Breeshia Wade is a trailblazer in integrating grief with social initiatives. Her innovative approach stems from personal experience blended with extensive academic and professional expertise.

Current Focus and Contributions

Breeshia is the author of Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, ranked one of the top 9 books on grief, and is required reading in multiple graduate universities.

Grief Alchemy™ allows her to channel her experiences to support college students in transforming their grief into a source of empowerment and effective activism.

Academic and Professional Background
Breeshia holds a B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University and an M.A. in Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of Chicago.

Her expertise was further enriched by completing a two-year Buddhist Chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center, where she was lay-ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition.

In her professional roles as a Buddhist chaplain in hospices and hospitals, Breeshia identified how unaddressed grief among predominantly White medical staff impacted Black patients, contributing to medical racism. This realization underscored the need to address White grief to alleviate its impact on marginalized communities.

Breeshia now applies her insights by working in “big tech” where she examines how fear of loss affects corporate environments. Her work aims to foster inclusive, empathetic workplaces by addressing these underlying fears.

A Journey Shaped by Personal Experience
Breeshia Wade grew up across from a cemetery in a rural town in South Carolina. She had a close relationship with her grandfather as a baby. When she was around 1.5 years old, he suffered from an aneurysm.

According to her mother and uncle, as they were getting ready to go to the hospital, Breeshia suddenly arose from her nap and said, "Uh oh, E-R." Moments later, they received a call that he had died.

She remembers all of her dreams until the age of 8 because she always had the same three. In one of them, she would sit peacefully on her rocking horse in a blindingly white room. Every time she woke up, she knew that the room she was sitting in was her grandfather.

Her grandmother worked 12-hour shifts at a local factory so that she could send Breeshia to a private school.

She was the only Black child at school, and she suffered for it.

Her grandmother knew grief, and she saw Breeshia's. It was the form of grief that forced her grandmother to choose which aspects of her granddaughter's identity to let die at the hands of White supremacy—and how—so that she could get an education that might give her a future, enough time to stitch herself whole.

By the time she was 17, Breeshia had touched enough death to not know fear. Through the eyes of a dying woman who grieved the disembodiment of her rage. To the closed casket of a man who suffered mentally and died alone.

Her story began with life, grew with love, and deepened through grief.