hi friend,
I disappeared for a while there.
Some hospital caregiving was required, and caregiving is both my favorite thing and also the thing that most causes me to disappear, literally and metaphorically. I found myself hyperpresent in every bedside interaction, lasered in on the swarm of clinicians every time they came — and also, like the edges of my physical self blurred, became hard to find again. It took me a week or two of recovery, after everyone else started their recovery too, to come back to this side. I wrote about it a bit here.
Everything I ever learned about conflict and change, I learned by doing birthwork and deathwork.
If you don’t know this part of my story yet, I started out doing maternal and infant death prevention for a state public health department.
My job was to facilitate a group of 35 — policymakers, doulas, community members, public health professionals, clinicians (addiction medicine, maternal fetal medicine, midwives, OBs, nurses, the occasional cardiologist) — in what was essentially a public health version of an M&M, a mortality review process. We analyzed every single death of every single pregnant or postpartum person in the state, determined what had happened (and what hadn't happened), decided whether or not the death had been preventable.
People often ask me how I became a facilitator, what training I have that qualified me to bring teams through conflict as a tool for change. It was that work, this group — three hours, every 6 weeks, at 7:30 in the morning — arguing about what racial discrimination looked like on an autopsy. We fought bitterly sometimes, and grieved well together — and our little group changed federal policies and definitions. I brought in half a million dollars, and our data led to statewide postpartum Medicaid expansion — more than 20,000 people covered by insurance for a full year after giving birth, instead of a measly two months.
Birthwork and deathwork don’t always look like a sterile hospital room, humming with IV machines and respirators and contractions. They aren’t always the explicit witnessing by the veil, next to a body that is laboring. Sometimes it’s all the infrastructure around that labor — the caregiving and changework that makes it all possible, brings it all to life.
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I’ll be writing much more about this over the next month or so. Tell me — what questions do you have about birthwork, deathwork, and the stuff of change?
Some housekeeping in the meantime — as I stare down the piles of laundry from an accidental 5 weeks away from home, as well as the piles of books and drafts waiting for my renewed attention. I’m planning to move to a different email platform soon, so things will look a little different around here, and I’m sure there will be some broken links. I’m also experimenting with the cadence of this newsletter — biweekly-ish, with some more frequent journal entries on the site.
I missed you, friend. Thanks for being here, reading, and witnessing.
More soon.
