Mourning is cited as a need on the Nonviolent Communication needs list, paired with its counterpart: joy. Along with many others, I believe that we have largely lost the capacity to mourn, and that this loss costs us more than we realize, including in our most intimate relationships.
Join me in this episode as I draw on the work of environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao, whose Aeon essay *How to Mourn a Forest* documents the mourning practices of the Marind people of West Papua, a community whose ancestral lands are being destroyed by oil palm plantation expansion. What the Marind offer is a glimpse into what I call active mourning, not the private collapse of grief, but a deliberate, communal practice of turning toward loss rather than away from it.
I also touch on how, in my work with couples, it's not uncommon for one of the individual's parents to have recently died and how unbeknownst to them, residual feelings from childhood will quietly resurface within the relationship in surprising ways.
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**Referenced in this episode:**
Sophie Chao — *How to Mourn a Forest*, Aeon Magazine, 23 May 2023
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-mourn-a-forest-a-lesson-from-west-papua
Marshall Rosenberg — Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Stephen Jenkinson — *Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul*
"Grief is not a feeling, it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you — we are not on the receiving end of grief, we are on the practising end of grief."
The Marind song in this episode was composed by Andreas, a Marind youth, and is quoted within Sophie Chao's essay:
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