CENTRAL TO MY DEATH AND GRIEF PRACTICE

Death is all around

In hindsight, I see that the call of death work surrounded me from a young age and continued to make its presence known as I aged. At two-years old, my younger sister died. I don’t recall specific memories, only that this experience and the consequences of it have impacted me on a cellular level.  I remember at that age tenderly witnessing my sister in her bassinet, exuding care and love–all the while knowing she wasn’t “normal.” I see the threads of this theme wind throughout my life, most often when I've witnessed the death of a child.  

Loss happens across the lifespan

Physical death is only one aspect of loss. Between when we are born and when we die (no matter the length of our life), we encounter so many different kinds of loss. I spent decades running from and not knowing how to face and integrate loss. Life circumstances led me to wade into the seas of loss, not knowing some days if or how I could return. Diving into my own healing became the foundation from which I could begin to name and realize the impact of loss across my life.  Of course loss is not easy, but my practice of befriending it allows for a wider emotional range to work with.

Death and grief work are political

Long a seeker of justice and someone who can often quickly identify the power structures that have defined our world, I often felt something missing in activist spaces. For me, this piece is an inability to tie-in the grief that is a part of this work.

How can we act for change without mourning the reality of what we are asking to be changed? 
How can we act for change without acknowledging and processing what we are losing in order for that change to be realized?

Change and transition is grief and death work—radical and revolutionary work.

Death and grief work pull it all together

Death and grief work are the center that brings together multiple components–physical death, individual loss, collective justice.  Inherent within all of them is transition (shifting from one state to another state), experience of the pain of loss or death, and the possibility of re-birth and re-imagination. 

How delighted I am to embody this central space.