People find it joyful, bringing a new baby into the world. That being said, I don’t think that the same couldn’t be said for a lot of folks at the end of life, if they are supported and cared for in a way that allows them to feel validated in their wishes and met with exactly how they want their lives to end. I know this could happen. And I’m also very optimistic and hopeful about what we could build, especially as an organization, at Pause, what we could build that would sort of mimic that model.
– Alica Forneret
This is the When You Die podcast. If it has to do with death and dying, we’re talking about it. I’m your host today, Johanna Lunn.
Johanna Lunn
With me today is Alica Forneret. Her work focuses on how we can support each other through death-related loss and grief, sparked by and before end-of-life experiences. She is an author, entrepreneur, educator, mentor, and so much more. Alica is fiercely committed to making sure that our conversations about grief, death, and dying go beyond hospital rooms and funeral homes. She’s excited to contribute to how we handle grief in the workplace, and our personal relationships publicly and, very specifically, the grieving process for people of color and diverse identities. Alica is the founder and executive director of Time to Pause, which focuses on supporting communities of color through grief and end of life. So welcome, Alica. I’m so grateful that you’re here with me today.
Alica Forneret
Thank you for having me.
JL
Truly my pleasure. There’re so many things that we could talk about. One thing that I’m interested in about your work personally, as well as the work of Time to Pause, is that death touches a lot of different spaces. So, there’re workplaces and personal relationships and so on. And I was really impressed to see that the mentorship program through the Starlight Business Development Residency, that your mentees are a very diverse group of people in terms of their personal interests: art and space and design and all of these things. So, I just want to throw a big question out there around how did you get so expansive in your thinking on end of life and our needs?
AF
Thank you for such an expansive broad question. I am happy to give a little bit of context maybe about how I landed in this work. And that would probably answer that question. Is that helpful?
JL
Yeah.
AF
Thank you for the introduction. Again, I’m Alica Forneret, and my pronouns are she, her, and I’m the Executive Director of Pause, and many other things. As you noted, I got into this work in 2015, actually, working on an art project, a design project, and a content project. So, I was working with a designer, and we very arbitrarily chose the topic of death. We found that it was something that felt taboo; neither of us had really explored it before. And so, we spent about a year working on this project and developing it and traveling around having conversations about death, culture, and death rituals. We were looking at the intersection of death and music, death and food, death and art, in this really abstract way. And then in October of 2016, my mom, Deborah, unexpectedly went into the ICU and died about a week later. So, I’ve been doing this work in a really, like I said, big picture, removed, abstract way, and recognized very quickly that I needed to experience and sort of look inward at processing my own relationship to death and grief. Having a background in writing, I started writing about grief and the intersections of grief and mother-loss. And over the years grief and identity, grief and how we deal with it in the workplace, because I had a really challenging experience going back to work after my mom died. And so, I was sort of both witnessing internally what the experience was and how it touches our personal lives in so many ways, and how it touched me and intersected with so many parts of my experience in so many different ways. And then, as I was having conversations on stages, in workshops, as I was moving through the work professionally, it became really clear that there were a lot of opportunities to think about how we can have these conversations, do this work and build sort of corners of this industry that tackle all of these different ways that death and grief touch our lives. So, when we opened the applications for the residency, I was very aware that I know that there are folks out there doing the work beyond just death, doulas, doctors, and funeral professionals. So, we were very adamant about if your work addresses death or grief at any intersection, and you identify as a person of color, we are going to have a call with you, and we are going to consider you for this residency, because it had become very clear that those spaces within healthcare systems, within the funeral industry, etc., aren’t the only places that we should be doing this work or having these conversations. So, we ended up finding, as you would have seen on the website, and as you noted, a huge sort of spectrum of work that folks were doing around death and grief. And for us, it just felt really key to say, not only are you folks of color, not only are the majority of you women and gender non-conforming folks, and queer folks, you’re doing all of that in an industry that like nobody wants to talk about when we go to incubators and accelerators. So, we can just find anyone that’s interested in doing this work. And you hit all of those pieces that make it really hard sometimes to grow a business, our door is wide open to you.
JL
And you really hit the nail on the head when you said, incubators and other businesses are not looking for this kind of thing. I mean, I’m a filmmaker. I’ve spent 10 years working on death and dying, and my colleagues are like, “Aren’t you over this one yet?” I say, “You have no idea how rich it is, you have no idea how full and robust and how life-giving it can be,” and all the other things that fall into there. But it is really true that it’s a space that is pervasive. And well, because we have blinders on to death. I hear what you’re saying about how challenging it was in the workplace. I was 19 when I lost my mom. And then within two more years, lost my best friend and was in a car accident with fatalities. And I was so young, and I became an outcast. At university, they had no idea how to deal with me. Other friends had no idea how to deal with me. Now a lot of time has passed, and many things have changed. But we still don’t know how to deal with death in this world. I really appreciated, and these were your words, that the way people of color experience grief after a death-related loss is different. And I think not only in the white community do we not relate, but we can’t relate to anybody. And culturally on this continent, we can’t relate to grief and loss, be it death related, or many of those other really important losses. I’m just so glad to have you coming out into that space. Because, you know, gosh, if you look at the news, it’s just appalling. I just don’t think people have a context for different cultures, different experiences, death related anything.
AF
Yeah, thank you for that. And I think the example I want to point to is, when you experienced your losses, and thank you for sharing about them. The folks that we expected want to show up for us and to hold us because we have those intimate personal relationships with them, when they can’t even hold us in those moments and don’t feel equipped to, how can we expect folks that are within academic institutions, when we’re a student or workplaces, or were an employee, to do that? And it’s for me even, so interesting, to not excuse, but to start to understand, we have, like you’re saying, those barriers in our personal lives and relationships. And culturally, just as humans living, like you said, in America right now, how could the systems be able to catch up? And that’s what’s been really interesting to work on. And for me, when I went back to a formal workplace, I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect what I received. And I think that so many people are not prepared to go back to work and don’t know what to expect. And that’s been really hard to hear. But inspiring, for the work that we’re doing is okay. Well, then we need to work with the employer so that they show up in a better way. It is our responsibility as people who employ folks and who work with folks and who are building a team in a community, to be able to hold those people in their hardest moment. So, I want to hold folks accountable for that and equip them to be able to do so, because it’s hard enough as it is.
JL
And I know you’ve given talks and consulted with a lot of corporations around this. Didn’t you go to Google and give one of those Google Talks?
AF
Yeah, I’ve worked with Google. I’ve worked with California Department of Education, giving talks about this. And I’ve talked to a lot of different organizations at different levels and done consulting on bereavement responses and bereavement policies and doing audits and having conversations about how to make them more inclusive. So, that’s where the majority of my work is that free Pause. And then with Pause what we’re looking at right now is very specifically, what I don’t consider 101 anymore, but what a lot of organizations would consider 101. How does this show up in the workplace? What are people holding particularly after the last three years, globally, what we’ve experienced in terms of loss and grief and death, but 101: how can we show up for folks? How is it showing up at their desks and behind their computers, and when they’re taking a moment to step away, what’s going on there with their grief, and then equipping managers and HR leaders to be able to say, okay, maybe we should add some stuff to our policy, make some changes about how we respond. And then hopefully, my goal after all of that 101, is then trained managers to be able to respond better and to feel more equipped to resource folks when they’ve lost someone and returned to work.
JL
And what kind of reception are you getting from people as you go into those spaces?
AF
There’s usually one really hardcore advocate who, like you or me, had multiple losses, where it’s become very, very clear. Of course, we should be doing this. Of course, people should feel more equipped to take care of their death reports. Of course. As a team, we should be able to have conversations about these things openly. That person is usually going to bring me in or bring our team in or reach out about our resources. And then sometimes it can be met with a couple other advocates here or there. Sometimes, it’s met with folks who are like, “Why are we doing this, as this is the workplace, we absolutely should not be talking to people about these personal problems.” And sometimes, it’s an uphill battle. I think across the board, though, it’s so hard to deny that something should be done. But I think people are still catching up to what does our team have capacity to do and what is realistic about what we’re able to do within our organization. And so that’s why for me, I don’t just talk about bereavement policy and making updates there. It can be very, very key to just look at how you respond to death and grief in your workplace overall. And so, I call it a bereavement response. How does your company or your organization think about how you’re responding to grief and bereavement and death in the workplace, rather than just like we’ll give everybody a couple of extra days, and we’ve ticked the box of modernizing our policy.
JL
My colleague, Kel Edwards, did interview two of the Starlight, mentees, Brianna [Simmons] and Nefertiti [Moor], and each one fascinating, interesting, engaged in different ways. I want to talk a little bit about how you mentor people and how you bring them along, and what kinds of changes do you see in your cohort?
AF
Thank you for that question. How do I mentor people? I think … so, I’ll say this first, and I say this all the time to people. I love grief therapy. I think grief therapy is so important; folks that are actually trained to do counseling and therapy with a focus on grief and bereavement and death is amazing. I respect all grief therapists. That said, I never want to become a therapist. So, my role, I consider it to be, I will find all of the people out there who are grief, therapists doing their thing being in their lane, having their expertise. And my goal is to connect them to anyone and everyone in my network that I can find, that wants a grief therapist. That is how I approached our cohort; they are doing so many things. And even though our focus of working in this industry is aligned in the fact that we’re all focused on grief and death in one way or another, I don’t need to do all of the things that they do, I don’t need to get skilled in all of the areas that they’re skilled in. That’s for them to love and be passionate about. What’s my role, my responsibility? And what I truly consider to be a responsibility for me as someone who has connections and power and privilege in this industry, is to say, my virtual digital Rolodex, my phone, my inbox, and anything you want, it is all open to you. So, we spent a lot of time thinking about, for them, what is going to be useful to help your business feel more stable and grow. And where the people that I know, the organizations that I know, and the connections that I know, that we can connect you to, to expedite that. Because one of the things that we’ve learned in terms of building a business entrepreneurship, in general, is it is one thing to have an incredible idea. It’s another thing to be very skilled in what you need to do to get that idea off the ground and then to actually get it off the ground. The other piece is having connections and being able to meet folks that empower you and uplift you and make referrals to you. And so, that is a huge part of what I do; just being present for folks and saying, “What do you need? Who can we find that will get it to you and support you in that?” And then I will make any connection and make it very clear to folks I know. You’re gonna hear from everyone in my residency, if you’re open to it, because I’d love for you to interview them all, or talk to them or support them all. The other pieces, sort of the flip side of that, my role in terms of supporting folks was developing a program that felt incredibly, from what we’ve heard, safe and affirming, and comfortable. I think that sometimes one of the things that we talked about a lot in the beginning, both the program manager and I and the cohort was, these spaces exist in some form or another, right? All over the place: we’ve got incubators, we’ve got accelerators, we have these sorts of business development programs. But we designed ours to be a little different, we went at a very different pace, we had different expectations of what they would come out of the project with, we held the space in a way that was very, very intimate. And also, for us, it was really important to work in a component of rest. Because what I’ve seen being an entrepreneur and you know, being a part of other programs and talking to folks who run other programs, is you get this sort of accelerated, obviously, that term is used, I think, very intentionally, you get into these programs, it’s like, how much can we do in the six weeks or six months or six, whatever that you’re here? What is the most that you can come out of this with? And we’re here to grind, and we’re here to hustle. We didn’t want to do that, primarily, because we’re all folks of color. And we’re already doing enough and doing the most and we don’t get a lot of space and empowerment and invitation to rest. So, we built that into the program. And also, because we didn’t want people to leave the program fully burnt out with no resources left to keep running their businesses. So yeah, that was sort of my role to really think critically about what might need to be different about the way that we design this program, to hold folks of color in a way that other spaces don’t.
JL
I love that. Not just that you’re getting the skills and the context and the network, which right just there is like massive, it’s huge. It’s inviting, it’s supportive, it’s all of those things. But then the moment you said, “Rest,” I was like, oh, because it’s the one thing we don’t do as a society. And it’s the very thing that grounds knowledge and experience and keeps an open heart.
AF
Yeah, and I think too – we do hard work. We talk about things all day, every day, as a part of the work that we do. The other folks either do want to talk about it, and then they get really excited in partnerships or in collaborations, like great, we can feed off each other’s energy, or people don’t want to talk about it at all. And so, it can be an uphill battle just to do this work every day in a way that’s sustainable, and that we feel cared for. So, we really wanted to make sure that everyone felt that. And I think that intimacy piece was very important to us as well, because it’s one thing to build a budget spreadsheet, and like I’m an operations person, I’m a systems person. I’m a spreadsheet person. I’m like all about the systems and ops. And at the same time, we knew that it was going to be important to figure out how not only do we build the budget spreadsheet, but how do we have conversations, first, about our relationships, money, and our relationships to building wealth, and our relationships, both negative and positive to what our bank accounts look like right now? And how do we dream about where we want them to be in the future? And that intimacy was critical to build in a situation, in a format like that, because we were having very heart opening, like, put everything on the table, break yourself open in front of all of these other entrepreneurs, conversations and interactions. All of the resources that we gave them, I’m like, “That’s great.” Have all the spreadsheets have all the templates, I will give anyone anything. But it was for us what was really important was to think about the container and the deeper layers of things that we really needed to discuss and explore beyond just the technical sides of running a business.
JL
That is so beautiful. I can’t tell you how, how moved I am and how fortunate your mentees are to have a program like this and someone like yourself, who has the vision and voice to do it. Any human being’s dream is to be supported in that way.
AF
Oh, yeah. And it’s all the stuff that I either had and really recognize the value of or didn’t have. And I was like, if we can give this to people and, like offer this and invite people into a cohort where they can experience this at an early stage, I think it sets really incredible expectations for how people hold them as they run their business moving forward. Because I think for me there’re certain things that I didn’t get or didn’t receive or didn’t look for as an entrepreneur in the beginning. And I was like, this is just how it has to be. This is just how people treat you. This is just how running a business goes. And now I recognize that is absolutely not the case. So how can we work with folks and alongside folks to say, what do you really want? How do you really want to operate? What’s important to you outside of the typical business structures that exist as models for us? Okay, great. That’s not too much to ask for; ask for it, and we will figure out how to get you there. So, that’s been really key, I think, because I went through it myself. Has the landscape changed much since COVID? Hmm, I would say, for what we’ve seen, and the surveying that we did, and conversations that we have, we do something with our alumni called a quarterly victory lap. So, every quarter we’re coming together, and we’re both praising ourselves and praising others about what they’ve accomplished in that quarter. I see huge value in this. People, obviously, developing and running new programs in partnership with each other. So that was huge for us to be able to say, “Hey, you’re all going to become part of a cohort. Yes, maybe we’ll feel like family at the end. But what’s more important to me, almost, is other people in the industry who are excited to work with you on the same page and aligned in their values as a business with you and who want to develop new kinds of projects together. So, that was one huge thing. The other is a word that came up pretty consistently throughout the program and in all of our exit interviews: confidence, having the confidence to do this work and to continue this work in a space where it can be incredibly challenging, is like, probably, for me, the thing that I feel like pokes and touches my heart a little bit, because I’m like, this is what I want. All I want is for folks to come out of a program like this and say, “Hey, it’s been a couple of months since we talked last. And I asked for the rate that I know that I deserve. And I was confident in doing that.” And that to me, I’m like, that’s a good thing, to be able to build that confidence in folks. And also, to be able to then celebrate that with them and say, “Good, keep asking for it. And when you’re ready to raise it, we’re all here to cheer you on when you raise it.” And I think that, for me, those partnerships between people in the cohort, which is the purpose of a cohort, has been really key. And then witnessing that confidence in people has been really, really, really key. And in terms of the landscape, I think what’s been really interesting is we did get a wild number of death doula applicants, which has been really, really interesting. I’m expecting the same when we run the program again this year, and we’re making some tweaks and expanding the program and lengthening the program this year. But I expect that our applicant pool will probably be pretty death doula heavy, which has been really interesting. And to your point, the note that you made earlier about the creative side of the work that I’ve been really, really excited to see, and to find even more people to collaborate with in that way, because I think there’re a lot of folks who’ve been writing about this for a long time, creating films and little bit of audio around it for a long time. But I’m really excited about the intersection of art and design that some of our cohort members have been exploring.
JL
That’s great. I have a lot of sympathy, of course, for well, for everyone. But for death doulas, in particular, because they’re coming into a business that isn’t regulated. There’s no standardized certificate process for being recognized in the state or province in which you live. And so, a lot of the conventional places, like hospitals and hospices and so on, don’t have any budget line to hire anybody like that. So, it is a tricky, slippery slope there. All of these areas are really pioneering, whether it’s what is the soundscape you want to have in a hospital? What are pleasing, visually pleasing things for someone with so many environmental ways you can look at death. There’re so many spaces, all of it is pioneering. But we have such a huge blossoming now of people that have been through very diverse kinds of training, and death doulaship. that’s a tough road.
AF
Yeah, one of the things that we’re exploring across a couple different partnerships and programs that we’re hoping to pilot right now, as much as people aren’t ready to receive and standardize and formalize the way that we work with death doulas, we’ve seen it happen on the other end of the life spectrum, right. So, I know from being a person who lives in the state of California, there is a formalized state program that I can access as a black woman to receive care from a black birth doula, which was incredible. I know that it changed my entire birthing experience, it changed my pregnancy, it empowered me to advocate for myself in the hospital in ways I never would have been able to do without her empowering me and being present with me and my family. To me, we have a model for it that works. We have incredible partnerships already between the birth doula industrial community and full lifecycle spectrum community, your community, and I think that, to me, that gives me a sense of optimism for us being able to say on the end of life side of things, there’s a way we could do this, there’s a way we could pilot this, test this, see how this could work, because it’s been done before. But just at the other end, I think the other end is celebrated. People find it joyful, bringing a new baby into the world. That being said, I don’t think that the same couldn’t be said for a lot of folks at the end of life, if they are supported and cared for in a way that allows them to feel validated in their wishes and met with exactly how they want their lives to end. I know this could happen. And I’m also very optimistic and hopeful about what we could build, especially as an organization, at Pause, what we could build that would sort of mimic that model.
JL
Well, anything that the When You Die project can do to help further your end, count us in. I think it would be amazing to change the narrative around end of life to one of peace and release and joy in a certain way. That would be quite different than fear, and pain, and all of those things that most people think of when they think of dying.
AF
Absolutely. Changing the narrative and finding new associations for what we think about when we die, is the goal. That’s key. I’m excited about it, because people ask me all the time, they’re like, how do you wake up and do this every day? How is this your job? How do you think about this? And I think this puts a smile on my face and brings me joy, because I think it’s a missed opportunity to not think more critically and openly about how we die, how we want to die, and to take advantage of all of the resources that are out there that want to help us do that, like you said peacefully, gracefully. And with our needs and our wants met, it is largely possible. We just have to change how we meet those conversations.
JL
That is so true. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking this time and sharing all the amazing things that you do. What’s the best way for people to reach you?
AF
Yes, as I said, my inbox isn’t just open to our cohort. It is truly open to anyone. So, my email, my direct email, is helloattimetopause.org. Our website is www.timetopause.org and you can also find me personally on Instagram, alica.forneret, but I welcome and invite anyone to get in touch with me anytime any day.
JL
That’s great. And we’ll share that on our website as well. Thank you.
AF
Thank you.
This conversation is brought to you by the When You Die Project. From existential afterlife questions to palliative care and the nuts and bolts of green burial, if it has to do with death and dying, we’re talking about it.
