The Juncture talks to The Nightside
Rebecca Pardo of The Nightside finds an evolutionary path to grief
Rebecca Pardo’s introduction to death work was at Facebook where she worked on Memorialization (Memorialization refers to what happens after an account holder dies). What does the design of a memorialized profile look like? How do you do that in a culturally sensitive way? The work proved fulfilling, expanded her horizons, and proved influential on what came next.
During her time at Facebook, Rebecca, who has a PhD in cultural anthropology, embarked on a research project of cross-cultural grieving practices (the photos in this article are from her research). She eventually launched The Nightside (her Junction owned and operated business) to help organizations create more supportive experiences around loss. Since then, Rebecca trained as a death doula and is passionate about working with communities – individuals, families, and groups – to promote death awareness and support people in their end-of-life journeys. “I believe everyone should know the options that they have and then choose what’s right for them,” Rebecca told me. “Part of being a death doula is the education on options.” She provides support with all aspects of loss, including death planning, bereavement, vigiling and ceremony, and legacy and memorialization projects.
Recently, Rebecca and I met to discuss The Nightside and her vision behind her “death-positive” installation gracing the windows of Type Books Junction in October. Quoting Claire Bidwell Smith (a grief specialist and author of the 2024 book Conscious Grieving), Rebecca proffered: “People are robbed of the grief they deserve.”
Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, began on the topic of our pets.
- Josh
Rebecca: I always tell people I have a dead dog and an alive dog.
Josh: Well I have a dead cat, and I also have an alive cat.
What’s your alive cat’s name? And your dead cat’s name?
The alive cat is named Cookie after Cookie Mueller, and the dead cat was named She-Ra. She-Ra came into my life just as I moved to Toronto at the age of eighteen, so she was tied-in with my journey into adulthood. Fast forward fifteen years and she passed suddenly during the pandemic – some kind of accident, we still don’t know what happened – and it was devastating for me and my young family. We were already experiencing all sorts of grief. And yet it blindsided me, the loss of a pet. I remember I didn’t want to be in a room alone because I felt the emptiness, the vacuum of She-Ra’s absence. The emptiness was like a person. For example, She-Ra always curled up in my lap when I read books, and I thought “Oh I read all these books alone, by myself, in moments of solitude,” but no – I always read them with her, with another being there. And during the lockdowns I had so much time to feel my pain.
Yeah, losing a pet is crushing. With my alive dog I try to think that loving a pet is practice. It’s like practicing love in the context of knowing there’s an expiration date. You know that most likely you’ll outlive them, and there’s a way to use that knowledge to practice love with non-attachment. Because nothing lasts. Loving pets can be instructive in that way. It doesn’t make it hurt any less, but I try to, sometimes, think of that.
Right. So you’re thinking: to love without attachment is ‘love practice.’
Yeah, because we’re going to lose everyone. And with pets we know we’re going to lose them within ten years, fifteen years, and we have to reconcile that with the love, learning how love with that spectre of loss helps us with other types of grief. And it helps too with loving people – family and others – keeping in mind that none of this will stay.
In terms of grieving pets with ceremony, what do you find helpful? Sometimes a pet doesn’t have a large community of people. It’s often just a household or one person.
Any kind of ritual in ceremony is helpful. What’s comforting will be different for different people and different animals, but making a point to intentionally commemorate that moment is helpful for everyone.
I can tell you some things that I did when my dog Quincy died. I’d been doing cross-cultural research and learning about different death practices – things I wouldn’t have previously thought to incorporate. For example, I’d learned about the healing power of spending time with corpses. For Quincy, I had an at-home euthanasia, which was a blessing, and after the vet left, my friend and I did some ceremonies and rituals. One of the things was spending time with the body. If I hadn’t been exposed to this from other people I would have found it scary and creepy. But my friend, a Buddhist chaplain and my death mentor, walked me through what to expect: his body will get a little bit stiff, his nose will get cold, and his eyes might open. I said OK, and I kept him for a few hours. I laid with him and I cried with him and I hugged him and I told him all the things I wanted to say and I thanked him for all of the things I wanted to thank him for. It was very powerful for me. I think it helped my brain understand his deadness, by feeling it happen, by feeling his limbs get cold and things. When someone dies there’s so few last opportunities to care for them. And so caring for a body is one of those privileges.
Afterwards, I created an altar for him – something that I learned about during my research in Mexico – and I used it as a space to communicate with him. I’d say good morning and goodnight to it. I would cry in front of it. I would lie down. It helped me feel very connected to him. All of these things together turned something in me. I felt like I was high on gratitude. I was grieving, I was feeling so much intense pain, but it was overshadowed by the gratitude for what I had learned from this experience and the beauty of it.
The gifts that grief provides is something people don’t talk about enough. Grief has so much to teach us and so much to give us. And the dying have so much to teach us. Moments of dying and death and grief are moments where we touch the things we don’t usually touch, which are the mysteries of life. We touch these sacred mysterious spaces where weird things happen, or we don’t know what exactly is happening, and that can create magic. That’s what I experienced, and I was so grateful for that.
In a lot of ways it’s a privilege to be able to have that kind of death. Not every person can have the kind of death that my dog was able to have, or that I was able to have with him. That was an important experience that made me passionate about proselytizing the idea that, no matter what your situation is and how many choices are taken away from you, there are always choices you or loved ones can make before, after, and during death. Identifying opportunities for agency and being intentional about these choices can be transformative.
My dog’s death changed my life.
I’m thinking about how grief is love. There is no grief if there is no love. But people know where to direct love. When we speak about agency with love, there are ways to show it, to express it, to validate it. Whereas grief can be thought of as love with nowhere to go. But you’re saying: No, there’s life after that, there’s still life to that love, there’s agency and decisions you can make.
Totally, I’ve heard this expression, “Grief is love with nowhere to go” and in some ways that feels true, but in other ways, the more we intentionally engage with grief, the more we can connect with our lost loved ones after they die. There’s a concept called continuing bonds. People used to have this idea that you do your grief work and you try to get past it. But now it’s understood that it’s normal and healthy to continue your relationship with the dead person. People keep their lost loved one’s phone numbers and text them if something happens. Or they’ll talk to them. A lot of people might be embarrassed to share these things that they do because it’s taboo and their behaviour might be considered unhealthy, but it actually is healthy. It’s normal. And it’s beautiful to keep and maintain those connections. Keep having the conversations you would have. If your loved one dies and you want to tell them something, tell them. Say it out loud, say it in your head, and think about what they’d say back. It honours them.
In our increasingly secular world, it’s very interesting to think about options. My wife and I had a kid a few years ago and we were thinking about birthing practices and different ways to think about birthing. In the accepted Western culture, birth is disseminated as very painful, medicalized, sterilized. It’s sometimes portrayed as unnatural. And we read this amazing book, Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth (Random House 2003), about trusting in the natural process of birth: this is what your body does and that the pain is something you can move through. So we had to open up our mind to this new way of thinking where our culture had let us down. And I’m assuming it’s the same with death. Can you give me an example in which that plays out?
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful parallel. There are so many parallels between birth and death. They say babies know how to be born. We know how to die, too. Our bodies know how to die. With birth we at least have a norm of planning ahead, thinking about these things and planning for them before they happen. But with death, often the planning happens under duress. You don’t have the opportunity to ask “what would be a meaningful ritual for me?” Even if people have written down what they wanted, often it’s limited. I feel strongly about death planning. It’s a lot nicer to be able to have the time to reflect on your values and what matters to you when you’re not confronting imminent death, or when your loved one’s just died and you’re trying to deal with a funeral home. That’s a difficult time to just begin the reflecting process. The more we can get people talking about these things, reflecting on what they want, planning, documenting, and communicating to their loved ones, that’s what everyone should be doing now, today. Then when that time comes we can be comforted by the fact that this will reflect what the dying person wanted. I love death doula Alua Arthur’s response to the question “When should people start planning for death?” She says, “When do you start planning for something you know is coming and could happen as early as tomorrow?”
I think a lot about how my life is different from my parents’ lives. With the climate crisis, wars, biodiversity loss, we’re in a constant state of grieving. There’s a lot of communal grieving. And of course there was lots of communal grieving before, but now we have new language (the term “climate grief” being a prime example). How has language informed the grieving process?
Climate grief and biodiversity loss are great examples of new types of grief. The younger generation is very aware of this constellation of grief including existential grief and grief for things like racial injustice, police brutality, or when things happen to public figures. Everyone is handling multiple griefs at once, at multiple scales: individual, community, generational and inter-generational, and global.
As far as how language impacts grief, the popularization of therapy language has been helpful in a lot of ways. A younger generation has a vocabulary for talking about mental health and emotional intelligence in ways that we didn’t previously. The same generation is also more engaged and interested in talking about death.
And how does language inform our perspective and our experience?
One thing, on a simple level, how do we use words like grief? What is the word used to describe? Sometimes using the word can provide legitimacy. It’s good for us to call climate grief “grief” because it is grief. And it’s good for us to call non-death losses “grief.” There’s lots of non-death grief – such as divorce, loss of identity, loss of childhood, grief of a future you’re not going to have, and if you’re diagnosed with an illness: anticipatory grief. Grief is a phenomenon that exists in all these different kinds of experiences. It’s good for us to practice engaging with it in all its forms. Death is only a specific kind. Death losses are a very specific kind of grief.
What a great answer. Legitimizing it, for sure.
There’s a concept called disenfranchised grief from Kenneth Doka. It’s used to refer to certain types of grief that aren’t validated by the community or aren’t recognized as such. I think pet loss, for example, is still culturally disenfranchised. It’s not always recognized or taken seriously. I think the more we can recognize and name it, the more these types of grief that are made invisible can be made visible, which then can become a huge comfort to people. And that exists for all kinds of taboos – death by suicide, violence, gang violence, homicide, when someone goes missing, or if someone has an illness that’s stigmatized, substance abuse related deaths, these things are often stigmatized and that grief is disenfranchised because there’s all kinds of blame associated with it. David Kessler, a renowned grief therapist, lost his child. When people would talk to him about all kinds of grief they had, some would say “how can you take my grief seriously when you had the worst one.” And he’d say: “No, the worst grief is whatever grief someone’s experiencing right now. Your grief is the worst grief. Period. We don’t compare.” The most important thing is for people’s grief to be witnessed and validated. So hopefully the language and the naming is helping with that.
Now, because grief is somewhat taboo, I’m often selling children’s books to people and they feel the concepts are too advanced or complex for young readers. Now, as a parent I would read to my child whatever picture books I thought were of the best quality, regardless of what the subject matter was – the thought being she would engage with it on whatever level she would at that time, starting with shapes and colours, character names, and then eventually the bigger concepts. But often the picture book on grief isn’t what the grandparent wants to buy their grandchild. So can you tell me, in no uncertain terms [both laugh], why it’s important to start young. Why is grief something that isn’t scary and should be talked about? The youngest people, we want to nurture and protect them, but grief is a part of life. We teach them to love, so why shouldn’t we teach them to love in this way?
First off, let’s caveat that parents know their kids best, and not every book is going to be a match for every child - a parent should certainly defer to their instincts about what will be helpful for their kid. That being said, kids are already curious about death. They’re naturally curious. They want to know. They are already encountering it.
That’s such a good point.
By the time they’re five they’ve seen plants die, they’ve maybe seen pets die or experienced loss of a grandparent. At minimum they’ve seen it happen in nature. And they’re starting to understand that death is part of life. I believe the most important thing with talking to kids about this stuff (whether it’s through a book or whether it’s answering their questions) is that the adult doesn’t frame it as a scary topic. The most important piece is to reassure that it’s OK to ask and that you’re OK to talk about it with them. Because then it takes it away from this black box of avoidance. It makes it less scary. This is part of life and information isn’t bad. In general, there’s lots of information that can be comforting. And the avoidance of answering their questions, or the avoidance of talking about it, makes it scary.
Last question: what are the names of your dogs?
My dead dog is Quincy, and my living dog is Tina.
To learn more about The Nightside, visit their website, and stop by the store to see Rebecca’s death-positive window installation. And for books on loss and grieving, you can browse a new shelf curated by Rebecca.