Good Grief: laid to rest on Playa.

By A. E. Teller

Collective healing is one way to honor your lost ones.

I started a new job this week as a Brand Ambassador for a cannabis company. I was feeling the need to get out of my house and start building my community here, and frankly, there’s no greater community than stoner folk.

Immediately impressed with the company, from product to presentation, I was a fan right out of the gate. They’re a legacy brand, #dope with an award-winning rosin vape made the purest way, babe... just the way I like it: ice, water, hash, and heat…

But what caught my eye most about this exceptional brand is that Jetty Extract's Shelter Project gives away $1.2M in product to cancer patients…

Cannabis, and the community that came with this wonderful plant, have supported me in my healing. In my own PTSD support group, the testimonials of the ways this plant heals is remarkable.

The medicine extends beyond terpene profiles and chemical compounds; it is in the connection within the community. Healing together from whatever ails…

At one dispensary I visited this week, a customer and I got to talking about how much healing happens just sharing a smoke and a story or two with other stoners who just get it. He wasn’t wrong. I can’t tell you how many breakthroughs I’ve had in smoke sessions with others.

I feel honored to represent a company that provides these opportunities to cancer patients.

I am reminded of my time at the Temple at Burning Man last summer (‘24) when I was grieving a transformational loss, saying goodbye to someone I loved deeply. I was there with an art installation designed by my build/business partner, Sheck called The Chapel of Reflection, a meditative temple in honor of the daughter he lost to cancer that year.

I met Sheck after her passing, but he has become a person I treasure more than most. We grieved together over our prospective losses at the Temple in silence. Each grieving women whose passings forever changed us in different ways.

Since it was time to let go of the past, I also took part in a “memorial” service for the mother I lost when I left the church.

I wrote her an honest letter, performed a cord-cutting ceremony, and wept as though she were truly gone until my tears softened to warm acceptance, remembering the moments that mattered, leaving the rest to burn on playa.

As we were standing to leave, a procession of musicians and artists came in singing hymns and playing instruments. I froze there as they sang my mother’s favorite three hymns in a row. They were grieving a member of their theme camp who had also passed from cancer.

Tears fell fast and hot as I allowed those songs to serve as confirmation from my guides that together with strangers, united in grieving mothers. Saying goodbye with grace.

As her husband spoke of her wonderful, loving energy, I imagined their children, how he would comfort them as they longed for her?

I sat with my own little one (inner child). I saw her ache, like those children, for mama’s touch. I reminded her that grief is the evidence of love, lost. 

I told her, “We loved her big much, didn’t we, little one?”

It may sound morbid, I suppose, to think of celebrating a passing before its time. But, it might help you understand that for foster kids, and the spiritually orphaned, the cult kids cut from the family tree… we deal with ambiguous loss. It’s like a long pause, until you remember them and then the sting of knowing they’re gone but not really though…it just cuts deep.

My mother said to me when I got a divorce that she would make sure that when she died, no one would tell me because I wasn’t invited to her funeral. I would not be allowed to grieve with my family.

Those words haunted me, stabbing me in the heart every time I thought of her. Every time I wanted to reach for her, to tell her of how wonderful my life was becoming, I had to remind myself again and again that it was not healthy for me.

So, I had to grieve on my own. In the desert, with strangers who came to sing over the death of my mother, the playa providing her favorite hymns in honor of a daughter who will forever love a mother she lost when she chose to live.

Holding hands with the man who loved his daughter and lost her too soon, together, we grieve. From that experience, I wrote a poem called Mausoleum in honor of his significant loss.

If death is inescapable, then loss is inevitable. That is the great unifier: together we are united in the evidence of our love, lost: grief.

Also, check out Jetty Extracts... They're a really dope company with an award-winning solventless vape. Definitely worth scoping them out if you're into it...