Processing grief: Salt Trails Philly’s annual event uses gathering, rituals and art to normalize, explore grief

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More than a dozen attendees lined up at the Salt Trail Philly table at Vernon Park on Saturday for the Carrying Our Grief event.

Participants were invited to write down what they were grieving on a sticky note. The notes were placed in a basket carried around on a group walk, and later burned.

The annual event is part of Salt Trails Philly mission to help those who feel isolated in grief connect with others in the community. Co-founder Naila Francis said she launched the organization to normalize grief and the grieving process.

“So many times we grieve alone and in isolation, and we think grief has to be very private in this culture,” she said. “When the truth is, grieving was always meant to be a communal practice. We just want to give the public spaces where they can come, without judgment, and be held by compassion and ritual and music and movement to help them process their grief.”

Salt Trails Philly hosts year-round events that include art making, participating in ancestral practices, storytelling and community gathering.

The organization’s first “Grief Processional” was in 2021. Although it was supposed to be an isolated event, Francis said “hunger” for the group’s offerings kept them going.

“[With this processional], we wanted to make a public statement that grieving is natural and normal and nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “And can we actually reclaim this as worthy of honor and worthy of lifting up in the same way that we talk about babies coming into our lives and weddings and meeting someone and falling in love? Grief is such a normal part of the human experience, why is it so stigmatized? So just wanting to help sort of break that stigma and invite people into places of care.”

Francis said the event is curated to give participants the agency to explore and express their grief in their own way.

“It’s not necessarily so much a space to learn about grief as a chance for people to really feel their grief and express it and move it,” she said. “We bring in singing, we bring in embodiment and meditation practices, and we often have drumming … it really is giving people multiple access points to tap into their grief.”

On Saturday, the processional featured movement, music and ritual for attendees to explore and express their sadness. The collective grieving experience began with a brief song by the Philly Threshold Singers.

Suzanne Noll, a Chestnut Hill resident, has been singing with the Threshold Singers for many years. She said the group’s main focus is to provide peace, comfort and love through music to those who are near death.

“Our songs are beautiful and comforting,” she said. “We pay a lot of attention to what’s happening with people on their bedside [or who are near death].”

Singing helps to boost the experience, said Amanda Green-Hull, a Mt. Airy resident and Threshold singer.

“[I think it’s amazing to] see individuals coming together and watching people move from an individual to a collective,” she said. “And how they start to open up as they share their grief and listen to other people’s grief and realize that we’re not alone in that. And they are able to come together as a community and do something so human and so normal, to be sad and to witness people in their sadness and hold each other together, I think in these days and times, I think it’s important for us to remember that we are truly all human and we really can take care of each in the hard times.”

Francis reminded the gathering about the purpose of the event.

“We’re here to publicly and radically declare that our grief matters and to show who or what we love,” she said.

Suzannah Hartzell, a Germantown resident, said she has been participating with different Salt Trails events since the pandemic.

“There’s kind of been a lot of overlapping griefs, both personal and national and global, all compounded,” she said. “I think it’s kind of awesome to be in a space where we gather in community.”

Hartzell said that the collective nature of the Salt Trails Philly events makes processing this grief easier.

“I think it’s important to make visible what is otherwise kind of a private experience,” she said. “And I think so many of our griefs are overlapping and connected. So there’s a healing element to come together and realize whatever you’re dealing with is not disconnected from what other people are dealing with,” she said.

At various park gates, participants stopped and reflected — going over a grief framework.

“One of the things that we do is walk people through a framework for grief that was given by psychotherapist Francis Weller,” Francis said. “So it’s really an opportunity to name and acknowledge some of the griefs that we don’t get to in our everyday lives.”

Laughter, tears and silence filled the air at different times during the walk.

Megan Dwyer, an organizer with Salt Trails Philly, led a grounding ritual. Participants were encouraged to observe the surrounding nature, ground their feet in the grass and practice mindful breathing.

“If it ever gets tough on the inside, can you ever bring yourself to the outside to find something good or beautiful to look at or feel?” she asked.

The group then processed weaving in and around Germantown’s Vernon Park.

Francis explained previous processionals are always guided by the participants who show up, and the kinds of grief they are experiencing.

“We’re living in very intense times, and so we may come [to the event] and we arrive with a plan, and we know what we’re going to do, but so much also can be shaped by who shows up and how people engage and how they participate,” she said.

For Francis, one of the most special parts of the experiences are seeing people feeling validated in all the forms of grief they may feel.

“Some of us are grieving the way that our lives have turned out,” she said. “ Maybe the disappointments or the expectations that we had that never came to fruition. Some of us are grieving things that have been passed down through our ancestral line and this doesn’t even cover the broad swath of griefs that people could bring into this space.”

Francis said the organization aims to normalize all grief, even when it shows up in unconventional ways.

“I will say one of the things that tends to get people a lot is what we expected and did not get,” she said. “I think that’s a grief that almost anybody can relate to, but we don’t really get room to express that in this society. We’re not allowed to grieve the way our lives have turned out, or all the things that we thought would happen to us and they didn’t, or the lost dreams and the lost hopes. There’s still such a limited perception of what we’re allowed to grieve, limited permission given to what we’re allowed to grieve.”