Learning about death & dying is self-care
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My mom used to run a death group.
She had been a nurse, a therapist, and then went into spiritual guidance. She ran many groups in her time. The death group was based on the book, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine. The book is not necessarily for those who are actively dying, but rather for those who are living in a death-phobic culture wanting to practice dying. The group culminated in a ritual where each woman laid on the floor, the other women surrounding her, while she let go of life.
In the week before my death doula training starts, I think: I am clearly my mother’s daughter.
My interest in death has been blooming for the last few years. I started thinking about death work several years ago after my friend Alex died from colon cancer at age 33. But I talked myself out of it—feeling too afraid to interact with death head-on. In the last few years, the desire to learn about death and dying popped up again, and I felt more ready (and eager) to sink my teeth into it. I no longer feared it.
I have lost four grandparents, one uncle, and one friend. Death has not been an overwhelming presence in my life just yet. But the longer I live, the more I know it will be. I am learning to feel okay about that; about the death of others as well as my own death. I feel the least afraid of it now since beginning reading the required texts for my training.
As a person with various mental health issues, it was never death that I feared—it was discomfort and pain. That still feels true to some extent. Even though, I feel uncomfortable physically and/or emotionally most days of my life. Everyone would like a “comfortable” death, just like they’d want a “comfortable” life, but that’s not what death (or life) is about—nor will it be the thing that happens.
In Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson, he writes about the price we pay when we “over manage” a dying person’s death in the name of “comfort,”
We cannot… contain, control, limit, treat, anesthetize, or analyze that suffering to the point where dying people do not suffer it, and our continued impoverished take on what is happening when dying people suffer deepens and extends their suffering. The enormous use of sedation on dying people ploughs them under to the point where those of us in attendance can see no further evidence of suffering… this suffering is quieted to invisibility, and the patient is resting comfortably, and the cost is lucidity, responsiveness, perhaps awareness.
This is an interesting take in a death-phobic society where many of us, including the medical professionals who treat us, consistently scan for solutions and fixes. To actually welcome suffering, to stop with treatments when someone’s body has been poked, prodded, cut out and up far too many times is a radical idea. To not resist suffering—to not resist death—is revolutionary.
In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gwande, he writes about the problematics of the medical field and the narrowness with which those working in the field learn about death and dying, saying:
The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.
As I bear witness to my parents’ aging, I have thought more about their deaths: what they will look like, what they will feel like, what textures they will take on, should they pass before me. I have had open conversations with both of them about their desires. I am the medical Power of Attorney for both of them. My brother is their financial Power of Attorney. I’m fairly certain they set things up this way, because of my dyscalculia (I would definitely need a lot of assistance to make any large financial decisions and could potentially get swindled because I don’t do well with numbers).
Just because my parents are old, doesn’t necessarily mean they will die before my friends or myself. Anything can happen and it’s important for me to think about what I would want for my death, who I want beside me, who I want to help out. It’s equally important for me to think about (and talk with my friends about) what they would want and how they would want me involved. We should all be having these conversations.
Death work is a caring field—one that I hope to be apart of in a big way. I am considering offering grief services when I finish my training. I am considering this work as my true path (along with writing, of course). I have a knack for caring, for research, for compassion and empathy for others.
Last December, I had an astrology reading with Johanna Hedva, and they mentioned something that I’ve never heard discussed before about Capricorn moon placements. People with this placement are the ultimate caregivers—just never to themselves. This is something I’ve been actively trying to change. Thinking about death is helping me to do this.
Learning about death and dying is an act of profound care for myself.
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