible. But after fifteen years of being in a community with fellow grievers, Carla has witnessed a different side of the story. Grieving a significant loss is hardcore, hardly something to be swept under the rug, but an experience to be held with respect, a creative spirit, and with friends. Through inspiring stories of real grievers, patterns from across history, and fresh science, Renegade Grief enlivens you with the permission and possibility to explore your grief in your own unique way and reminds you that you’re not alone in doing it.

Renegade Grief is an indispensable resource for people at any stage of the grieving process and with Carla’s candid and compassionate guidance, you learn that life after loss isn’t about the futile attempt of arriving at some other side. Rather, it’s about building your community, adjusting to change, and finding the way for your grief to become a pathway into your own version of a soulful life.

Carla Fernandez is an impact strategist, community designer, and facilitator. She’s cofounder of The Dinner Party, a nation-wide nonprofit connecting young adult grievers to a caring and supportive community of peers, transforming our most isolating experiences into a source of long-lasting companionship, personal meaning-making, and culture change. Her work with The Dinner Party has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, and OnBeing. She was named one of LA Weekly’s most interesting people of Los Angeles and was featured in Oprah Daily as a woman who ＂saw a need and rose to the occasion.＂ In addition to her role with The Dinner Party, Carla leads True Love Studio, where she helps leading organizations care for the parts of the world they truly love, with a focus on a functioning democracy, a healthy environment, and the arts. Carla is a senior fellow with the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications Innovation Lab, and a fellow with the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship out of New York University. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley, New York, and Joshua Tree, California, with her husband, Ivan Cash, and their dog, Biscotti.