Dear becoming ones: This week’s Friday Care Package brings together last week’s focus on collapse and care and extends it into grief work. I hope you enjoy the work on care that we are nurturing.
Friday Care Package
Tending Grief, Tending Care
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” — Joan Didion
Last week, I wrote about care in collapse—about putting care into the cracks of empire, where necropolitics scripts death and disposability. This week, I find myself circling grief, not as interruption to care but as its very form. To tend grief is to put care into everything.
Jennifer C. Nash reminds us that grief is evidence—that the photograph, the letter, the intimate archive stands as witness to the fragile texture of love and loss. In her How We Write Now, she treats mourning not as paralysis but as theory in motion, a way of documenting how love leaves traces in us. Nash’s work shows us that grief is not absence—it is memory preserved as care, a refusal to let disappearance have the last word.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes grief beyond the archive into the oceanic, into the deep time of collective and ecological mourning. In Undrowned, she insists that survival itself is a promise, that every breath we take is in conversation with marine ancestors who have known captivity and yet live otherwise. Gumbs teaches us that grief is porous, tidal, a communal fugitive practice that teaches us to breathe together. Grief here is not a private ache but a shared worldmaking form.
Candice Iloh gives us grief as embodied becoming. Their novels Every Body Looking and Break This House channel the tremors of parental loss and addiction into queer self-making. In Iloh’s work, grief is not the end of the story but the opening of a new one—the messy, emergent self that rises through tending sorrow. Their writing insists: grief is intimate self-care, grief is emergence, grief is the tender work of becoming otherwise.
Together, these Black feminist voices converge on one truth:
grief work is care work.
When we tend to the insatiable grief around us, we are not merely lamenting what has been lost. We are tending the soil of our collective becoming. We are sharing our futuring forms with one another. We are practicing a politics of tenderness that refuses to let empire dictate what lives are grievable and what loves are worth remembering.
Grief is not ornamental—it is insurgent. It is what teaches us to live into the prophetic future of becoming, where care and loss are not opposites but companions.
The question I leave you with:
How might we grieve together as a form of care? How might our shared mourning become a fugitive worldmaking practice that nurtures life even in collapse?
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in loss.
Breathe out care.
Breathe in memory.
Breathe out emergence.
Breathe in grief.
Breathe out becoming.
Closing Poem
We hold the letters,
we breathe with the tide,
we rise through the tremor of our own becoming.
Grief is not the end,
but the care we lend one another—
an archive, an ocean,
a body breaking open
toward tomorrow.