Help Bilen Launch Grief and Loss Work

Ten years ago, I launched my first GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for birth and postpartum doula training. After dealing with severe burnout and the initial stages of chronic illness, I knew I needed to shift gears by prioritizing healing while serving my community in a different capacity. I knew I could not do this alone, boot-strapping my way as a good eldest immigrant daughter would. Instead, I asked for and received funds to bless this pivot. To the many hands and hearts that held me through that time, I owe you everything! I established a doula practice that served over 450 families in the tri-state area. For those of you that chose me to be by your side as you welcomed your littles, know the honor you bestowed upon me has fed me in so many ways. Your trust and faith have nourished me and I thank you endlessly.

March 2020 brought this work to a sudden and grinding halt. I contracted COVID-19 and nearly lost my life. I now suffer from Long Covid and continue to fight many daily battles with this virus. As lockdown spring gave way to summer uprisings, I found myself ruminating on grief and the nature of this particular beast that brings us all to our knees. Witnessing complex and compounding losses that disproportionately affect people of the global majority with marginalized identities lent a sense of urgency to step into death doula/grief guide work. The dominant death-phobic and grief-illiterate culture require healers to reclaim our lost rite/rituals and make new ways to carry or be with grief and death. There is an amazing opportunity for collective healing and liberation in this space.

This is where you come in. I am once again reaching out to my beloved community and beyond, to ask for help and blessings in my grief guide and death doula work. I have completed a grief literacy series with Being Here, Human and I started End-of-Life Doula training with Going with Grace. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it has exposed how badly we need to revisit our relationships to grief, dying, and death. We need tending to and I feel called to do this work with you. With your support, I plan to offer a bevy of possibilities to acknowledge and alchemize our grief so we can approach it from an instructional or generative perspective, where embodiment is possible and healing beings. Your support will go toward the costs of training, multimedia production, and survival funds (including fundraising fees!) as I dive deep into this important work. I thank you for witnessing and supporting me.