‘I Was Never Told About the Sorrow’: A Critical Narrative on Embracing Grief as a Practice for Healing and Possibility

• In Event: Grief as a Portal to the Past, Present, and Future: Narratives of Educators of Color

Abstract

Objectives & Research Question
Interest in grief research has grown, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the need for resources to process grief among teachers and students (Cariaga, 2023). Factors like increased state repression, climate disasters, and multiple genocides contribute to ongoing and prolonged grief (Gaur, 2025). Prior to the pandemic, there was a movement to bring trauma-informed practices and social emotional learning to schools (Camangian & Cariaga, 2022; Simmons, 2019). However, there is still a lack of guidance for teacher educators (Goodwin, 2014) on how to support teachers and students experiencing grief and trauma (Hannegan-Martinez, 2023). This paper examines grief as a powerful practice for healing and knowing for teacher educators. I share my walk with grief as a Salvadoran woman, educator, and scholar, and seek to answer the following research questions: 1) What understandings arise from engagement with grief? Furthermore, 2) What pedagogical approaches do I take up because of my embodied relationship with grief?

Theory
Moved by Meyer’s Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of Meaning (2008) and her call for remembering “what is valuable about life and living, knowledge and knowing (p. 3), I turn to the categories of ‘Spirituality and Knowing’ and ‘Physical Place and Knowing’ to understand the spirit-driven knowledge we gain when we take up grief as a practice and the way that Land helps us in understanding that knowledge and ourselves (Meyer, 2008; Deloria, 2001; Simpson 2019).

Methods/Sources
This study utilizes narrative inquiry as it is “...inspired by a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives” (Clandinin, 2006, p. 45). I employ a narrative approach, since “stories allow the listener to draw their conclusions and to gain life lessons from a more personal perspective” (Wilson, 2008, p. 17). I blended narrative inquiry and autoethnography (Chang, 2008) to both engage in reflexive inquiry (Cole & Knowles, 2000) and construct a narrative of a Central American woman, educator, and scholar learning to be in an embodied relationship with grief while serving as an instructional coach and attempting to complete my doctoral studies at a university in Los Angeles. To that end, the study draws on data that includes artifacts, audio recordings, and reflective memos collected between 2018 and 2024.

Findings & Significance
This study revealed how an embodied practice of grief led me to new forms of ‘meaning making’ that supported my healing and wholeness (Stuhr, 2021; Hannegan-Martinez & Cariaga, 2023). I not only kept the spirits of my deceased loved ones alive and near (Bracho, 2023) but also created conditions for me to come to know an epistemology of spirit (Lara, 2002; Meyer, 2008). This spirit of knowing led me to Indigenous women who generously shared with me Indigenous Land and Water pedagogies. Grief, Spirit, and Land have become essential to my reflective practice, pedagogy, and storying. Through our embracing of grief we can be led out of despair and into new ways of knowing and relationality necessary for the forging of liberatory futures.

Author

• Sara Jasmin Diaz-Montejano, University of California - Los Angeles