Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community

by Camille Sapara Barton

An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss

We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief—deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person’s experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss.

Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief—without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community,


Sapara Barton honors each and every The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help readers feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing.

Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we’ve lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Grief, Self Help, Psychology, Death, Mental Health, Health

176 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2024

Reviews

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another enjoyable selection from one of my favorite in-person book clubs!!! This time, I went with a friend, which made the experience even better.

We need to feel grief: in our bodies, and everywhere else
Barton’s core point is that we are all grieving the aftermath of colonialism, and the ravaged world we’ve inherited. In the West specifically, they argue that we resist feeling grief to keep ourselves indifferent to the human suffering created by capitalism. For many of us living in the imperial core, it feels insufferable to even think about our grief for the state of the world, because then we’d grieve everything all the time! No wonder, Barton argues, our cultures have such painful relationships to substance use—substances are frequently used to numb ourselves from what’s going on around us.

Barton talks about how part of listening requires us to re-engage with our bodies, instead of seeing them as an unimportant container for our minds. In many cultures, seeing is the last sense that is used, and more innate forms of knowing or experiencing something are prioritized. Throughout Tending Grief, Barton asks us to consider the importance of listening to our bodies, so we can feel the many things that our brains attempt to suppress (including, of course, our grief for the state of this fucked-up world.)

We need PEOPLEEEEE
Barton reminds us that we are not meant to feel this grief alone!!! In the immortal words of Ari Lennox, OH MY GOD. [we] need PEOPLEEEEE. Up until very recently, many cultures prioritized rituals that allowed people to carry the weight of grief collectively. I appreciated Barton’s remarks about how this has changed in just a few generations, especially for Black people in the West. As they note, many Black Gen Xers unconsciously abandoned communal care as they traveled up the corporate ladder or sought other forms of “success.” Years later, many of these people and their children (Camille Sapara Barton, me) are realizing that this loss is another thing to grieve. Barton goes a bit further back from Gen X, and discusses their grandmother’s experiences as part of the UK’s Windrush Generation, which parallels the second round of Great Migrators in the U.S. I often admire how this generation (my grandparents and their siblings) maintained connections and communal networks of care even across great distances, and Barton shares this admiration. However, before waxing too poetic, they also note that this generation had their own traumas and grief that they repressed until it exploded into mental health crises and familial violence. So clearly, there is grief work to be done in each branch of the family tree.

Despite the promises of collective action, many political organizations also fail to serve as helpful containers for our grief. There is often an intolerance for grief in movement spaces, partially because a limited range of emotions are deemed “productive” for organizing (namely: rage.) Like every book bemoaning the state of modern movements, Barton has the necessary discussion of the frustrating gap between people’s expressed politics and their everyday relational actions. As someone who studies anarchism, they particularly note how the concept of prefigurative politics should provide a framework to narrow this gap—unfortunately, this framework is rarely followed. This section closes with another helpful refrain on the fact that we are, in fact, not machines!!!! We have to stop ignoring the parts of our bodies that don’t “produce” or “function” with constant productivity and discipline, and instead listen to the emotions struggling to get out.

This needed more nuance re: Black Americans
All the notes about connection to ancestral or indigenous practices felt mostly irrelevant to people who are the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. While Barton kinda notes that we can’t ever go back to pre-colonial periods, I feel like they didn’t *truly* understand what that means for Black Americans. Like for some of us, the colonial period was marked by chattel slavery, something that created a permanent rupture.

A few years ago, I attended the Unurbanist Assembly, a 23-hour conference and memorial for Ahmaud Arbery, hosted by The Thrivance Group. During that conference, I first learned that some people describe the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as the Maafa, which is a Kiswahili word for disaster, calamity or terrible occurrence. It struck me immediately that I knew other cultures’ terms for their people’s experiences of genocide—Shoah, Nakba—but I had never heard of this term for my own. This speaks, I think, to how difficult it sometimes is to articulate just how much Black Americans cannot move on from the past, or even reconnect with it. My friend Michaela frequently mentions how permanently the Maafa has ruptured Black Americans from anything like “traditional” genealogy, and how few other ethnicities understand this rupture. Even in the extremely rare cases when we can trace our pre-colonial roots, going back to anything before slavery can feel disrespectful, not just inaccurate.

This is a different experience than the “cultural void” that Barton discusses for white people, but it’s also separate from the clear-cut advice they give for other people of color about reconnecting with indigenous grief rituals. I’m thankful that there are more than enough grief rituals and practices I can find from my ancestors in the Carolinas. Unfortunately though, these places will never be without the stain of Indigenous dispossession (for my places: particularly of the Tuscarora, Eno, Saponi, and Catawba people.) So it’s a different loss of sorts—I can’t get back to my Indigenous ancestors, nor would I want to skip over everything that happened to my ancestors once they were brought to this country. But, at the same time, I also don’t want to overlook the genocide that happened ON THIS LAND to another group of people. So basically, I’m somewhere between Camile Sapara Barton (“just reconnect with your pre-colonial Indigenous ancestors, it’s so easy!”) and Attica Locke (“before Texas, we were dust.”)

Not the best book for grieving actual people
Okay so just in case it wasn’t clear, this is a book about grieving *cultural* death. Like the grief Barton is talking about is what we’ve lost as a society thanks to capitalism and colonialism, and the harm created by this new way of being. In book club, we further discussed this theme of permanent rupture, and how we’re not able to go back from that. Many people added another form of cultural grief: how many people want to go back to pre-2019, but that isn’t possible, because our world has now permanently shifted!! Cultural grief is also a never-ending grief, because there are new losses occurring every minute. While all of this is super important to unpack, it’s probably not the most appropriate selection for a friend who just had a loved one pass away. While it’s great for those of us hoping to think about broader societal losses, it might come across as insensitive to people seeking advice and support for more personal, acute losses—just want to note that as a heads up.

Final Thoughts
I think this is a mostly relevant book for people grieving the overall losses we experience on a societal level (less so for those grieving actual people.) If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your body or emotions, this might also be a helpful place to turn. Camille Sapara Barton was a delightful audiobook narrator, and I recommend experiencing their words in this format. Finally, I really appreciated getting to collectively practice some of the grief rituals through book club, and will continue thinking about other ways to do this in the future.

[Pchu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really good. Highly recommend.

[Jordan Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

“May we have the courage to tend to our wounds and move towards aliveness.”

Camille Sapara Barton’s Tending Grief is a gorgeous guide to our collective healing. The book feels as though we are directly in conversation with the author, who aims to chart a path for life during and after the apocalypse. Tending Grief is for anyone curious about how to get free from the void that is brought by both being a decedent of colonized people and a decedent of colonizers. Barton uses vulnerability and references to take the reader through a history of grief, care, and community. What does it mean to be deeply connected to Earth and all its beings in 2024 and beyond? How do we tend to our emotions or the suppression of them? There are so many questions posed that ask the reader to explore their own vulnerabilities in a spiritual way. Tending Grief is a resource for the spiritually curious, transformative justice focused, and grieving person. I particularly enjoyed learning about the medical-industrial complex compassionately through the healing power of plant medicines. Barton confidently draws the readers to engage with new types of research, which grip you page after page.

Politically liberating, skillfully written, and deeply personal, Tending Grief is my new favorite read.

[Harjanti Kertokarijo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated some of the explorations in this book of e.g. clubculture and how it can hold space for emotion/trauma, the nuanced conversation on supporting persons through abortion, and the overarching theme of recentering grief in our lives. However, the book's narrative structure fell short for me. The book contains a couple of essays, two interviews, and while I can see how some of the practices it held can be of value, they were given very little context or introduction.

[Alyssa Bernhardt · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt that the description for this book is a bit misleading to the actual content of the book. The book contains a lot of history and storytelling, which I understand is considered necessary for the practice, but was hard to be engaged. The form of writing was dull and hard to make it through.

[charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible. one I’ll come back to again and again.

[Bek (MoonyReadsByStarlight) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an I credible read that left me with much to think about (and much more to read with all the sources and recommendations for further reading). This talks a lot about grief in the context of larger systems and ancestral pain, and the role in activist spaces. There are a few conversations from organizers who handle grief in community. Finally, it concludes with grief rituals that can be used alone and in groups. While this looks a lot at grieving things like the impacts of colonization, it also acknowledges many more individual experiences with greif, including various experiences with abortion.

This had a lot of really good information while also staying really grounded in how we can relate to all of this individually and in our communities.

[River Crabbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book that combines history, practical direction, somatic wisdom and movement weaving. I really connected with Camille's framing of the political necessity of grief work and the colonial history of suppressing grief practices. I'm sitting with their words on the Void within whiteness.

I've been on a journey for some time with grief work, and I learned a lot of history and context in this book. I've come away from this with a renewed sense of how essential feeling our grief is in order to make space for joy, imagine futures and connect with one another. V good.

[Adam Mandelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Grief is an inescapable part of being human and it manifests everywhere from the acutely personal (a death, a break-up, a painful moment of failure) to the deeply rooted and collective (the heartbreaking legacies of colonialism and slavery, the generational traumas of war, the sorrow of witnessing global environmental crisis). And yet, for all its inevitability, most of us—especially in the West—are conditioned to be highly grief-averse. Grief is to be avoided, ignored, looked at only out of the corner of our eyes (and as briefly as possible). And anyone who spends “too much” time with grief risks being pathologized.

With “Tending Grief,” Camille Sapara Barton offers an antidote to this conditioning. Brimming with context for contemplating collective grief in the world today, the book also offers wisdom for facing—indeed tending—to our grief. One of the most profound insights of this book is inspired by West African Dagara grief rituals, which understand grief not only as inevitable, but also as something that deserves collective care and expression. Failing to make regular, communal space for processing grief risks inviting illness, violence, or other harm into the community. One begins to wonder whether so much of the suffering we’re witnessing in the world today, from Gaza to dying coral reefs, isn’t in part due to a collective failure of grief tending.

Barton’s first three chapters examine chronic collective grief (from colonization, COVID, the war on drugs), the crisis of ancestral identity (or lack thereof) for many white people, and the radical potential of incorporating grief practices into social movements. Chapters four and five consist of insightful interviews with grief workers in both nightlife and abortion care. And the book concludes with a slightly expanded version of Barton’s “Grief Toolkit” (for creating one’s own grief practice), originally published in 2022 in partnership with the Global Environments Network.

Occasionally, “Tending Grief” has qualities of a graduate-school dissertation: a tendency to (perhaps anxiously) over quote; a buffet approach to narrative/argumentation in which item after item gets added to the pile; and the occasional bit of jargon or assumed knowledge. The book is therefore at its strongest when Barton’s voice and passions come through most clearly, providing a much-need roadmap for navigating—and resting with—one of life’s most challenging emotions.

[Maya Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful, timely and important journey through the authors own grief, the violence and subsequent grief of colonialism, and the importance of learning as individuals and a community to navigate and honour this grief. I particularly enjoyed the authors openness and self reflection as to their identity and the entanglements with grief, as well as the particular UK context as a UK based queer person myself. I also really was moved by the chapter on the Void, and how white Europeans can and should honour and explore our own grief caused by colonialism, through our own rituals and ancestral knowledge, as opposed to culturally appropriating spiritual practices from others. The writing style is very easy to follow, with a few interviews. I enjoy this style of story telling, and I found it easy and interesting to follow. For me, the chapters on the actual embodied rituals was interesting, but I felt like it wasn't as in depth as the rest of the meticulously researched and explained chapters- though the grief rituals are very interesting and I will certainly be trying some, I would have maybe liked them to be interwoven with the other chapters throughout the book.

However, I highly reccommend reading this book for anyone interested in exploring their own grief and the role that grief can and should play in our collectively histories.

[Christy l Bidon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Tending Grief," Camille Sapara Barton guides readers through the difficult time of sorrow, offering ‎profound insights into rituals for healing. This process advocates for a community approach to Grief, with ‎the importance of shared traditions and cultivating cultures of care. Barton's writing style and functional ‎guidance create a compassionate guidebook for navigating loss. "Tending Grief" comforts those in ‎mourning and builds supportive communities that understand the collective healing process. ‎

The book contained a lot of history and storytelling, which made it hard to stay engaged, but I understand that it is necessary to understand the practice's process.

As I am dealing with grief from the loss of my son, this book serves as a reminder that we are allowed to feel ‎our feelings the way that we do; we are all human and handle situations differently. I appreciated that this ‎book gave a different aspect from “pray and it will all be alight”. I also appreciated that we say actual views ‎of how different cultures grieve not just people.


Thank you to @NetGalley and North Atlantic Books for the opportunity to read and review "Tending Grief"

[Jasmine Virdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book comes at the perfect time in a moment when the world is heavy, even bursting with grief. My heart has been cracked open through grappling with the different kinds of loss in today's world, reckoning with a genocide that has been ongoing for 200+ days and a climate crisis that has been in the making for the last century. Camille Sapara Barton's "Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community" comes as a sweet balm to my soul, offering explorations of the causes for grief which goes beyond individual loss, our collective grief, as well as providing somatic, embodied tools for practising this grief and letting it take its course.

As a brown-bodied person moving through the world, I particularly appreciate this book and the wisdom that it weaves, infusing decolonial perspectives that are non-pathologising and which seek to move beyond the individual to the collective, whether it be through engaging a relationship with our ancestors or healing through social organizing as a community. I highly recommend this book to anyone moving through grief and ready to offer themselves up to be changed by it!

[Gayle Cappelluti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tending Grief is a guide. It gifts the reader with rituals and practices for dealing with grief, either as an individual or as a member of a community. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that suppresses grief, doesn't talk about death, and covers up feelings with a series of euphimisms. We cannot say, "He died," but rather mumble, "He passed away." We never deal with death or its aftermath directly.

As a result of our avoidance of any discussion of death, when we come to that difficult time, we naturally find ourselves wholly unprepared for tackling grief and its journey. What this author gives her readers in this book is a concrete path through the heart of the grief journey. She offers practical and doable exercises that are drawn from a wide range of people and their cultures. Being thrust into grief is completely unfamiliar, disquieting, and destabilizing. Tending Grief helps the mourner to move through this journey in a real way, one that honors our lost loved one and connects the mourner with his/her ancestors. This is a valuable tool, one I highly recommend.

[Alyssa Gursky · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tending Grief"is an absolute gift for our modern times. Not only does Camille teach practical skills for working with grief, they also model what it means to be a good future ancestor. This is elucidated in their pacing through difficult content, invitations into the body, inviting in community experts, and
offering a path to ritual, in hopes of processing through grief. We have desperately needed a queer, decolonized view on grief. After finishing this book, I feel firmly that this perspective might be our only way through. As a trauma-informed, queer, psychedelic therapist, I can promise you that this book will be at the top of my suggested reading list. Selfishly, I loved seeing collage be considered on the list of options for integrative practices :) :) Thank you for this gift, Camille!

[Courtney R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was provided an advanced copy of this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

In "Tending Grief," Camille Sapara Barton masterfully guides readers through the delicate terrain of sorrow, offering profound insights into rituals for healing. This thoughtful exploration advocates for a communal approach to grief, emphasizing the importance of shared rituals and cultivating cultures of care. Barton's empathetic prose and practical guidance create a compassionate guidebook for navigating loss. "Tending Grief" not only provides solace for those in mourning but also serves as a catalyst for building supportive communities that understand the transformative power of collective healing.

[Anna Tessum · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has read extensively about grief ... what I find unique about Camille's book is it's specific UK, Queer & Racialised context. Much literature about grief centers a North American and white lens. As a reader who is also racialised , queer and grew up in the UK it was both refreshing and resonant to connect with Tending Grief. In particular Camille highlights experiences within grief discourse which are often left in the shadows, as well as explicitly discussing grief in the context of colonization and the pandemic.

[Rhiannon, Soft · Rating 4 out of 5]

Camille beautifully weaves historical storytelling, movement building, and personal anecdotes to offer alternatives to white conceptions of grief.

I listened to the interview sections via audiobook and found Camille’s voice incredibly soothing.

There is so much here was I will keep thinking about and returning to. In particular, how the definition of what “normal” grief is, how it should be expressed, and how long it should last are shaped by productivity and individualism. I was really inspired by the community grief work discussed throughout.

[lizzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

Tending Grief is a beautiful book that celebrates the absolute torture that is grief. It is a heartbreaking, heart-wrenching, atrocious part of what makes us human and this book serves as a reminder that we are allowed to feel the feelings we have. I appreciated that this book wasn't just "pray and they're in heaven" it was an actual view of the way people in different cultures grieve.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend, such a necessary book. Thank you sharing this with us. As someone who has (like many of us) had various waves of grief throughout my life, finding and reading this book has shown me that this work is lifelong and now I set aside time as often as I can to do the work that this book outlines.

[Zuzana · Rating 5 out of 5]

kapitola The Violence of the Void nejlepší, konečně oslovila pocity, které mám u čtení dekoloniálních knih - kde jsem já, co je "moje" kultura. není to vztažený na východní Evropu (po tom pořád toužím), ale na vykořenění bílých lidí. Jinak je tak kniha hodně moc čtivá a na konci je spousty truchlících cvičení a praxí k inspiraci, skvělý, miluju.

[Margot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend the audio book version. The narrator reads the book in a calming firm voice. There are exercises described in the second half that as really enhanced by listening to them being read aloud.

[sylas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so absolutely necessary. Both beautiful and practical.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Content of the book was not what the title made it seem, which was disappointing.

[Liz Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ch6 has grief rituals, if you listen on Spotify you can use it as a guided ritual

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Good basics on the importance of grief in our movement spaces. Wish there could have been more to the rituals part.