Lessons Learned in Walking Our Grief with Young Adults
At the Wealth and Work Futures Lab’s Media Design Fellowship Program, we have been very intentional about developing knowledge and awareness on how grief impacts people, particularly young people, in Philadelphia.
In our weekly Friday wellness sessions, the Design Fellows have developed the ability to recognize and respond to grief in ways that have facilitated their art, design and engagement skills. The lessons below illuminate the generative nature of our relational and contextual work at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab.
Lesson 1: The way to navigate the healing power of grief in the city is not above, over, or under young people. It is only with them.
This does not always mean we are in the room together, but that we co-create and design space(s) in our practice, policy, and research that are informed by the power and urgency of every stage of human development. While there has been an increasing focus on grief care for children and families, young people, upon turning 18, are often left on their own to navigate death and non-death-related losses that are common for 18-25-year-olds. Losses that are often exacerbated by unattended grief.
Lesson 2: Young people are willing to lean into the complexity and uncertainty of grief to explore ways of increasing their own knowledge and skills as they grow into adulthood.
It is common for humans to move through life with grief reactions buried deep within their emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual selves. However, when young people are given consistent support and the opportunity to explore their own perceptions, thoughts, and ideas about grief, what may initially be perceived as risk often becomes discovery. Their expressions manifest artistically, intellectually, relationally, and spiritually,opening pathways not only for their peers, but also for the adults who support them in increasing awareness and advocacy.
In and outside of the cascading overwhelm, they can see all of the Philly’s from up north to the down south and beyond. To Flint, to Gaza, to the Congo, to Atladena, to Ferguson, to Breonna, to Walter Williams, and to all the ones with wounds who go unnamed in the systems services provided by bright lights. As hard as this vision may be, they most often are bathed and simultaneously pledged with this knowing as their identities are being carved and navigated.
Lesson 3: Grief work is work.
We should never underestimate the energetic force that grief carries into our places of work, living, and play. Young people are often disregarded, discarded, or discouraged when navigating the arduous combination of emotional and intellectual labor. These dismissals are often entangled with adults’ attempts at control; an inability to sit with the intensity of emerging thought, and, often, our own lack of having done the work ourselves.
This work — for both youth and adults — involves simply noticing the self in relationship to others, recognizing how systems shape all of our development, and genuinely leaning into conscious grief. Spending time with body, mind, and spirit awareness takes time, effort, and acuity. It requires attention to the needs of the self, others, and the broader community. Courage and tenacity, combined with curiosity, anxiety, fear, sadness, and questioning are arts in themselves, serving as doorways to change.
Lesson 4: The change process yields joy.
One key to building a foundation for grief care and literacy is to create the widest possible portal. A net that welcomes the full range of human feelings and deep understandings, which, in turn, allows joy to emerge. Institutions and individuals in popular culture often prioritize happiness while simultaneously suppressing grief. These demands and expectations around how people "should" feel or think often result in suffering and the suffocation of our full emotional range.
Young people often respond to this dilemma with a mix of creativity, resignation, resistance, and rebellion. When we recognize that change is a fundamental part of existence, and lean into that knowing, we create a synergistic space that invites openings to a transformative ease of body and mind. This does not remove the grief and trauma reactions, but makes more room to inhabit the physical body and the fullness of life-affirming energy around it.
Lesson 5: This particular moment in history has presented young people with unique grief and loss challenges.
Some of the losses young people have identified include:
Loss of history
Loss of reproductive freedom
Loss of legal protections
Loss of affordable living
Loss of access to career-building work
Loss of language
Loss of early childhood
COVID-related losses
Loss of physical location
Loss of educational options
Loss of the transmission of resources from grandparents and parents
Loss of pathways from family to community care
Lesson 6: The circle is the remedy and the answer.
As we have gathered over time, I have observed a convergence of awareness, practice, risk-taking, and co-regulation. When we ask young people to reflect on their individual physical bodies, their political bodies, and our collective bodies — and to bring that data back into the circle — we witness their stress and concern. Yet, trust increases as a sign of our interconnectedness, collective strength, and cultural resilience.
The circle brings order while human-made systems clash with the natural world. Grief is increasingly tied to justice, liberation, and the creative tools we use to pursue both. When you die sooner and more often in the physical realm while your material circumstances shrink, there is washing that occurs that tumbles young peoples’ lives in a circle. As the cyclone moves, the circle and the sun arise, and the heat of that cycle begins to surface in justified rage and passion, spinning forward in choices. These choices include either spinning out of care or spinning into creating safer circles where they can see and be seen.
Lesson 7: Young people are clear about our ties to the Ancestors and how we can look closer to see through our physical disconnections to discover our ongoing spiritual connections.
Oftentimes the remembrances surface through acts of making visual art like media, poetry, essays, conversations, sitting still in quiet practices of contemplation, and listening to each other and to the self. The influx of ideations that seem distant and apart from their hearts and minds drift in like utterances of that “they” and “we” that we have been longing to feel and hear above the clamor of always doing and performing.
The repairing of soul and spirit is at hand…
The rebirth of our people is in the waters of our connections…
The re-energizing spins around every opportunity for change…
Together, we remember the cradle of love that builds our protection in the future, past and present.
Learn more about the Wealth and Work Future’s Lab Media Fellowship Program here.
Kevin Carter is a Senior Practice and Research Fellow at Drexel University’s Wealth and Work Futures’ Lab and the Director of Wellness at the Lab’s Media Design Fellowship.