Episode 58: Grief as a Doorway with Melissa Word
In this episode, I sit down with artist and death midwife Melissa Word to explore grief as a doorway into the vast field of information that lives at the core of the psyche. We talk about what it means to retrieve the scattered parts of ourselves—the aspects of self that have been lost across timelines, memories, events, and family systems—and bring them home to reify our own wholeness.
Melissa shares her philosophy of tending to grief through creative practice, from the improvisational quilting work of Grief Threads to the somatic, embodied approach she brings to all her facilitation. We discuss the underworld not as a place of peril but as fertile ground where parts of us have been steeping, learning, gathering intelligence we can't access through conscious striving.
This conversation is for anyone who has avoided their grief work, who has wondered why we can't just skip to the good part, or who senses that creativity and loss are more intimately connected than our culture acknowledges.
Topics We Explore
Grief as retrieval: collecting the parts of ourselves scattered in the underworld
The daffodil bulb teaching: why some things require deep darkness to grow
The intelligence of hands and what fabrics can teach us about loss
Why grief work makes us honest—and why avoiding it makes us a liability
Ritual, creativity, and what gets recalibrated at the level of soul
The symbiosis between personal grief and collective healing
Getting free: what happens when the roots go deep enough
Melissa is an artist, dancer, movement coach, grief and death doula, and quilter.
She's lived 20 lives since '89—professional dancer and choreographer turned museum educator, turned Baby Rave facilitator, turned textile artist, turned rural farmer, turned death midwife. And back to dancer. Always back to dancer.
In 2021, she founded Grief Threads, a seasonal online workshop on creative grief processing through sewing, quilting, and art-based ritual. In 2024, she completed a nine-month death midwifery training through Nine Keys School of Death Arts and has been fully rearranged by the ongoing project of living in death-awareness.
Her work is observing the world in front of her, putting her body in proximity to beauty, and metabolizing this life research into her art and facilitation practice.
Connect with Melissa
About the Soft, Earthen Futures Podcast
Soft, Earthen Futures is a podcast about imagining and crafting a more whole world. We explore what it means to stand at the threshold between what has been and what is trying to emerge—tending to that in-between space, listening for what the earth is dreaming through us, and giving those visions form. This show is for wild-hearted creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Hosted by Daje Aloh.
