Breeshia Wade

Breeshia Wade holds a BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University and an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago. She completed Upaya Zen Center’s two-year Buddhist chaplaincy program. Wade served as a hospice and palliative care end-of-life caregiver in Los Angeles County. Over the past five years, she has supported people through grief and transitions as a birth doula and a lay-ordained Buddhist chaplain working in jails, on the mother and baby units of hospitals, and in people’s homes. Wade uses her practice as an end-of-life caregiver to encourage those who are not facing illness, death, or dying to be open to what grief can teach them about relationship, life, failure, sex, and desire. She wishes to expand the world’s conception of grief beyond concrete loss and to call attention to the numerous ways our experiences of grief impact the way we (mis)understand power, craft self-image, and approach boundaries, conflict, and accountability. Breeshia is the author of "Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow."

Articles:

Grieving While Black: Everyday Grief

Grieving While Black Often when people imagine what it means for Black lives to matter, they focus on the explicit death of Black people, like those caused by police violence. But Black people don’t just face death at the barrel of a policeman’s gun. Life is taken from us on a daily basis, through housing discrimination; through the inability to get or maintain a job that allows us to pay rent, have health insurance, and buy food; and through under-compensation. After spending years working in environments that were toxic, at best, I found a company where I felt I could […]

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Navigating Grief in the NICU

Grief in the NICU I remember my first day on the NICU like it was yesterday. I walked the floors filled with so much self-doubt and fear, afraid to make a practice of people’s lives and to perhaps cause irreparable harm that they would spend years, maybe even a lifetime, trying to undo. Holding the current census in my hand, I looked for the patients who had been there longest in order to determine who would need a visit soon. Then I stopped by the nurse’s station to get their assessment of the patients. When I introduced myself as the […]

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