In 2024, while leaving my birthday party, my sweet friend Vlora was killed in a motorcycle accident. I’d always had a severe aversion to people who ride motorcycles for this very reason. Growing up in Arizona, where state law does not require helmets for those over age 18, I’ve seen some motorcycle accidents that still haunt me to this day. But who could say no to a friend like Vlora? Not me. Vlora was 10 years younger than me and loved life more than anyone I knew.
They weren’t the first friend I lost. In 2015, while I was in Costa Rica, my friend and former climbing partner, Mark, committed suicide. As I made the long, morose trek back home to Arizona, I sobbed in every form of transportation along the way. Curious and worried locals inquired, but with my limited Spanish, all I could say was, mi amigo es muerto. My friend is dead. I was so grief-stricken, in fact, that I didn’t immediately realize I had also contracted chikungunya, a tropical mosquito-borne disease whose primary symptoms include “severe malaise.” What is “severe malaise” to grief, anyway?
I moved to Seattle the following year, still deep in my grief. It isolated me.
Mark and Vlora’s deaths were radically different. Mark withstood a series of never-ending struggles, and it was hard to imagine a future where any of his circumstances would improve. Even after multiple suicide attempts, Mark’s healthcare repeatedly denied further treatment options to save his life. I felt rage toward the systems that failed him, but there was also some small sense of peace that came from knowing he was no longer suffering. I was proud of him for making it as long as he did—he hadn’t been staying alive for himself.
Vlora adored life. An average day for them included things like skateboarding, juggling, reading about activism, teaching themselves Arabic, making friends of strangers, camping under the stars, adventuring with friends, and walking a regular gaggle of dogs for their adoring owners. Vlora was vibrant, energetic, talented, and gushing with potential.
I found community, ritual, compassion, and understanding while wading through grief.
Losing Vlora meant losing all of the future they should have been promised. And it nearly destroyed me. No one teaches us how to grieve. It’s been two years since their accident, and some days I still can’t get out of bed. Grief continues to make me sick. But I know that’s normal now. I’ve actually learned a lot about grief this time around.
Community, ritual, connection to nature, compassion, understanding—I have found all these things while wading through my grief in Seattle. There is an inherent avoidance in mainstream culture when it comes to witnessing death. We keep it at an arm’s length, not spending time with decedents’ bodies. Most of us don’t create rituals and altars. We’re discouraged from taking bereavement time, and we lack the language to openly talk about death and grief. Instead we embalm bodies, put them in impenetrable coffins, separated from nature and public view. We lean on practices that are quiet, restrained, and profoundly misaligned with the realities of death and grief.
But in the past two years, I’ve met many grief and death workers in Seattle who are changing and challenging the white, colonial narrative of loss.
I was fortunate to have found a grief group in West Seattle, just weeks after Vlora’s death, hosting a grief walk in nature.
In my stunned silence, I joined a group of fellow grievers through Schmitz Preserve, led by Tamara Kubacki of Listening to Grief. I began attending her weekly grief groups after that, and she helped plug me into resources I would have never found alone.
It was a lifeline, thrown by someone who knew how disorienting and overwhelming the world becomes after loss. Since then, I’ve attended grief groups, wailing rituals, and guided walks in nature, planted and grown a grief garden, shared stories, and built a little community in the shadow of heavy, heavy loss.
Here, you’ll find some of the lifelines in this city: Kubacki of Listening to Grief; Derek Dizon, founder of A Resting Place, a nonprofit that creates physical space for nonwhite grief; M Abeo, who created a portrait series called “Faces of Fortitude,” documenting the friends and families of suicide victims; Katrina Spade, a pioneer in human composting; and Lashanna Williams, who founded A Place to Die, where people can travel from out of state to Die with Dignity.
Derek Dizon
Founder of A Resting Place
Upon walking into A Resting Place, I was viscerally overwhelmed. Derek Dizon, founder of the nonprofit, immediately clocked my reaction and encouraged me to walk around and “take it all in” before we spoke. It’s a humbling, sacred space. It felt like both unmitigated love and incomprehensible loss. My eyes welled up, I put down my camera bag, and explored the space in silence.
Softly lit altars stood against one wall, adorned in photographs, flowers, candles, incense, and other meaningful gifts. Next to that were small stacks of beautiful art prints by Dizon. There’s a wall of handwritten letters to the dead, written in many languages, that have been clipped to string and hung like prayer flags. There was even a place to sit down and write your own. Along the other wall stood a grief library, a tea station, incense to offer prayers, and printed resources to take with you.
From a shared storefront in the middle of the Chinatown–International District, weekends here are open for grief. A Resting Place centers Asian American, Black and Brown, Immigrant, and other non-white communities in grief, and acknowledges the shared grief across cultures, languages, art, and community. This includes racism, systemic state violence and oppression, suppression of culture, and other detrimental realities.
Dizon’s entry to grief was early and personal. In 1995, his mother, Phoebe Dizon, and her friend were volunteering as advocates, interpreters, and guides to support Susana Remerata Blackwell, who was pregnant going through a grizzly divorce after years of abuse. All three women were Filipina, and the white husband she was trying to leave came to the courthouse and shot and killed all three of them, and Remerata’s unborn child.
This tragedy deeply affected the community. It was also a cornerstone in the creation of API Chiya, a nonprofit that supports domestic abuse survivors, cultural healing, educating, and building accountable communities within the South Asian, Asian, Pacific Islander, and immigrant populace.
Dizon lost his mother in a courthouse shooting in 1995. The incident shook the community (above), and inspired the creation of API Chiya, a nonprofit that supports domestic abuse survivors. Now, he runs A Resting Place (below), a space for non-white grief.
M Abeo
Creator of Faces of Fortitude
After the suicide of their brother, M Abeo’s life was never the same.
While working through their grief, Abeo began an art project in which they interviewed and photographed family members and friends of their brother. There’s a specific pain and stigma that comes with grieving a loss by suicide, and so few resources to navigate them. The project gave them a safe place to explore it.
Abeo continued to expand this project into Faces of Fortitude, a portrait and interview series focused on friends and family members of suicide victims, first responders to suicides and attempts, and survivors of suicide attempts. Abeo gives a voice and a face to the people who dare to speak of the suffering surrounding this kind of death. “We all need to be seen by somebody,” Abeo says, “somebody that can mutually understand through their own experience.”
All of their photos are taken in black and white—a thoughtful choice on M’s part. “I don’t want you focusing on somebody getting a red nose when they cry or somebody’s rosacea or the color of their tattoos, or their hair—none of that matters. We are talking about their emotions.” Abeo continues to exhibit their Faces of Fortitude show around Seattle.
Due to the chasmic gap in suicide-related care, M has also launched a group for suicide-specific grief, co-led by Lashanna Williams of A Sacred Passing. This group meets virtually, once per month, and is free to attend. Additionally, Abeo is a suicide caregiver, death worker, author, podcaster, and public speaker. Their commitment and conviction in life to providing community care and a greater understanding around suicide is inextricable. Like all the best people, M continues creating the very resources they once desperately needed.
Tamara Kubacki
Founder of Listening to Grief
Death, divorce, suicide, politics, pet loss, traumatic passings. You name it, Tamara Kubacki will listen to your story of grief. But it’s not like talking to a therapist. Kubacki’s background is in folklore, interviewing, and storytelling. Her company, Listening to Grief, is dedicated to grief education, grief groups, one-on-one counseling, grief walks in nature, artistic expression, and collaborations with other wellness professionals.
Kubacki lost her sister to suicide in 2021, and it “absolutely brought me to my knees,” she says. She found an online support group, which she still attends, and a therapist to work with as she navigated deep grief. The work felt important, and with the encouragement of those around her, she studied grief work, became a Grief Educator, and began a business devoted to the listening and processing of all manner of bereavement.
It was a reminder that grief is everywhere, that no one is exempt from it.
Kubacki is dedicated to changing the silence of grief and loss. At Listening to Grief, all kinds of loss are honored and respected. “One of my goals,” says Kubacki, “is to offer a disenfranchised grief group: sibling loss, empty nest syndrome, ambiguous grief.” Events and offerings are tailored to address both specific types of grief, and collective grief.
Kubacki told me about the first grief walk she led in nature. While stopping to do a breathing exercise with the group, a few teenage boys in the park stopped to ask what they were doing. When she explained that they were on a grief walk, two of the boys asked if they could join for a bit. The teens shared that they had also lost a mutual friend very recently. It was a reminder that grief is everywhere, that no one is exempt from it.
Lashanna Williams
Founder of A Sacred Passing and A Place to Die
Before running the nonprofit A Sacred Passing, Lashanna Williams worked as a massage therapist. Williams laughs while recalling a birth doula class she once took, just to hang out with her friend, in which the instructor told her she’d “never be hired” as a birth doula. Instead, the teacher recommended that Lashanna might be more interested in death doula/death care courses. She was. Eventually, Lashanna started volunteering with A Sacred Passing; And three years later, the founder transferred ownership to Lashanna, who transformed the program into a multifaceted framework to better reflect and facilitate her own understanding of community care and needs.
Williams continued her work as a masseuse, and one day, one of her terminally ill clients, Sally Baily, had a radical idea. After learning about Lashanna’s work in death care, she invited her over to give her something. Lashanna recalls that Sally “answered the door with a quick claim deed and a plant, and said ‘welcome home.’” Sally was donating her house to the nonprofit, for however Lashanna wanted to use it to help others. Asphodel House, as it is now known, quite literally arose from Sally’s death.
Asphodel House is a multifunctional community home located in Lakeridge. It provides a physical space where terminally ill people can spend their final days being cared for by volunteers and professionals at no cost. This includes bedrooms for people who have chosen to die by way of VSED (the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking) or MAID (medical aid in dying). Lashanna has even worked with pharmacists and patients to create drink recipes with ingredients to mask the harsh taste of the end-of-life medications. (She has found that liquid sugar, brown sugar, and cinnamon help mitigate the bitterness.) Asphodel also hosts monthly gatherings, like Suicide Supper and Sunday Mourning, to bring grievers together in community.
“We started by sharing what we had,” Williams says. For her, that included time, energy, acts of service, compassionate care, and massage. For Sally, it included the deed to her home, deep trust in Lashanna, and the opportunity to improve the lives and deaths of all future visitors to her beloved home.
Katrina Spade
Founder of Recompose
Katrina Spade has spent more than a dozen years reimagining the “traditional” ways we handle our dead, outside of burial, cremation, and donating your body to science after death. While in grad school for architecture, Spade recalls, “I was looking for something rich to think about from a design perspective. And what’s richer than mortality?”
Spade admits she found the funeral industry to be “uninspiring.” When it came to funeral homes, she says “the offerings that existed were not for me.” After learning about how farmers compost their livestock, Spade wondered if terramation was also possible for humans. While her thesis project was never intended to be a real business, the interest was immediate and undeniable.
Along with a very talented team of engineers, lawyers, and scientists, Recompose became the first company to make terramation not only physically possible, but also a legal, viable alternative for bodily disposition. They also helped legalize alkaline hydrolysis (aquamation) for other companies who want to offer the option.
Once Spade’s team receives the body, the process takes about 45 days to complete, and results in approximately one cubic yard of soil. This soil is then packaged and can be collected by family, or donated to Recompose, who uses donated soil to restore and preserve conservation land in western Washington. Now, people from around the nation can transport decedents here from near and far to be turned into soil through human composting (terramation)—an option which is not legal in most states.
With the rise of cremation, it feels like people have lost the ceremony that comes with the body of a loved one. “I believe that when someone dies, it’s the perfect time to make a fuss,” says Spade. Although it may be new, she says “ritual is really just about marking the moment with some action.” At Recompose, ritual is built-in to their design. Bodies are gently washed and shrouded in biodegradable cloth, loved ones can gather and place organic material on the body. “At the end of the service, everyone gathers around and places the body into this threshold vessel which then is actually and truly a doorway to the next space. So that’s how we’re passing the body onto its next phase.”
