30. Confronting Grief With Keisha Wells

The Secret Lives of Black Women

The Secret Lives of Black Women and Stitcher

Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Black women are constantly exposed to death in our private lives and in the media, but we rarely talk about the process of grieving. Lauren has been grappling with her own grief for decades after losing her father at nine and Charla is hoping to learn new ways to support her loved ones through unfathomable losses. In this episode, they talk with licensed grief counselor Keisha Wells about ways to manage the various manifestations of grief, and whether it’s even possible to truly overcome a loss. You can find more about The SLBW at https://www.instagram.com/theslbw/ Follow SLBW on Twitter and Instagram @theslbw Follow Keisha Wells @kwellslpc and pick up her book “From Three Heartbeats to One: A Gentle Companion in Grieving Pregnancy and Infant Loss”

Transcript

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0:00.0	grief hits you all over. It's not just on an emotional level, but it also can reach your life physically as well.
0:09.0	Going through the experience of grief and loss has put me in a position, you know, to be able to help and
0:14.8	nurture and support others who are dealing with that. So I feel like that's a way of
0:19.5	keeping that connection there. Grief is unscripted.
0:24.0	There are no rules to that.
0:25.6	So it's gonna look different at different ages
0:28.8	and different stages and different times
0:30.4	throughout your lifetime.
0:32.3	This is the secret lives of black women. I'm
0:34.4	Charlotte and I'm Lauren and today we're talking about grief which is a huge
0:40.8	subject in itself particularly for black people. In 2017 there was a study
0:46.4	held by researchers at the University of Texas Austin that found black Americans
0:51.8	are three times more likely to lose a mother,
0:55.0	twice is likely to lose a father,
0:57.5	and more than twice is likely to lose a child by the age of 30.
1:02.0	So there's a lot of like personal grief that's happening in our
1:07.5	community. I mean I've experienced this I feel I don't know whenever I see a
1:12.2	statistic and you're like a part of the
1:15.9	statistic it's like very heartbreaking like I lost my dad when I was nine and just to
1:21.8	see like oh I'm a part of this huge number of people
1:23.8	who've lost a parent. Yeah. But 430 actually is making me like a little emotional.
1:29.2	Understandably. But aside from the personal grief, there's also the collective grief of being black.
	...

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