a note on november: death
“I am full of an acute, awesome joy. It is the joy one feels when one has expected death and disintegration,
a joy more terrible and more profound than the joy of living, of creating.”- Anais Nin; Henry & June
Each month, I meditate on the memes I saved in my phone from a year ago and derive the theme from there. The monthly theme is supposed to be a reflection of what was coming up for us collectively and how such traumatic experiences are being revisited and re-lived as this pandemic rages on within inaction.
I always hope that the themes ring a universal tone even if you’re anti-mask and anti-vax (which might be a pipe dream to think someone with such different conclusions would give my words the time of day). I hold my truths and conclusions as strong, but not unyielding. I am not here to deny anyone else’s experience of the pandemic, simply to unpack our “unprecedented” experiences. And in keeping true to this ethos and the facts of the pandemic, “death” must be a theme that is approached.
Firstly, I’d just like to note that we’ve been counting deaths for a year and a half. Everyday we have new and rising death-toll numbers. And we often see them as abstract, forgetting they are neighbors and family members. Real flesh and blood. It’s easy to outsource death as a statistic and keep it safely as such, rather than accepting that we are part of the sum. Our lives have been on the line for 18 months and having to navigate that reality can simply become too much.
We’ve had to turn deaths into mere statistics to survive; to keep logging into zoom or taking dinner orders. But as someone who will be a certified End of Life doula by 2022, I’d like to remind you that death isn’t just a number, nor is it the antithesis of being alive. Death is so much bigger than all of that and if we can take this month--just one month--to look at our relationship with our own mortality a little more closely, we can touch the core of why this pandemic has been so heavy.
Some of us are still shielded from the concrete realities of death, having not known anyone to die from Covid, but that doesn’t mean we are untouched or unmoved by the amount of death happening within our communities.
And I do want to make a note of caution since our culture doesn’t help us withstand these difficult feelings around death. I will not be able to hand over all of the tools necessary for you to get through this month if you have a complicated relationship to death (re: suicide, currently grieving, etc.). I do not know how this month’s essays will affect your psyche and I do not want to inspire anyone to spiral further into premature deaths.
I know when I’ve been in deep depressive episodes, it can be really hard for me to think about this work because I can form an arguably too-death-positive outlook. If this starts to feel like you, please stop reading and reach out to someone (myself included) to bring you back into the world of the living.
This isn’t the intention essay, but it is my intention to paint death in a newly demystified light. Death positivity is a movement popularized by Caitlin Doughty to inspire folks to talk more about such a forbidden topic as death and dying (source). To be death positive is to accept all aspects of life and ultimately live more freely and more presently before our time here comes to an end.
I ran an instagram poll asking if this month’s theme should be “death” or “change” and death didn’t win, but I feel like I couldn’t talk about change without talking about death. To me, they are exactly the same. Any change we go through--even a haircut--is a death to something else. That’s just the way the world of the living works, that’s how the seasons change, yielding to one another.
Death can be a beautiful and natural part of our complex humanity if we’re brave enough to peek through the walls our society has built up around it. To deny ourselves access to this inherent and natural wisdom of dying is to avoid the truth of our existence. We are finite. And grasping this perspective while holding space for our fears around it can open us up to a more sacred experience of living.
All changes require some grieving, some death. If we can call it as such, then we can step deeper into the full breadth of our humanness--our mortality. And what gifts we can find there in accepting the true nature of our existence. What liberation lies just within the process of grieving.