by Sof Sears
I pull cards like pulling teeth from a skull: embalming fluid, obelisk, clover, raven. I keep this oracle card deck sealed away inside its own canvas pouch, hidden in my bedside drawer. The artist, Claire Goodchild, created this intricate, gorgeous deck of cards, called “Memento Mori,” each depicting some sort of object or symbol associated with death. I have a hard time fully committing to Tarot, or anything with any hint of spirituality, but this deck comforts me in its matter-of-factness. Each illustration represents itself, but also contains multiple meanings, like transitions themselves; to draw a card from its hand is to tend to my own terror, is to anchor myself in reality.
We sit on the floor of my friend’s apartment, surrounded by plants, and I’m lighting an altar candle from my great-grandmother’s house—La Santisima Muerte, patron saint of death and Mexico. I’m trying to stomach the grief, to lean into its arms and let it press its face close to mine. I’m trying to think about death the way the doulas seem to, with warmth, with my heart in full view. I’m trying everything, and yet, I’m sitting here, and I still wear this anxiety like a choker. I still cannot seem to unclasp it.
—
We go to the park, and find them, huddled in a circle, hands and arms locked around each other, mostly women, mostly women of color, and also, lots of people who look as queer and gender-uneasy as me. They stand in front of a makeshift altar, flowers unfolded and bursting from the grass, piled in the shape of a death shroud. There are framed photographs of loved ones, bracelets and necklaces, neatly arranged seashells and candles, a dusty mirror, crystals, bundles of dried flowers, and looking at these objects feels like looking at the tendons and muscles of love—disarticulated, but still love.
The Salt Trails Collective organized this ritual: a processional of communal mourning, swathed in afternoon light and the noise of the park: birthday parties, kids screaming, rap blasting from someone’s speakers. One of the women approaches my friend and me, eyes rimmed red, but smiling, and something about the unabashedness of her grief silences my skepticism, disarms me. She leads us to a table and offers paper, pens, different stickers, safety pins, says we’re welcome to write down our grief and adorn ourselves with it, if we’d like. We stand there and as we stare at the blank pages, we both start crying, without having even written a single word. Crying—when what I call the Zoloft wall is so thick with scar tissue and, at this point, years-old—is a rare occurrence for me, and yet, the warmth of these people, the quiet undemanding wide-openness, punctures a hole in my chest. I can’t help it. I’m crying, feeling like a child, and no one is looking away in discomfort, or trying to get me to stop. There is nothing saccharine or cliché here, nothing that forces me to explain or scaffold my grief in a digestible language.
Salt Trails is a Philly-based organization that facilitates community deathcare and mourning rituals and support, and this event is free, open to anyone carrying any species of grief, be it a physical/literal death or the loss of a relationship, self, or period of life, and, also, societal grief. Their rituals are creative, and seem to be equal parts devastation and joy, refusing to sacrifice the nuances of death and its consequences for politeness’ sake. Someone has painted a poster that reads: “Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves,” which is, I learn, a quote from spiritualist Sobonfu Somé. Another woman has painted elaborate rust-colored tears over her cheeks, as if to symbolize their unendingness, and has pinned a piece of fabric to the back of her jean jacket that asks: “What breaks your heart? What do you grieve?”
Here, on the outskirts of the park, around fifteen people gather and try to sit in grief, together, to not look away, to bear witness, even if just for an hour. I paraphrase a line from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets that haunts me with a particular viciousness, and copy it down onto a fragment of paper, the full quote of which is:
“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
We want to feel witnessed in our despair. In what feels unknowable, bottomless, the mouth of a cave with no visible ending. We want to feel witnessed, even by strangers, even if we return to the cave, over and over, alone. Sitting in the grass, holding stones, speaking in hushed tones, weeping, sniffling, we are doing something, something, anything, to hold ourselves, hold each other.
—
I decide to go looking for alternative forms of thinking about death, dying, and to uproot all the costumery Western culture likes to place over all its corpses. I want to know about a different way, to envision a relationship to mortality that doesn’t demonize or reproach every reminder of its imminence. I search for events, people, collectives, anything I can find that seems to imagine and construct death in a new way, in an honest and tender and liberatory way. Building a death-raft out of stones and sticks and tender makeshift rituals; building an intimacy with death that I can somehow live with, maybe. Compiling my own death-archive because one day I will be a thing to be archived, all dust and bodiless longing. To sit in death’s hands and lean into its touch, is how I can continue living, how I can withstand the fundamental terror of life.
I want to perceive death as neutral, as the natural conclusion we cannot evade, not a monster or a refuge; I want to perceive death as a fact, not a threat. But death is not neutral—maybe philosophically, I hope, but life politicizes its details, renders every process of dying uneven. The death industry—funeral homes and directors, morticians, embalmers, etc—is, unquestionably, an industry.
Whose deaths are mourned? Whose deaths are mournable?
Who gets a ‘good death’ and how do they get it? Why them, why not ———
There are questions no one wants to look at. Questions that gnaw at me, like these, whenever I try to calm down my swirling night-spirals, the panic hours, in which I look up green burial and human composting at three in the morning and tend to the spiral with thoughts of greenery, regrowth, flowers bursting from a skeletal jaw.
I want to perceive death as neutral, but when murdered trans and nonbinary people and women of color is the constant thrum in the background of culture, is the circulatory system, it seems, of so much of our entertainment and myth, it is difficult to keep believing in neutrality. To linger in the word, then, is the function of the death-worker: what is death care if, so often, those most in need of it are the most culturally and societally uncared for? When death comes abruptly, violently, or painfully? What is it to provide care when the world feels perpetually on its last legs, trembling over a precipice, about to be swallowed by flames?
—
In my great-grandmother’s house, borders dissolve. Death is everywhere, inflects the very air of the place. She lives engulfed in silent brujería: her black death-saint candles, her offerings of flowers and chocolate and pan dulce, ancient photographs of people I don’t recognize, dust that bleeds from surfaces and chokes me, bottles of perfume in violet and pink-tinted glasses that haven’t been sprayed since the 80s. She is nearing her own ending; at the age of ninety five, she is on the verge, always, walking its perimeter and still not seeming to flinch. Ghosts are not metaphors here. Ghosts are beads of sweat on the forehead, the hum of the fan in the East LA summer, but see, now I am returning to figurative decadence, to myth, to analogy, when, for her, there is no like—ghosts are real, and they’re home.
But I am more interested in how she thinks about death. How she relates to it, how she imagines and wants her own death to play out. I’m hesitant to bring it up, but she’s unabashed, talking about her death the way someone might talk about a birthday party. What kind of flowers she wants at her bedside; which friends and neighbors she wants there, Chicana all the way through, wanting her last seconds alive to be spent, of course, gossiping; the lavender detergent she’ll use to wash her sheets the night before. There is texture and color and smell, in her words. She’s thought about the scene of her ending and hasn’t done what so many people do, understandably: costume any mention of mortality in vagueness, try to evade any talk about last wishes, about advanced directives or after-death arrangements. She’s taken her heart and handed its last few sputtering beats to us, to make it warm, make it gentle, make it just this way.
—
I wanted to talk to a death doula because of my great-grandmother, because of her approach to death, how precise and gentle her description seemed to me. I wanted to talk to someone whose life revolved around death in such an explicit, devoted way.
But I also wanted to talk to a death doula because I’ve been, for as long as I can recall, obsessed with death. ‘Death doulas’ sound invented, oxymoronic—don’t doulas bring life into the world, not escort it out? But death doulas facilitate the other given of life, try to make it gentle and autonomous and emboldened. They’ve always existed, but they’ve historically been erased or relegated to the ‘unseriousness’ of domesticity, their roles in deathcare extinguished or glossed over. They were and are usually women, often women of color, often queer and femme. Their jobs entail many things, and these responsibilities can be tricky to pin down, since it’s so personal, and the calling has only really recently been professionalized, but, usually, they act as processors and advocates for the dying and their loved ones. They help plan a death, well before it actually happens, months to years, make it as comfortable as possible, and they also facilitate advanced directives and after-death plans. In the U.S., they deal with the bureaucratic nightmare of dying in America and help offer alternatives to the overpriced, unsustainable options of ‘traditional’ funeral homes. They do not only work with the terminally ill, though. They work with anyone who wants to start thinking about and exploring their relationship to their own death.
They are not guardian angels, they’re real people, but the first time I learned about their existence I could only envision them as sorts of deities, guides, a warm hand in your hair, a low voice leading you somewhere comfortable and not so dark, not so haunted. I thought of the doulas this way because I wanted to believe in that kind of comfort, in people who could unlock my obsession with death and make it all okay.
—
Childhood mostly moved from one terror, one preoccupation, to the next, for me; debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder and unspoken trauma will do that. When I was five years old I was threatened by a man with a knife in a hospital cafeteria. It sounds ridiculous, dreamt-up, a child’s gaudy nightmare more than anything else, and sometimes, I almost trick myself into thinking it never happened, but, I’ll ask my parents, and they’ll confirm, looking away immediately, as if they still feel responsible, though they weren’t. When I was a child I never felt entirely safe, even when I was: my body could not be trusted, could not protect me, could not engineer a world in which all little girls survive intact. Things happened, trauma happened, and I joke about it now, but back then I lived shoulder-to-shoulder with the knowledge and terror of death. Rituals sustained me, kept me afloat, but those ‘rituals’ were compulsions that limited my participation in actually being a kid. The thought of death, then: a canker sore, or, the drip of mucus in the back of your throat during a nasty cold, just as incessant and uncomfortable.
The nerves gathering in the throat. Panic opening its palms and squeezing your throat in a chokehold. The nights I spent shivering, shaking, undone by random thoughts of oblivion, of nothingness, etc, etc. My high school self could not stop thinking about death. When death came closer to me, when people I knew far more closely died suddenly, when someone I loved had someone they loved die—the terror sweltered, bloomed. You can spend your whole life locked in that cold room, a panic chamber, only your own anxiety echoing against the walls. It’s a lonely place to be.
It’s a place that someone like a death doula, a death-worker, someone with one foot entrenched in the mud and green rot of death, and the other in the glistening quick foam of life, would’ve known by heart. A place that could be made slightly less lonely by the presence of death-care, of actually talking about it, thinking about it, without becoming immobilized by it.
—
I meet with Lori Zaspel over Zoom one morning. Lori is a licensed social worker, and a death doula, as well as a grief therapist. She is part—and one of the founders—of the Philly Death Doula Collective, which is how I found her. Even through the screen, she overspills with warmth and candor; shaggy silver hair and arms adorned with tattoos—many of which, she tells me, are memorial tattoos, pointing to one for her late grandfather on her wrist. I ask her how, exactly, she found this work, and she tells me that she considers death-work to be something of a ‘calling,’ that, in fact, most death-workers she knows feel this way. She studied English in college, she says, like me, and I fight the instinct to ask her, immediately, about books—not what I’m trying to uncover here. She got into the death world via volunteering as a facilitator for a children’s grief support group near Philly, and in doing that, she discovered that she “loved the work,” devoured every book she could find on the subjects of grief and loss and death-care.
“I learned that death doulas even existed,” she laughs, “from—this Youtube channel? It’s called ‘Ask a Mortician?’”
I pause, cannot contain my grin at this—“Ask a Mortician” is the piece of media that introduced teenage me to the very notion of ‘death positivity,’ and indeed, the death industry and the culture of death care, is the reason I even know what a death doula is in the first place, or green burial, or human composting. Mortician and author Caitlin Doughty started this series of videos talking about death in all of its logistics, messiness, history, and literal processes, as well as the emotional and cultural aspects. Doughty’s work cut me open and unveiled the reality of Western culture’s complete avoidance and denial of death, decomposition, mourning, and their inevitability. I read her memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, about working in a crematorium, mortuary school, and, ultimately, her path to realizing that the death industry, as entwined with capitalism and all its inequities as it was, desperately needed to change, and the world split apart for me. I wanted to work at her sustainable, ‘green’ funeral home in my own city of LA, wanted to study green burial, human composting, and the repopularization of home funerals. She sent me on a spiral of death-lit and death-obsession, but this time, in a good way.
Lori loves Doughty, too, she says, but she’s relieved to see more Black and brown leaders in deathcare receiving more recognition lately. Because, yes: the “death world” is still very newly recognized as doing crucial and radical work, and most of that visibility is whitewashed to the extreme. Reading Doughty back in high school, I didn’t quite appreciate the extent to which deathcare—and the lack thereof—is inflected by inequity and capitalism, its rot leaking into even the end of life. Lori and I talk about this, too. I ask her: What is a ‘good death,’ exactly? It is a term I used to espouse, a term I see often used in the death-positive movement—the “Order of the Good Death,” Doughty’s collective, has the phrase in its name.
Lori pauses, thoughtful, and says: “We have to acknowledge that a ‘good death’ is not possible for many, many people, for a variety of reasons, most of which tie back to white supremacy and capitalism—so, that’s the umbrella that’s over all of this,” she clarifies. “Even after that—the definition of a ‘good death’ totally depends on the individual, and their family, and their customs and beliefs, and their needs. To me, a good death is individually designed, and has Plan A, B, C, D.” She laughs.
“So, if Plan A is not possible, if you wanted to die at home, but that’s just not possible because of your symptoms or because of the abilities and preferences of your caregivers—how do we bring as much of those things that you wanted into that space you’re existing in now, and onward? Because there are ways to preserve the big things; that’s why, often, I prefer to talk about values as opposed to specifics. So, if you value calm, or quiet, peace–how do we bring that? Or, if you value visits, not being alone, how do we bring that to wherever you are?”
This idea, of honoring a person’s envisioned general qualities of a ‘good death,’ feels far more feasible than attempting to engineer an immaculate and hyper-specific deathbed scene, the stage set and props at the ready. Even with a planned-for death, there will be the unplanned-for. There will likely be the unforeseen, ruptures and gashes in the most meticulous vision, because dying, and particularly dying from a terminal illness, is almost never a spotless disappearance. Dying is dying: seams will unravel, pain might slip in despite all our attempts to temper it, words will go unsaid and we might have no choice but to die in hospital beds and not our own.
“I think, for a lot of people, a good death is… well, we can’t ask them, obviously, because they’re gone, so, we can’t say, did you have a ‘good’ death? But I think knowing that someone gives a shit about that and will try to give them that, that someone will be actively working to advocate for that—that makes a huge difference. And it doesn’t have to be a death doula. That can be anybody.”
We buoy ourselves with ‘meaning’ while knowing, ultimately, that we’re all going to become dirt again, one day, soon enough.
I remember holding my dying dog, for some reason, when she says those particular words: that can be anybody. How we euthanized her, our 14-year-old, stinky, arthritis-ridden, cancer-struck, beloved chocolate Lab, Emily, on a June afternoon the summer after I graduated from high school. How we sat in the backyard, my dad and I, while the vet inserted needle after needle. I held her head in my lap and stroked her fur for what felt like hours, sobbed hiccuping-wailing-childlike sobs and sobbed even harder seeing my dad—chronically emotionally constipated in the way white men tend to be—start to cry, too. We were tending to her as she died, felt the breath slip out and away from her matted body, kissed her head and set her in the best spot possible, shrouded in sunlight.
Yes, she was not a person, but tending to, facilitating and witnessing her dying process, caressing her as her heartbeat quieted and stilled, we were doing death-care in the only way we knew how. My mother and siblings couldn’t handle it, understandably, but my dad and I, both swarmed by loss, stayed beside her. It is that simple: to sit and tend to our dying, even if we feel unhinged by grief. To extend care in whatever way we can. To make those final stray breaths as love-lit as possible.
“The goal with all of my jobs,” she continues, after a pause, “is to not need them anymore. Ideally, you’d have someone in the community to take care of you and your dying process, but, because of capitalism, and all that shit, we’re not there yet.”
The support structure isn’t built in. Instead: we do our best to alleviate its inadequacy. To patch our own structures of care that do not rely, at least not entirely, on a fundamentally venomous system that values certain lives and bodies far more than others. Death doulas exist because of an unfulfilled sociocultural need. They exist, like therapists, because there is nowhere socially sanctioned to put death, to look it in the eye, contemplate it, plan for it, accept it. Even more so, capitalism does not enable or encourage mutual aid, or support systems, or anything even resembling community. Capitalism says: We live and we die alone and if we have money, maybe we can make it a bit more comfortable. The holes of the very material of society are elemental and leaking and rotten and the labor of people like Lori are attempts to provide care, love, attention, even amidst this damage, this unyielding brokenness.
“Not everyone gets the privilege of a good death,” Lori says. She’s right: ideally, we’d each plan our own dying process as meticulously and lovingly as we would weddings. But, like birth, like the fissure that delivers us into the world, wet and screaming and purple in the face, we can exit at any time, no warning granted. “Death education should start, I think, from kindergarten,” she says—and it might sound odd but I agree, wholeheartedly.
“It’s not always sad,” says Lori. “I’m not a religious person, exactly. I mean, I’m spiritual, but I don’t have any sort of coherent organized religion—but, I don’t know, sitting with a dying person can feel…it feels sacred. To be permitted that experience, to be granted the honor of sitting with someone at the end of their life, with their loved ones, is sacred. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Lori then brings up terror management theory, which I’m very familiar with: the controversial evolutionary theory, proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, that, essentially, everything humans do, ever—from religion to war to politics to art to celebrity gossip to TikTok to parenthood—is a means of warding off and managing our immutable, constant terror of death. We buoy ourselves with ‘meaning’ while knowing, ultimately, that we’re all going to become dirt again, one day, soon enough.
How we manage the terror might really just be that—managing the terror—but it does matter, is what Lori seems to imply. Thinking about death as a space we can begin to examine whilst still alive, asking ourselves and the people we love to envision, detail, texturize and map out their own deaths—all of that questioning, that considering, matters.
It sticks with me. This particular grain of tenderness: to ask someone how they envision their own ‘good deaths’ to look, to write it down, to plan, even knowing that there’s no guarantee they’ll get a chance to actually use it. It’s a gesture of hope, of such farsightedness, of such love that it can hurt.
—
At a party. Sweating through a disheveled black dress, bangs matted to forehead, boy’s mouth against my shoulder. I am shimmering and sleepy and still bleeding desire, everywhere. I am alive, and I am trying to stay in the moment rather than preemptively mourn it, eulogize it before it’s even over. To stay not so obsessed with accepting-mortality that I relinquish the rope that tethers me to wanting-to-be-alive.
I hope death swallows me and there’s no regurgitation, no final bubbling of pain or terror. I hope I dissolve back into the soil and the ecosystem as quickly as I came into it. I want to envision a warm death, perhaps swaddled in blankets and cool sheets under afternoon sunlight, somewhere near home, back in California, immersed in all the drugs that make the process painless and quiet. I do not want to stay plugged in when there is no chance of me being meaningfully, of ever being actually alive again. I do not want a half-life, a life hollowed out by pain, every bone and muscle rotting inside of my still-beating body. I want to die before the worst arrives—before I get a chance to decay too much.
—
My ‘death-archive’ is starting to transubstantiate, to shapeshift: blood into wine and death into love. I’m building a death-raft, but it’s also a love-raft—because isn’t the notion of death-care all about love, love embedded in every final gesture, in washing our beloveds’ corpses, brushing their hair, dressing them in their favorite clothes, returning their bodies to the earth whatever way they ask us to? This is a makeshift altar; a DIY museum of death and love and their objects, written down.
—
Erica is another death doula. I find her online and DM her immediately. She, coincidentally, is also from California, has lived and worked in my hometown, and is a recent Philly transplant. She wants to remain anonymous, though, for the piece, she mentions, and we agree on using a pseudonym. I want to talk to another doula, to many, because they’re all so different and, also, I still have questions: questions that live and burn and linger in my chest, tangles of thorns and ash, questions that preoccupy me, that I obsess over in the longest hours of night and try to push into a corner for most of the day, until I crawl back into bed and it all floods me again.
Erica has blue hair and is smiling when I approach her in the coffee shop. She’s petite, shorter than me. She’s wearing a Stevie Nicks shirt and corduroys and a jean jacket and I am immediately comfortable with her. She asks me my pronouns right away and doesn’t falter, not once—which shouldn’t be impressive but it is. She wants to know about my experiences with death and dying. What I’ve read, thought about. She says she’s read my writing online and loved it, and I flush, disarmed. She does her research, she is forthright and almost unsettlingly engaged and feels like a mother without any of the gendered connotations.
We go to the park. We sit at a picnic table, facing each other, and she walks me through my death. She talks with her hands, with gestures and prolonged pauses. She asks me a question, and gives me a moment to consider my answers.
What qualities do you most value, in a setting? What particular qualities comfort you? Calm and quiet, gentle solitude, company, noisiness and music and laughter and lots of touch?
What is your biggest fear/concern regarding your own dying process (theoretically)?
Would you want to be given drugs if you are in pain or discomfort?
Do you have any ideas about what you’d like to be done with your body once you die?
Are there any scents, songs, or other sensory elements you’d ideally like to have around you when you die?
Is there anything you want to say to anyone before you die? Anything you want written down or recorded?
The sunlight honeys over us and I’m staring at the cracks of gold between trees and my heart isn’t racing, my hands aren’t clamming up, my throat isn’t tightening, talking to her about this, narrating a dream deathbed scene without joking, without deflecting, without, also, the morbid and theatrical lurch towards a too-passionate embrace of the—my—ending. I’m not catatonic or shaky-sweaty-spiraling. We both have oat milk chai lattes from the coffee place down the street and we’re both sipping intermittently, trailing our fingers around the lids, blowing on the surface. We are two femme, queer, chronically ill people talking about death, but she’s helping me clear away the smog—the anxiety of the living, this death-phobic culture—and speak plainly, not romanticizing it, but also not panicking about its inevitability.
We are both privileged in many ways and yet our bodies, our lives, are tenuous, too, feel like water between someone’s grasping palms most of the time. But I’m sitting here describing a death that, even if I don’t get the chance to plan or to have, even thinking about it, developing it, is enough, is a talisman.
We go to the park. We sit at a picnic table, facing each other, and she walks me through my death.
I want to smell cardamom. Altar candles, lit, everywhere. I want to have a handful of people holding my hands and stroking my hair. I want as many drugs as they’d like to give me, whatever smoothes the slipping-away. I want soft music—probably Weyes Blood, if I were choosing today—bleeding through the room. I want the California afternoon sunlight, most of all, the warmth and quiet and gentle unfurling love of it in my face. I want to be outside, if possible. I want my body thrown into a forest and left to rot, raw and maggot-y—she laughs, interrupts, gently, tells me that this is a tricky thing to find, laws are weird, so, do I have a backup plan?
If you can’t leave it to rot, compost my body, I shrug. Not cremation, not burial, I know I’ll be dead and gone but the thought of being buried or burnt feels wrong, for me. I pause. But I guess it won’t really matter, like, at all.
My biggest fear is fear. Is feeling it, squirming, parasitic, persistent, a worm in my blood. Is staying terror-struck until the end, into the end. I don’t want to feel like I’m jumping off a cliff. I don’t want to scream, to have my very last feeling be an anxiety attack. To be a sensation of thorns creeping around and swallowing my skeleton, my skull, my consciousness—to be claustrophobic.
—
But what if I don’t get the good death? What if the imagery I’ve drawn and designed disappears, and I’m left with a death that doesn’t announce itself, that arrives without making a sound?
OCD ricochets like this, cycles like this. The uglier thoughts, the vicious and disorienting ones that most depictions of mental illness tend to evade or flatten. I obsessively listened to true crime and I felt ethically weird about it and hated the copaganda, the martyrization of dead white girls, and yet I still listened, as if, in hearing all the ways I might possibly be disassembled—because queer people and femme people and nonbinary people and women are more likely to star as the victims in these stories, because we know violence so well it becomes background noise—I could prepare myself. Not necessarily prevent. But prepare. The thoughts splintered and grew; I traced my own tracks, counted the clues I’d leave behind.
What if, instead of a deathbed, instead of a warm room stuffed with love and light, you get a crime scene, or an unremarkable anonymous ending? Accepting death is also about accepting that the “good” death you envision might not be the one you get. That you can imagine an ideal death—but there is no way to secure it.
This is the part that gets me. That I cannot quite ingest. It’s not death itself or even necessarily dying that terrifies me; it’s the possible lack of any warning, any heads-up.
That you’ll die as you are, that you’ll never be more than what you are, that you’ll die without having been really genuinely seen or known—in the marrow-deep way—by anyone. That love alone might not actually be the glue you want it to be, that it cannot keep you intact forever, and yet you have to keep believing in it anyways.
—
Erica and I walk through the park for a while. We watch kids and dogs running around, and she tells me about home funerals. Green burial. About the experience of sitting with a dead body, with the bereaved, of witnessing a family wash their dead, the gut-punch tenderness of cradling an unblinking face between your hands and running a sponge along cold skin. I mention one of the corpses I’ve encountered—of which there is a small handful—in a cadaver lab, when I was a teenager, thinking I’d become a surgeon one day. How odd and mathematical it felt, the face covered, the body cut open. How we reached inside and felt the different organs, how the formaldehyde clung to my hair and skin and clothes and for days, afterwards, I’d taste it in the back of my throat, eating lunch or drinking coffee, and I’d gag, have to sit down and put my head between my knees. These bodies felt alien, completely illegible as human beings, as people, until, I tell her, I saw their hands. Wiry hair and mottled skin. Or smooth and scarred. Hands, that moved, that touched, that held, that melded, that hurt, that loved. That shit freaked me out, I admit, and Erica nods. It was fascinating, didn’t unnerve me in the slightest, until I looked at their hands.
To be in the presence of a dying person is an indescribable experience. This is what she tells me, repeating Lori’s sentiment, though not outright, but I sense it, can read it through the subtext, of the gaps between her language and description, how she falters, seems unable to articulate the sensations and gestures and atmosphere of a death, not because she doesn’t know, but because to communicate such a liminal moment is akin, it seems, to trying to explain what desire is like, in a way—sometimes it can be pinpointed in the body, but sometimes, more often, it is amorphous, incoherent, everywhere and nowhere.
When you’re that close to death you must think about love, right? I ask, and she pauses, brow furrowing, and considers my question.
“Yes,” she says. “But I think I’m always thinking about love, so. I guess it just—feels more urgent, you know? To go kiss my girlfriend or, I don’t know, call my dad?”
I ask: Does that give you anxiety? To be in constant proximity to those reminders, of how short and quick and—just temporary, shit is? The good shit, especially?
“It used to,” she nods. “But things kind of changed. This work does that.”
—
What I haven’t said aloud, what all this death-archiving, all the oracle cards and conversations with doulas and grief rituals and endless research reveal, really, is what the marrow of this project means. Asking someone to love me feels akin to asking someone to plan my death: facilitate it, witness it, soften it.
It is less about death and more about the fear of living too much, of letting love too close, when our return to dirt is always inches away. It is that I do not know how to stomach love if I accept death.
Lori and Erica, and the women of Salt Trails—all of them say or imply, in every touch they press to a dying person’s face, every honeyed word they offer to the grieving families—that their work is anchored by love, by the respect and attention for human dignity and community. Their work melds a quiet resistance to the blood-hungry machinery of capitalism and all its dehumanizations. The work is slow, often thankless, can consist of long silent hours in waiting rooms and beside hospital beds, can be filled with misdirected rage or violent despair.
They still do it. They still make death a little less lonely, a little less unbearable.
They still believe in the work, in the witnessing, in watching a candle’s flame flicker, keeping your eyes on it even as it goes out.
I want to know how. But they can’t translate that species of attention, of compassion and recognition. It is work, unromantic and sacred still, I know, it is emotional and physical and psychic labor, the labor usually associated with femininity, and thus devalued, degraded. But it is work they keep, somehow, doing.
It is less about death and more about the fear of living too much, of letting love too close, when our return to dirt is always inches away. It is that I do not know how to stomach love if I accept death.
—
At the Salt Trails ritual, my friend and I sat on the grass and told each other secrets and cried through the telling. But the words got out of our mouths, nonetheless. We had rocks in our hands, to which we were told to attach our grief, whatever we were mourning that day.
I thought about my great-grandma.
I thought about the rituals she’d enshrined, made holy. Her altars. Those lavender-scented sheets.
I thought about how certain wounds follow you around like black flies circling a fresh carcass, sensing a corpse well before the heart’s stopped beating.
I thought about how kissing always makes me a little scared, a little dizzy with loneliness, especially if it’s good, if it’s with someone I truly want—a rare occurrence, and rarer still because the confession of wanting, feels like I’ve just asked to be pulverized by loss.
I thought about my dead dog. My dead relatives. My child-self, who is not quite dead but is somewhere in death’s vicinity.
I thought about the dead white girls I used to worship and fixate on—Laura Palmer and the Lisbon sisters—how much easier it seemed, when I was a teenage girl, to be beloved as an absence, as a still-life, instead of a clumsy filthy tangle of desire and anxiety.
I thought about grief as a knowledge you cannot outgrow, cannot unlearn.
I thought about death. How it would come whenever it wanted. How every ritual meant to evade it would not keep it away forever. How every ritual meant to evade love, being-loved, all that wreckage, would not keep it away, either.
We laughed afterwards. We got pizza. We watched families stroll through the park. We gossiped about whatever. We were both tear-wrecked and completely unable to care about how we looked. The proximity to death—aren’t we always neck-to-neck, though—unmoored us, for a moment; there were, suddenly, things much more essential than beauty.
—
After meeting with Erica, I start to ask my friends about their death plans: what spaces they’d want to breathe their final breaths in, what people they’d want around, how the light would look, and, crucially, how the world would sound (sound, they say, is the last sense to go). The archive I’m looking for, scrapping together, resembles a wilderness more than anything, I think, woods abloom with green light, ecosystems that sprout from our footsteps and our flesh, these words we share quietly, sometimes afraid, sometimes laughing, imagining our deaths without romanticizing or hating the fact of their inevitability.
I thought about death. How it would come whenever it wanted. How every ritual meant to evade it would not keep it away forever. How every ritual meant to evade love, being-loved, all that wreckage, would not keep it away, either.
Collapse, or, the sureness and expectation of it, tints every moment of sweetness; the act of loving can feel like building a house of cards, really, because the fragility, the breakdown, is so unavoidable. But when I talk to my friends about it, to my great-grandma, to people I can’t help but love, despite the futility of it—collapse becomes bearable. Slightly. But bearable, still.
“No one completely stops fearing death, or, they’re lying to themselves,” is another thing Erica said to me in the park. “You might accept it, become more comfortable with it, but it’s natural to be afraid of it at the same time—part of human nature. Our bodies are trying everything to keep us alive, so of course to accept death would feel slightly unnatural.”
She’s right. There is no complete erasure of fear, of panic, of the rituals I still sometimes fall into, the patterns of obsession and compulsion, my fervent fumblings at safety, as if such a thing exists, ever. There is, though, this:
I ask this boy, the one who pressed his mouth to my neck, who I don’t know well but enough of, about his envisioned death. I walk him through the questions.
He tells me he’d like to die in the early morning, in his childhood bed, quietly.
He sorts through my death oracle deck, pulls cards, and it feels like I’ve spatchcocked my heart and delivered it to him on a glistening bloodied plate. The strangeness of sitting and discussing death with someone who could hurt me, could wound me, who also is beginning to evoke feelings that, simultaneously, keep me alive, and afraid of liking life too much—the moment chokes me, sticks to the insides of my throat, reveals too much. There is too much witnessing for my liking.
Still: I sit in it. I listen. I flush all over and open a window. I light more candles, pour wine. The moment is too much, but I don’t step away, for once. Because how many glimpses of tenderness, of this startling decadent intimacy like water-clutched-between-hands, do we get, and what else, really, is there to keep us here, while we’re here?
What else, besides the slippery, iridescent sensation of shared light? Just for a second. Just for a minute.
We don’t have all the time in the world. We have a minute or two. That is enough.
Sit here, look at me, and don’t look away.
