Photo by ZOA Photography. 2026

I move at what I call a savorist’s pace, making space for what I cannot control in my body, in my relationships, in the world. Grief literacy isn’t a concept to rock with, it’s a way to try to live, by staying honest about what we’ve lost, and trusting the wisdom of our tender places. My role is to help folks unravel what that could look like for themselves and their people. Not to bring answers necessarily, but to ask the rarely-asked questions.

• Akilah S. Richards

Most of us were never taught to name what we’ve lost unless someone died. But grief shows up in breakups, job loss, estrangement, aging out of identities, the gap between our dreams and our realities — and all of it deserves tending.

So much of our personal and collective stuckness comes from things we haven’t let ourselves grieve:

• Unspoken disappointments passed through generations
• The versions of ourselves we thought we’d be
• Ways we’ve been taught to bypass our pain
• The times we’ve been deepened by loss and couldn’t name it

This work is an invitation to slow down and uncover what we’re really carrying. This slow-down will not ‘fix’ it, but it will honor the weight and wisdom loss brings. Because what we grieve intentionally teaches us how to live more honestly.

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Grief literacy as I practice it includes endings like: breakups, divorce, job/identity transitions, family role changes, the loss of health, safety, or autonomy, and the space between our expectations and reality.

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Grief literacy is a deepening of the liberation work I’ve been doing for years. I came to understand, through my own unraveling and the stories of those I’ve walked with, that so much of what we’re hungry for is permission to grieve.

For more than a decade, my work as a partner, parent, and community-weaver has been about unlearning the parts of our conditioning that keep us trapped in shame, scarcity, and separation. First through Fare of the Free Child podcast and my work in Self-directed Education, while moving through my own family’s messy journey of shedding harmful relational patterns.

What I noticed was that every time I created space for people to get honest about loss, unlived dreams, and the things they hadn’t let themselves feel--something exhaled. In them and between us.

So I went to seminary and after a year and half, started studying death and grief more formally — through several trainings, hospice volunteering, and certification in Integrative Thanatology (the holistic study of dying, death, and bereavement). But I also kept studying it in the rawest laboratory there is: my own life and relationships.

The pandemic years brought so much of this to the surface. Among other things, I shed a certain identity in my work as a mother, and found myself reckoning with massive relationship shifts alongside collective loss. There were no ceremonies for most of what died in those years. But there was a whole lot of truth-telling in that darkness.

What I carry from that time is a deep commitment to helping others develop the literacy I needed. The grief work I practice now is a love letter to anyone trying to navigate endings in a world that prefers neat stories, TikTok inspired solutions, and quick rebounds. It’s for all of us learning to live with things we just cannot change.