Although the Western concept of grief paints it as a private, individual process with distinct "stages" heavily influenced by the Kubler-Ross model, the reality is much messier, and it is often communal. Activist, social worker, yoga teacher and devoted daughter Michelle Cassandra Johnson explores the impact of collective grief and offers some tools for healing in her second nonfiction book, Finding Refuge.
Through personal stories--including her mother's long struggle against a racist health-care system that marginalized her experience as a Black woman--Johnson explores how grief builds up in the body and spirit, continuing to affect individual and communal wellness until it is acknowledged and released. Each chapter offers meditation resources, journaling prompts and other suggestions for facing, naming and even embracing grief, as opposed to hiding from it or denying it. With deep compassion, raw honesty and flaring anger at the systems that seek to bury grief, Johnson (Skill in Action) points toward a new way of dealing with sorrow. She discusses the ongoing racial trauma of living as a Black American, her experience as a novice beekeeper and her journey of tapping into various spiritual practices to nourish herself and move forward. The end goal is not denial or "perfection," but wholeness: an emergence into a stronger place where people can make space for their pain and then grow past it. Both challenging and comforting, Finding Refuge seems particularly apt for the current moment of racial unrest, widespread disease and political change. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams