Have You Eaten Yet?
When we call our parents, the first thing we hear is not “hello! how are you?” But, if “Have you eaten yet? Are you eating enough? What did you have for breakfast? What will you cook for dinner?” Food is our love language, it’s how we convey our love and our worries. So what happens when we lose a parent, or we are worried about future loss? How do we walk this new path of feeling untethered?
How do we grieve the loss of our parents? How do we find comfort and navigate this period of grief? How will we remember our culture and traditions when our links to our past are no longer here. How will we honor the stories of struggle and celebrate and cultivate joy? How will we enjoy our comfort foods again?
Join us for 4 weeks as we collectively navigate this deep loss through our shared love of food, culture, tradition, and ritual. We will also learn more about the language of grief and find new ways of integrating the wisdom of grief into our lives.
This is for anyone who has experienced parental loss or if you are feeling anxious about the future and wondering how you can navigate this period with more support, care and comfort.
Roshni Kavate is an Artist, Healer, and Activist. Roshni Kavate is the Founder and Creative Director of Cardamom and Kavate, a wellness platform dedicated to reclaiming nourishing practices rooted in ancestral wisdom for collective liberation. She believes grief is a portal to wholeness. Through rituals and storytelling, we can reconnect to our origins and be our wild selves. She sees the path to being whole as a radical art and political practice. The question that guides her is What is our grief craving? and how can we nourish and feed it?
Roshni earned a B.S in Nutritional Sciences from UC Berkeley, a B.S in Nursing from NYU with honors and Ayurveda Post Partum Caregiver Training from The Center for Sacred Window Studies. She is also trained in Urban Zen Integrative Yoga Therapy to provide complementary holistic care to people with serious illness. Roshni has over a decade of Nursing experience in both clinical and leadership positions working with diverse populations in New York City, Los Angeles and Oakland. Her work has spanned from working as birth doula, transplant ICU nurse, home health nurse and to an end of life nurse. Most recently she worked as a Palliative Care Nurse at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.
Roshni's early childhood was marked by the grief her mother and ancestors experienced by living on the margins based on gender and caste. Similarly in the United States, as a Nurse, Roshni witnessed racialized trauma and its lasting impact on the health and wellness of communities of color. Combining her interest in art, wellness and advocacy she has launched a startup, Cardamom and Kavate to reimagine what it means to embody our freedom and live in our pleasure. She has been grateful to use her nursing skills on service trips abroad and learn from traditional healers in India and Guatemala. Roshni grew up in India and California and enjoys cooking, hand building ceramics, swimming in the ocean, studying plant medicine and natural dyeing.
Tida Beattie is an end-of-life doula, community educator, and grief activist. Tida is an American-born daughter of Thai immigrants who immigrated in the mid-60s. She is a co-founder of MESO which is dedicated to providing resources and support for immigrants and their families at the intersection of heritage, culture, care, loss, and grief
Tida trained with Doulagivers, Denise Love’s Life Options, and has gratefully started volunteer training with Zen Caregiving Project. She has produced community-education events such as “Multicultural Immigrant Experiences with End of Life”, “How to Talk To Your KidsParents About SexDeath”, “Grief Through An Immigrant Lens”, “Go Back To Your Country”, “My Dreams, Your Dreams”, “Remembering Our Mothers: A Writing Practice”, and “Next-Gen Grief”.
Tida serves on the AANHPI leadership council for the national non-profit, “Compassion and Choices”, which is working toward the legislation of medical aid-in-dying laws in all 50 states. Tida has had a rich career prior to turning to end-of-life work: she is a recovering restaurant manager and a former Accenture consultant. She earned her MBA from Thunderbird and her BA in international relations at Johns Hopkins University. Tida lives in northern California with her spouse, 2 teenagers, and COVID dog. She loves exploring local farmers markets wherever she is, listening to BTS, and eating really good food. She is dreaming of creating a spiritual grief retreat in Bali.
