From overcoming challenges like experiencing homelessness as a youth in Thunder Bay, to learning about traditional plant medicines and family history from her grandfather, Chrystal Toop shares some of the journey that led her to start Blackbird Medicines, a cultural wellness program where she now supports Indigenous people training to be end of life doulas.
She had been working as a birth doula, but when her grandfather had cancer and was going through chemotherapy, he taught Toop about traditional plant medicines, and also shared more about their family history.
“Getting all of these stories from my grandpa, and trying to find plant medicines to help him, it really kept pulling me towards that death doula work, and before long I was kind of in demand,” Toop said.
She says learning about the different types of grief is one of the biggest things people can do to mitigate the inevitable difficulties of dealing with death.
“There’s no right way to grieve,” she said. “Grief is messy, and for the most part it never actually ends.”
“When we understand the different types of grief and how we carry and express and deal with them, it can help us to manage living with grief better.”
Toop also spoke about her time growing up, including experiencing some time experiencing homelessness in her youth in northern Ontario in the 1990s.
“What people don’t really understand about street life, particularly when it comes to being a young person out there, there is a really strong sense of camaraderie, there’s a strong sense of looking out for each other,” she said.
“It was very common to meet people who had run away from group homes, people who had left family situations because they had come out and weren’t accepted, people who were escaping really bad situations.”
“One person got an apartment and they’d offer the group a place to stay. We watched out for each other, we were a family, and there was a really strong sense of right and wrong.”