A Clear Signal

(1 min read)

Dear people of love who give a care,

What I would like to say to you is this;

as the sea’s storms creep further inland,

as forests burn and foxes run with divine instincts to safety,

as refugee tents are set on fire and elections divide desperate people,

as it seems like Uncertainty is the only common thread in us all,

as all of this now…

I would like for you to highlight in a moment of self-reflection how much you are softening towards yourself and others who need your softness right now. How you’ve begun to truly notice the beautiful details around you more as though you understand their impermanence.

How your boundaries have become stronger yet less angsty and you are feeling a little bit more like a freer-spirit for this. And how your gratitude practice seemed to just develop on its own by way of contrast to the severe distress in our world.

I would also like for you to notice that your intuition is getting stronger. I believe this is because what doesn’t truly matter in your life is dwindling, and your antenna is less encumbered.

I ask myself several times a day, “What is the Guidance saying to my body? My mind? My spirit?”

We have our higher guidance at all times. It is always with us. I would like to invite you to continue to consult with it more frequently regarding your body, mind, and spirit. Use this clear signal regularly. Remember, we’re all visionaries.

Let the new reality of this world and your dreams for it continue to grow within you from this guidance, that gratitude, noticing the beautiful details, and that freer spirit.

As Joél Leon says, “…A reminder that being the change we want to see is not an empty euphemism - it is a state of both being and mind that will radically alter how we show up in the world for ourselves and each other.”

Get Self Indulgent with Forgiveness

(2 min read)

If you’re playing tug-of-war with your grudges, regrets, or clingy expectations, I just want to offer up some gentleness as you Let Go.

(picture the moment a necklace breaks
sending pearls rolling in
s l o w m o t i o n )

Maybe you can give yourself a permission slip to take a clingy expectation or a blame you’ve been holding on to out of your hands.

You do realize that forgiveness can be beautifully self-indulgent too, right?

It can do wonders for our complexion.
(Bitterness dims the countenance.)

Forgiveness does not mean that what you are forgiving is okay to be the thing it is or do the thing it does. Forgiveness doesn’t have to be about the other.

When I forgive this realm, I’m not giving it permission to continue to harm us.

When I forgive this realm, I’m putting my blame game on the pyre of empires then wrapping myself up with who I belong to; the wind, the sea, the trees, my art, the fox, the crow, and the people of love.

I’m feeling creative, humming with inspiration inside of this belonging and not just creating for remedy’s sake.

Art does push boundaries and challenges status quos. It can be wonderfully explosive for social justice. It can also be an homage to our flora and fauna kin, whimsy, myth stories. Art making can be spell casting and prayer.

Art making can be respite.

I’m inspired right now by things that are alive and kind, like the porcupine on my walk yesterday. And I’m inspired right now by the tenderness in grief after devastating loss. For I have just lost a dear loved one and am feeling very tender.

My art making is giving me so much curiosity for living things right now.

After many years of heavy death work, my death work wants to find buoyancy by playing with life and creation. I’m seeing this winter coming and a lot of quietness to be with art inside of it.

I’m also hoping for some fireside chats with other makers this winter.
If you feel the same… you might be intrigued to learn about a special artist’s nest I’m building to hold us through the Dead of Winter.

Recently, I got a little selfish with forgiveness, letting a lot go, cutting the knots of blame loose, and this widened my capacity for wonder.

Wonder inspired! Go for it, let the old stale grudges go. Let the clingy tired expectations that just aren’t gonna come about go. Let the blame game fizzle out. You deserve this self-indulgence. Let your joy dimensions increase!

So, what happens when we sit with other artists through the winter and nerd out on death art themes? Let’s find out together… Enter Dead of Winter.

The Blue Jay Signaling a Turning Point: Omens for the Death Worker

(3 minute read)

A few days ago I went for a walk at sunrise.

As I came up over a hill, I was greeted by a pink and blue haze in the sky with a rising sun making sparkles in the dew on the grass— the air so cool and fresh to me that I blurted out loud without thought “There is glory in this day.”

I was so happy for this feeling because I had been going through a familiar spiritual itch.

A very uncomfortable and unnerving place in myself that I know very well and comes around occasionally had been shaking me up for a week or so. This particular place is a turning point that I am unable to complete without ending a mode of operation. One that was useful for my processes of expression and manifestation in my death work, but has now become stagnant and personally-outdated.

The path in the meadow curves around a little pond that has tall cattails along the edges and then drifts into a deep three-thousand-acre forest. As I took the path into the woods, I enjoyed noticing the slants of sunrise light on the dried pine and the moss around me. As I often do, I stopped on the path and engaged in communion with some details around me.

Behold, behold my eyes see a vibrant spray of royal blue, black speckled blue jay feathers!

I moved through the trees to find the carcass of blue jay fully intact, splayed out and skull exposed. All around the dear thing were pinecones. So, I moved them 1 by 1 to create a circle around the bird’s body. Then I put my sap sticky hands together and prayed this song. “Oh Great Mother of Death, even here still, I see you blending beauty and heartbreak. May I continue to do your work. And may you carry me as I do?”

The very day before this walk I had a conversation with a Nine Keys alum about her death work. The conclusion that we came to in her work was that she needed to “turn up the witchy” a little bit in her work. As I was saying this to her my eyes moved to a piece of art in my office of a blue jay surrounded by pinecones. This darling apprentice was influenced by blue jay when she was finishing her Nine Keys and crafting her website for her community. She often used pinecone in ritual. I took the art down off the wall and held it in front of my computer so that she could see what I looked at in reflex as I commented on the mystery side of her death work. We were both very clear then. And I was so grateful for the time we got to spend together finding clues for her work.

So here I was in the woods the next morning having the message returned to me as I sang the prayer in tribute over blue jay. “Oh, Great Mother of Death, even here still I see you blending beauty and heartbreak. May I continue to do your work. And may you carry me as I do?”

When I felt the time with blue jay’s carcass was complete, I stepped back onto the path to be greeted by a three-legged pure white dog with eyes so incredibly light blue they appeared to be white! He was a sight to behold.

Have you ever been looked at by white eyes?

His owner walked up behind him apologizing that he was off leash. I said, “No worries at all. He is a beautiful and special creature.” And she said his name is Ghost.

I kept walking and laughed the witch cackle that comes from my grandmama through me as I said in return, “Of course that is his name! It’s nice to meet you, Ghost.” when between my feet a long black snake slithered over the pine needles.

Oh, we know how these things come in threes. Blue jay, ghost, snake.

There is glory in this day.

I have often found in my decade of knowing I walk the death worker’s path, that when I find myself alone with a grand creature in nature just after it has died, I understand this to be an omen marking an ending in my soul-self path. A turning point may now be completed.

Blue jays are remarkable in their expression. Not only are their feathers eye-catching, but their call is also distinct and heard far from where they are calling. They are messengers of clear communication and bold expression.

There's a funny thing that happens when you are so moved to manifest your calling into a thing that pays your bills. We can find a formula that works for us but then after a while find that the formula no longer serves when we ourselves have gone through an ecdysis/emergence turning point. Meaning— our business must shift as our ego-self sheds another layer for the free movement of soul-self. When your business is a physical manifestation of your calling the business and soul-self are not separated. They are two hands for a body of work.

Truth is, I have been grieving what I thought was the loss of my art, in particular illustration and drawing, because for many years I have been so focused on my business and calling solely for being in service to those who are dying, the people taking care of them, and death workers. I have had very little bandwidth for my art. I have cried many tears over the loss of time that I wanted to be spending at my art desk. My death work, in its most recent incarnation has been very much geared towards helping death workers build their businesses. And while I enjoy this immensely and will continue to help death workers merge their calling with business, I now see that I am moved to a different place, a different speed, a wide-open meadow where there is more time and space for my art, my self-expression. I can let go of the mode of operation I have been using for quite some time. I’m safe to let go of how I was going about my business. I’ve turned the corner, blue jay confirms. There is glory in this day.

I want to show other death workers this way of ‘doing business.’ I want to help them truly understand that their calling will carry them. I desire to show them the magic in their work and the way it delivers time for the things they want to do and the resources to be well fed.

I want to show other death workers that their expressions of their work and their offerings may metamorphosize again and again, and that letting go truly is the art we are here to understand.

I want to express the reality that our businesses can emerge from soul-self. I want to be a messenger with clear and bold expression.

Blue jay, you are unforgettable just as seal and raven were.

The Death Work Arts

(5 minute read)

The death care culture in America has been one of my greatest muses. It has been a continuous source of inspiration for me while also being a great source of frustration. It has burned me up, lit a match for my work, angered me to action, and served as one of the forces that continues to fuel my death midwifery apprenticeship.

I believe that this relationship between this muse and I began the day I went to my beloved grandmother’s quiet, stiff lipped, midwestern-bland, borderline-soulless funeral in 1997.  It was the first funeral I remember attending. I won’t forget feeling so out of place there.

There was no reverence for awe there, and that was devastating to me.

It was 1997, I was an angsty twenty-one-year-old, in my Janeane Garofalo from the movie Reality Bites era. I was a Performance Studies major at a midwestern college and a recovering Christian-cult kid discovering herself for the first time. I wasn’t impressed. You could find me in oversized slumpy sweaters and combat boots ready to walk out on most things. I hid behind my cameras a lot in those days.

At that time, I was going through a phase of making short films with a VHS recorder. I guess to help me process what I experienced at my grandmother’s funeral, I made a little art film. That VHS tape is long lost now, though it’s probably still in existence somewhere, being plastic and all.

The scene: a foggy cemetery at sundown, a girl in a long skirt (me) lays herself over headstone after headstone, showing hopelessness and being bothered. Over the images we hear my voice narrating a long poem I wrote about the dismal relationship everyone around me had with death and the scolding I received for being “cavalier” about the topic of death on the way to my grandma’s funeral.

I wasn’t being cavalier; I was sharing that I was experiencing awe because of her release from her body.

I needed to make that film to communicate the experiences I had of being awestruck and silenced. I had to find a way to be heard and needed to explore my compounded grief. Art does this for us.

Art can create movement and expression for ineffable things.

It can twist one reality into whole new realities. Art can bend truth. It can heal us. It can break our contract with consensus reality and even become portals for gods and insight. Art can keep the edges of a belief blurry. It can shred comfortable complacency. It can reach in at us from the surreal, unreal, and shake us out of sleep.

Art can be a response to what is broken and originate from awe at the same time.

Artists can have the gift of vision. They can have a knack for invention. They’re creative thinkers and tricksters and problem solvers. They can merge boundless topics into tangible forms. Artists get the pass to break the status quo.

The death care culture in America has been one of my greatest muses.

Its brokenness inspired me to envisioning new paths to collective death awareness. Its abuse to dying people and the people who love them has kept my creative spark for death care revolution burning. Because it hijacked the overculture’s relationship with death, my creative rebelliousness in response to it has been strong. My death midwifery, and my training programs, from these inspirations have been growing more solidly for years. I’ve done well. I’ve been inspired.

And yet, now. Something has radically shifted in the collective in the 2020s.

A pandemic brought death to every doorstep and fractured the foundation of healthcare systems under it.  Wars and genocide, police brutality, a lack of faith in democracy, and increasing hunger have signaled the collective’s endings of many things. An alarm is sounding and waking us up. We are not just theorizing the Anthropocene anymore; we’re feeling it in our bodies. I’m standing at the fringes of the collective as a death walker with eyes for endings seeing that the-way-it’s-always-been-done is dead.

There is no death care culture to fix. It has died. We are at the end of it.

Where are we then?  To source my current ideas on fixing dead things, I’ll share what Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a great mythopoetic thought leader of our time, says about our times: “Postactivism is not the way I describe a superior form of being that guarantees solutions. It is not “post-” in the sense of being a successor narrative, a deeper truth, a surer track to utopian worlds, a formula for saving the world. Instead, it is the site where continuity becomes impossible, where “the world” in its colonizing completeness feels less compelling than that one riven place that sprouts alien notions, and where the solutions of the highway seem inadequate to a now unusual, more-than-human, arrangement. 

A frothing crack opens in the ground, enacting a break in the seamless totality and knowability of things, disrupting the exclusivity of human agency and inquiry, dispersing vitality, and expanding sociality to include things we hadn’t considered. Everything changes, becomes stranger. Alien. 

This is postactivism. When we have come to the end of the rope, to the very end of the world, and there are no more words.”

How do we birth a death care culture, collective death awareness, when we’re at the very end of the world, where there are no more words? Well, how do we sit with someone who is at the very end of their life, where there is nothing we can say to change the inevitable? We sit in this unknowing-what-to-do and we be with our visions.

Over the past year, the Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship has called to it more artists, fringe dwellers and risk takers to its hallways. I don’t think this is because we ‘make art’ in Nine Keys, but that we death work artists are called up to create portals to a death care culture birthing that also serves as a safety net for the people falling through the Anthropocene.

The creative process is an enigmatic journey akin to deciphering the mysteries present at the end of life. Both involve piecing together numinous elements and constructing a narrative from fragments of clues. In both cases, there’s a quest to understand the unknown and an invitation to make something out of uncertainty.

“We have come to the end of the rope, to the very end of the world, and there are no more words.” Akomolafe is right. We might be sitting in the threshold between languages. I have lost my interest in fixing the dead death care culture. My eyes are presently parallel with the horizon line, not looking on it, but within it. From where I’m standing, I’m calling death work artists to join me here.

Death Work Artists, join me in birthing a death awareness that will
escort us Home.

To visit the Nine Keys Art Gallery, please enter here.

The Art of Nine Keys

Why are so many artists and creative thinkers drawn to the Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship? Isn’t it just a course to learn ‘how to be a death midwife’ or a way to learn death care in America? Why does the apprenticeship dance so well with artist’s brain?

While I could surmise that artists and creative thinkers are drawn to this apprenticeship because I myself am an artist, I don’t think that is the reason. The apprenticeship does offer many expansive spaces for death workers to feel their way into their death work through self-expression in forms that serve them in their journey to their death work. It is a miracle to behold an artist unweaving grief away from what textbook knowledge and inherited thought say about it.

I was a C- minus student all through my schooling years. Writing essays on demand and memorizing facts didn’t support my way of learning. Back in the eighties when I was in primary school, the neurodivergent diagnosis was barely on anyone’s radar.

My dyslexia was unknown to me until I was in college in the late 1990s. I just assumed I didn’t ‘apply myself’ like I had been told I didn’t. I was considered a learner who couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit still, and always preferred imaginative headspaces over logical reasoning and fact regurgitation. I was punished often for talking too much and not paying attention. Perhaps it is because I am a neurodiverse learner, and an artist, that I created the Nine Keys apprenticeship to be a space with wide open possibilities for ‘alternative’ learners.

Yet, I still don’t think this is why the Keys call to so many artists and creative thinkers.

There’s something more powerful at play here than me just creating a course with a target audience in mind. I’ve never worked that way, anyway. If you are familiar with my work at all, you should know by now that my work, with its many twists and turns, is an emanation of my incessant right to be guided by something divine in my work.

To put it plainly, I believe I would fail at the work I am here to do in my corner of this world if I were going about doing it with a self-promoting drive. Could it be possible that our death work is a part of the evolution of human consciousness?

Could it be possible that our grief work is a part of a greater story of collective survival?

“You always have to be different,” was said to me often in my adolescence, mostly said with a tone of disapproval for my thirst to belong where I felt most comfortable; outside the box.

I’ve been mildly offended by the status quo since my pre-teen years. Now, nearing mid-life, almost age fifty, I am validated in my offense as I see that the status quo has led to such numb complacency within our Western culture that it became the prime breeding ground for corrupt and brutal systems that seem to be beyond our control now.

Disrupt the status quo or die is where we are now, in my opinion.

My death midwifery, true story, grew out of a series of unfortunate events for caregivers and the dying people they were taking care of. It grew out of requests for my presence to be present in death and dying spaces that were traumatic.

Occasionally, my death midwifery was in attendance for a family that, as hard as it was to do, was caring for their dying loved one with acceptance of the prognosis. Those instances our death industry would call “a good death”, I guess. I don’t use that phrasing, but I know what they’re getting at.

The status quo in Western death care is to outsource our death care to hospice and then to the funeral industry. We really don’t think to know our options and when the time comes to know them, we’re knee-deep in learning death in real time. If I’m going to have anything to do with creating new death care options, death education for the general public, and death and grief awareness that disrupts the status quo, I do not want to uplift death workers in my programs who are unable to think for themselves, or be brave enough to disrupt the norms, or who have any desire to maintain the ‘way it’s always been.’

I guess you could say that I call near to me the ‘fringe folk.’

The very way we go about learning in Nine Keys already disrupts educational norms. I’d rather see an apprentice’s truth kaleidoscope-ing through a drawing or a dance piece than to have them fill out an ‘A. B. or C.’ form that didn’t ask them to feel into their body the information they are being given. One of my apprentices said recently that “Nine Keys gave me new eyes.”

Another said, “Nine Keys creates embodied death workers.”

From the time we are age three or so, in Western culture, we are repeatedly taught that the way to understand a thing is through logic, reasoning, and thinking.

We are drawn up to come out of our hearts in our overarching educational systems. We are disconnected from our bodies there as well, save for a P.E. class here and there. We forget how to sense our way into things. We are cut away from our personal (let alone divine) truths. We learn scripts, not the ability to maintain touch with our words of wisdom.

I see this with medical staff. I see many of them, cut away from their hearts, boxed into charts and graphs, only able to help really with a medicine or a somewhat empty ‘I’m sorry you are going through this.’ platitude.

Of course, I’m not saying that this is all that I see from medical professionals. It is mostly what I see. The system designs it this way, they don’t.

I hope to be a part of creating learning systems that teach the adult student to stay in the flow of their calling, rather than to push it to be something it is not, even worse, something that is made to look like everyone else’s for the sake of credentialing and certification.

I have taught Death Ethics classes in universities, invited in by ‘old school’ nurses who know better and want better for their students. I’m not surprised when nursing students are baffled when I suggest that they manage their grief and stay in touch with the heart of their work.

One young nursing student raised his hand in a class I was teaching at Kennesaw State and asked, “Narinder, you’re saying that we are allowed to feel emotions for our patients?” I looked to the nursing professor sitting at the back of the lecture hall. Our eyes met, we shared a knowing, a sadness, that this is what it has come to. A nursing student asks if he may have empathy for his patients as though he had been led to believe that that was not appropriate. I was happy for all those students that their professor invited me in to teach the art of death midwifery.

We need inventive thinkers, status quo challengers, and brave artists in the death awareness, grief literacy, and death care landscapes. We need visionaries who exist outside of the boxes to become embodied death workers. We need the dancers, the writers, the painters, the gardeners, and the poets in this work. Great changes for the collective often come by way of artists. Why not utilize this group of us to better our death care and grief care landscapes?

If we are going to build future-loving worlds, we need invention and intervention through spirit-led inspiration.

Nine Keys draws the death worker to feel into their work, through body, through heart, through divine guidance. When they are sitting with someone who is dying, or someone who is bereaved, or someone who is grieving the sorrows of the world, my apprentices are wholly present and comfortable with ‘not knowing.’

They lean into uncertainty, just like they do with their art and with their calling. Their very calling is a muse. Grief is a muse. Their death work is an art form. They’ll study grief, sit with her, write about her, and disburden her until they find fountains of life under her. They’ll cut her to pieces and reassemble her in ways a scientific researcher may not be able to.

“You have a reputation,” a death care elder, who I don’t align with, said to me during a “Meet the Trainers” event held by the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance.

I know I do, folks.

I will always have the reputation as the student who thinks outside the box and refuses to maintain the deadly status quo, and now, I am a teacher who will behave in the same way.

May my reputation invite those to my work who want the Truth.

To hear more about how art weaves through the Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship, please enjoy this conversation with artist Melissa Word on the Nine Keys podcast.

What’s the Rush? Chronos and Kairos

A few days ago, I found myself alone on an island, Sears Island, the largest accessible uninhabited island on the coast of Maine.

A long road stretched right down the middle of the island. Grass and wildflowers grew up through the cracks of the old road.

As it is on an island, the path eventually comes to the water’s edge.

I climbed over the sun-bleached logs on the shoreline, through a tangle of creeping bellflowers, and chased my favorite hat along the water, caught up in the wind. 

Very often, I need to get lost, to not know where I am to remember where I am. I need to break my contract with time, step away from one reality into another, and re-enter childlike explorative play spaces. I need to regularly put away my to-lists and ideas so that I may sit with whatever is in front of me.

On this day I sat with an opened flower being tapped by raindrops until I was truly lost, until a bobbing and wet Rose of Sharon had my full attention. A story unfolded in my imagination as I paid close attention to the flower…

I imagined that I bent the Rose of Sharon towards me. I imagined that it grew so large that I could slip my hand down through the center of it and feel around inside of its stem. My imagination found a tiny envelope there.

I retrieved the envelope and struggled to get it open with my giant hands, but when I opened it, I found a note that read: “I am with you all. Love, Kairos.”

Kairos and Chronos, the Gods of Time.

Chronos measures time with clocks and calendars, decades and limits. I imagine Chronos sitting on a large marble slab saying things like “Time is money.” and “Don’t waste time.” and “Time is running out.” Chronos applies pressure with his waving pointer finger.

Sometimes Chronos’ wisdom puts a little fire under my ass. Sometimes it puts unnecessary pressure on things.

Kairos, on the other hand, is slippery with his directions. Kairos won’t comply with measurements. Kairos runs with a deer and says things like, “Come with me.” and “Here’s a secret door.” and “Imagination thrives here.” Kairos, in my experience, delivers me to ‘aha moments.’ Kairos expands me. 

I imagine that Kairos reigns where the Great Mother and her creatures and her cycles inhale, exhale, live, die, and transform. Kairos is childlike with her.

Slipping through Chronos’ backdoor, out into the fields with Kairos, is vital to my work in my corner of this world.

I must remember that there are many realities and realms. I must not cling to Chronos’ legs, hanging onto certainty, watching the sand running out in the hourglass. I must escape with Kairos, and go play so that my work ideas and tasks have fields to dream in. Chronos will always be there when I get back.

I think about how death is moved, held, and cajoled by Chronos and Kairos. I think about when it is my turn to stand at death’s door, will I be fighting for more time, begging and pleading for more time? I wonder what time I’d be fighting for then. I wonder if I’ll be ready to let go of time. I wonder if I’ll be sorry for wasting time, or if I will be resolved that my time was all well spent and played with. I wonder if I’ll be in a soft swell of gratitude for all the wonder I found playing in Kairos’ time. I bet I will.

I’ll remember the flowers and rain for sure. But will I get to my death and plead for a few more days to finish the projects I wanted to be known for, or will I be requesting that the Great Death hold away for a few more days so that I could rest and let go in the nectar of sunshine, on Kairos’ watch?

I wonder sometimes if we cling to Chronos’ legs because that way of keeping time does have some certainty to it. Whereas Kairos’ time mingles with big ‘U’ Uncertainties. I wonder what time is to us after we die. If our consciousness continues, that is. I won’t know until I’m there.

In the meantime, I’ll make sure to stop to watch the raindrops on the Rose of Sharon.

Time may be ‘running out’ but it also may be flooding in.

It just depends on whose eyes are making that call.

Chronos? Or Kairos?

Stop Pedestaling ‘Certifications’ for Death Doulas.

Every once in a while, there is a conversation circulating about the many death doula training programs that are emerging and the validity of ‘certification’ in this field. Even as I write this article, I learn about an organization that was recently created that uses the title “Certified Death Midwives.”

This is not a new conversation for me; ‘certification’ in death work training programs, ‘death doula proficiency exams’, and organizations and trainers who lean heavily into credentialing. I’ve been around the block with this topic dozens of times. So much so, that I rarely enter the conversation anymore.

This article isn’t about whether I think death doula ‘certifications’ are a ‘good or bad’ issue. This is an article about the overculture’s incessant need to box vast things that are bordering on infinite potentialities into certification programs.

“Wow! This is so helpful for my community, I think I’ll certify it.” was never uttered by an ancient elder, a mystic, or a midwife from the bygones.

Our collective neural pathways are so deeply tracked with one way of going about things when it comes to learning and training, that we, so help us god, tremble in our boots at the thought of hopping tracks and leaving ‘the way it’s always been done.’

We have fear that if we rip up the idea of certifications our work is no longer valid.

Several years ago a Navajo woman in my yoga community contacted me and asked me this. “Narinder, my grandmother has been helping people who are dying, and their families, in our community for almost 40 years. Does she need to go through a training program to call herself a death midwife?”

The fact that this question even needs to be asked is devastating to me. It angers me that this person who has been serving death care in her community for generations wouldn’t be listed on a website for “certified death midwives” because she didn’t pay her dues at a desk under the tutelage of someone who wouldn’t fight like hell for this woman’s right to call herself a death midwife. It’s preposterous to me that people, the majority of them white americans, do not see the problem here.

Here's what else rips my paper up; the ‘death doula training programs’ that the overculture buys into are deciding amongst themselves, what death work is valid and what death work is not. Keep your self-appointed authority off of my death work!

This same-ole-same-ole capitalistic approach to naming the value of our gifts can hide extremely valuable work that is done by death and grief workers under the rug. All eyes are on then on the ‘credentialed’ and/or ‘valued’ death work.  

Times they are a changing. Get with the program.

We have seen (so obviously) that death care wisdom belongs to all of us, and that grief illiteracy is a crisis in the collective. We are literally living during climate collapse, multiple genocides, pandemics, violence, and capitalist systems collapse.

We are in CRISIS which all originated with the ‘industry.’ Industry born from overloading logic. “I think therefore I am.” has gotten us into a big mess.

In my corner of the world, logic isn’t the only tool that’s going to build the structures that save our collective sanity in these times. We have to stop only giving value to ‘logical solutions’ when we are in a spiritual crisis. We need to stop boxing every spiritual care offering into certification programs. We need the artists and the mystics, the healers, plant talkers, and Indigenous teachers UP FRONT and center. We need these people to navigate death and grief care too. Honestly, we’re fucked if we don’t follow their lead.

So, SIT DOWN, capitalist learning systems in the ‘death trade’ arena. Your days of being the ‘big shot who calls the shots’ are OVER.  We do need more death doulas on hand, yes. We need grief workers like the earth needs the sun. What we don’t need is more training programs that pedestal certifications and a “governing body” over the people who do this work.

Have your certifications but stop the narrative that a death doula certification is what makes death work valid. That story has ended.

We are standing at the edge of an abyss! We are in a spiritual crisis! We need truly-spiritual learning systems that follow matriarchal flow. We need these death workers to be supported, held, lifted, fed, clothed, and housed; NOT slipping off into nothingness because someone else thinks their ‘uncertified’ work isn’t valid.

Bless all death workers and grief workers to understand the impact that their work has on the collective as we all feel, experience, and know the falling of the empires, climate collapse, mass violence, and extreme Uncertainty. Bless these death workers who already know this and behave as such.

Death Work Returns Society to its Humanity

7 minute read

This past week I watched a video of a college student being carried off their college campus by law enforcement because they were caught being a peace activist who was standing up for Palestinian Liberation.

As the student was singing the song “This Joy I Have” by the gospel singer Shirley Ceasar, their arms and legs were dangling from the grips of heavily armed police officers’ hands. The student’s voice insisted through song; “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. The world didn’t give it to me, and the world can’t take it away.”

As I watched and listened to the student singing this song while being arrested by four men that were dressed like soldiers, I couldn’t help but think about how the student’s soulfulness was refusing to be taken away by the colonizers’ machines.

This video was shown on social media the same day that I had a one-on-one phone call with my apprentice Meghan where we discussed how the soulfulness in anticipated-death spaces, always present though often unhonored, cannot be taken away by the medical industrial complex machine. As I watched the footage of this student singing while being arrested, after just ending the phone call with my apprentice, I saw the thread of the one-soul connecting the video of the university student with the conversation I had with my student.

The apprentices in the Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship are required to watch a tender documentary about a little boy named Michael who was dying and on hospice. The documentary was filmed in the 1980s, back when television programs weren’t in widescreen, back when smartphones weren’t in everyone’s hands, back when care for dying people wasn’t so medicalized and outsourced like it is today. The assignment asks the apprentices to share what they notice about the hospice group in this documentary and then to think about how hospice care has changed some forty years later.

Meghan shared that the documentary reminded her of the time when her own mother was transitioning. She noticed in the documentary how things were keenly focused on Michael and his family and how they all seemed to be held inside of something that quieted the noise of the outside world. Meghan remembered, “I forgot a lot about what that time was like with my own mother’s dying. This documentary reminded me of that quietness, that focus that comes around the dying person.” I was enthused that she recognized this particular atmosphere that is present in dying spaces.

“Meghan, you’re absolutely right!” I said. “This atmosphere around a dying person and their loved ones is like an invisible sphere around them. It’s almost as if in our dying spaces we are being separated from the day-to-day world by something bigger than us all. What do you think that invisible sphere around them could be?”  

“It’s a portal.” Meghan answered.

She emphasized the word portal in the way quantum physicists would, as opposed to the way new-age-spirituality uses that word to the point of diluting its meaning through overuse.

“Yes! That portal is always there around someone who is dying.” I said. “Now, where is that portal around a dying person when their death care is a part of the colonizer’s machine? Are dying people and their families given a chance to experience what this sacred sphere around them is offering if barely anybody in the death care systems are acknowledging that it exists?”

“That portal around the dying person is still there. The machine can’t take it away.” she answered perfectly.

This conversation between my apprentice and I was about the sacredness around a dying person and their loved ones and the dismissal of that sacredness by the industrial complexes. We were not speaking about individuals working inside of the industrial complexes but rather the soullessness of the medical industry. Though, I have been present many times for families and dying people when the soullessness of the medical complex trickles down through the medical staff, creating ungraceful situations for dying people and their loved ones.  

I’m writing this article, as all around the United States many university students and faculty members are gathering in peaceful protests to stand up for Palestinians who are being terrorized, starved, and buried in mass graves by occupiers and settlers. This attack is being supported by the American war machine. Many people, including myself, taking a stand against the American war machine, are now educated on how large corporations and institutions fuel catastrophic terror on oppressed people.

The empires, in my opinion, have muddied the waters of every American institution, from universities to hospitals.

The empire that created and maintains the American war machine is the same empire that holds the medical industrial complex intact. Death care in America, as we’ve known it for the past four generations, is a part of this medical industrial complex. Medicine in America is not healthcare, it’s business.

America’s pharmaceutical industry dominates the global pharmaceutical market. This arm of the empire was born out of white colonial imperialism too. The way we do death care in America was born from white colonial imperialism. It is separated from soul. The empire is in everything in America. It is in our homes, our jobs, our schools, our relationships, and it is even in the room where the holy portal for death is present.

However, while the empire may be moving through our lives claiming that it has the authority over our lives, it fails to be able to claim our soul. White colonial imperialism can be violent to soul, but it cannot claim it, change it, move it, or destroy it.

Soul existed before authority. Authority derived from reason. “I think therefore I am” is where the slippery slope began, in my opinion. Reason has great uses. It creates order and harmony, technological advances and medicines. However, reason without soul, and reason turned into authority in the wrong hands, leads us to be a society that has lost its humanity. Humans separated from soul are easily controlled cogs in the wheel. The problem arises for the empires when the humans remember that the soul within them, the soul within others, and the one-soul of all, cannot be controlled or destroyed.

When my apprentice Meghan and I discussed the portal around an actively dying person and their loved ones, and how the portal cannot be changed or dismantled by the industrial machines, we were touching on one of the points that gives me the inspiration to pursue my death midwifery artistry with so much passion.

Our death work is a matter of humanity’s life or death.

My apprentices and I see that the general public has had the wool pulled over their eyes by these industrial complexes and institutions. The institutions have claimed our death care and we’ve obliged. If we put death out of our sight does that mean it doesn’t exist? If we agree with the medical industrial complex that death is a medical event and we abdicate our responsibility to be present with it so that we can remain focused on our lives that we push, plead with, and poke at to be forever things, are we truly a society in touch with its soulfulness? No.

A tangible experience of soul and soulfulness is always present in the room of an actively dying person. Keeping dying and death care outsourced, over there where we can’t see it, keeps us away from experiencing the availability of soulfulness in these holy spaces. Our collective humanity is on hospice because our society is soul-parched. Something needs to shift quickly for us. To return a society back to soulfulness, we must return death care back to the people who understand the sanctity in the situation and behave as though they do.

The dying space’s sanctity goes well beyond a last confession or one prayer. There is a palpable change in the atmosphere around someone who is actively dying. This change is the opening of the portals for soul. When these portals are opened around someone who is actively dying, the loved ones and the dying person are held inside of a holy vessel that is unexplainable with reason alone but completely recognizable to soul.

When we are all truly present to death, we return soulfulness to our society. When our society is aware of its soulfulness, its humanity is restored. The world didn’t give us soul, and the world can’t take it away.

Through their work, death workers (doulas, midwives, companions) lead the collective to return to this soulfulness by educating people how to be with their dying loved one and how to care for the body of their loved one who has died. Death work reclaims our relationships with death. It brings death care back into our hands, away from the impersonal grips of the industrial complexes. Death work brings death back into sight, no longer hiding it away in institutions. Death workers have sat, as close as a living person can, with their own mortality. They embody soulfulness. Death workers invite us to live in death awareness, thereby living with the awareness of the preciousness of all life.

Death work restores our humanity.

by Narinder Bazen

*conversation with Nine Keys apprentice Meghan is shared with their permission

The Intelligence of Grief

6 minute read

I first learned about grief in the card aisle at the grocery store when I was around the age of seven. The words “with sympathy” were spelled out in pastels on the front of greeting cards at my eye level. Is grief like a sort of sad holiday that happens when someone died? Sympathy cards and flowers are given, then we all go back to school and act like nothing has changed.

I don’t think the word grief was ever said in my childhood. Looking back now, my grief lessons were all over my adolescence, even though I didn’t know that’s what the lessons were, or that “grief” was the name of the elephant in the room. We were all lugging this elephant behind us without knowing it was there.

Grief remains present, even when we don’t acknowledge it.

My mother’s father died when she was in her twenties, well before I was born. This was back in the “Time heals all wounds” days, in the “Buck up” generation. I’m assuming that her grief was expected to “heal”. I feel like my mom often had a knot in her throat that she was trying to speak around when we were kids. Though her bright countenance and sense of humor are very obvious, my hypersensitive heart could hear that knot throughout my childhood. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why she was always singing, to give the knot some room. And oh, can my mom sing.

Knowing what I know now about grief, I wish I had known then that it was the nameless elephant she was carrying around while also raising us kids practically on her own. Maybe her grief is what gives her such tenacious optimism.

Grief gives room for singing.

My father, a drafted Vietnam War veteran, was so sick with unacknowledged grief that he was diagnosed as mentally ill, hospitalized for mental illness and heavily medicated for it. Nobody anywhere thought that perhaps a front combat Vietnam War veteran, who also suffered a childhood that was a sort of warzone, could possibly be afflicted with grief.

Grief wasn’t on the radar.

His depression and sporadic nervous behaviors colored my childhood with dark tones. While most kids were memorizing state capitals, I was learning to distrust the American government. I was coming up in the fallout of what ‘drafted to the Vietnam War’ meant. But, still, nobody anywhere considered his afflictions to be grief. He died never knowing that it was grief that haunted him. The dark tones of my childhood grew my capacity for holding heavy things with others.

Grief can be passed down from one generation to the next after all.

In my teens and twenties, my own grief began to choke the life out of me. After years of numbing myself with drugs, I began numbing myself with meditation. Thousands of dollars in therapy and decades spent under spiritual teachers and yet nobody anywhere knew what was wrong with me. When I stepped onto the path of death midwifery and learned exactly what grief is, I began to understand myself. When I learned that it was grief that was the elephant in the room, I began to learn how to let it carry me. A grief practice can be a strong foundation after all.

Grief isn’t something that only comes after the loss of a loved one.

Francis Weller, a well-known author, psychotherapist and soul activist teaches us that grief goes well beyond bereavement. He teaches that grief comes for places within us that did not know love. It comes for the sorrows of the world. It comes for ancestral grief. Through my studies of Weller’s theories, I learned that what I was trying to numb or mend within myself was not an illness but was grief. When I began to practice my grief, learning its movements and desires and the weight of it, my mind and body and spirit began to synergistically bring wholeness, inspiration and health to my self. My depressive episodes became focused and purposeful once I learned they were my grief songs trying to be heard.

It is through my grief practice, my body opened and softened, my eyes watered regularly, that I am able to see clearly. Because of my grief practice, I can stay centered in this devastatingly dark and yet also beautiful world.

Grief sharpens our vision.

My grief will never go away, just like my love won’t. Being awake and aware now to the planet and its creatures and people is an invitation to grieve and praise. Every single day we are given something to grieve and something to enjoy. We have our own personal losses, and we have losses that come from being one part of the whole.

Our planet is gasping for air and yet it still is serenaded by birdsong. It seems that school shootings in America are now an unforgivable norm and yet children are still crafting whimsy with their imaginations. A suicide epidemic isn’t being largely discussed yet some deathworkers are now changing the narrative around this topic and saving lives while they do. Multiple genocides are happening to our kin and the terror is breaking our numbness apart. We don’t know where we’re heading, and yet, through our growing grief awareness we are given invitations to unite our hearts. Will we accept the invitations?

Grief knows the way.

Unacknowledged grief is the rootball of our collective pain. It can choke the life out of those of us that don’t know it’s knotted up around our hearts. Unacknowledged grief is deadly. If we want to see change in our world, we must get to the root of the problems. Unacknowledged grief leaves a sinkhole under Americans that many fill with overconsumption, causing more harm. This harm causes more grief. The sinkhole goes deeper.

We need love to fill these spaces in. Love cannot be its fullest expression until grief is in its fullest expression. We don’t pull the rootball up to destroy it. We pull the rootball up, expose it, study it, and replant it in a place where it will serve us.

Grief is a field that we tend.

Living in grief awareness is a way of life. Grief folds into our day-to-day living. Grief wants to move just like love does. We allow grief to move through our joints when we stretch and dance or swing a tennis racket. We allow grief to move when we gather with others and create space and ritual for it together. We allow grief to move when we make art with it, when we put it into our elbow grease in the garden, when we pray and sing it, and when we weep and breathe it consciously.

Grief has a place in our lives.

The gift of grief expression is interconnectedness with all that is. Grief unacknowledged isolates us and shuts life-giving parts of our selves away from others. Grief unmoved becomes stagnancy in our blood. It closes the shoulders down around the heart and stifles our breath. Grief keeps our gaze downward. The very word grief comes from the Latin word gravare which means to make heavy.

The posture of grief is slumped over and closed off. But when grief is expressed, opened up, and carried out in the open collectively, it is made (into) light. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. We should know our grief through our personal relationships with its movement within us and what it does when we share
it.

Grief is enlightening.

Having a grief practice is essential. Most mornings I start my day with a cup of coffee and my grief practice. Through my movement practice, I open my body and heart energy to express what has made them heavy. If I go straight to my mind to express my grief, my grief gets tangled up with worries, judgment, and ideas. My body must express my grief first. Some days this opening brings tears to my face, some days it brings inspiration, and most days it brings a keen awareness of what is possible.

Grief is a guide.

Recently, I got to have a tender conversation with grief coach Naila Francis for my Nine Keys Podcast. Naila is a death midwife, interfaith healer, and poet who centers their work around grief awareness.

In this conversation, Naila said something that really stuck with me. She shared that some days her grief will express itself through tears and that she won’t assign a reason for that particular grief expression. There isn’t a vagueness to this way of grief, but there is an allowance for the intelligence of grief. To me, this is a mature place on the path. Through practice, we learn our grief and how it moves. Some days it may write poetry, and other days it may weep in dance.

Grief is inspirational.

Naila and I have a grief thing in common. We have found that our grief practices have opened us up to experience a deep connection with nature and others. Our grief practices keep our hearts flexible and strong enough to hold the sorrows of the world. Our grief practices inspire new thought, new ways to care, and wholeness.

We may not be able to solve our world’s problems with our grief practices, but we can hold our collective’s predicaments with them in a way that allows for more love, patience, tenderness, and understanding to be the joining points between us. We’ve got to unite in grief, don’t we? Maybe our acknowledged grief has the power to move us together in such a way that makes empires fall and truly caring communities arise.

Grief is the way forward.

Keep going!
Narinder Bazen

*New to the idea of having a grief practice?

I invite you to lean into the many grief care communities that are forming within the deathworker movement and to work with one-on-one grief coaches like Naila Frances or myself.

*Are you a deathworker / death doula / death midwife / death companion, etc.?

If you would like to develop your grief coaching and receive soft-business development support, please consider working with me through my Reimagine offering. Deathworkers are just scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done for the collective’s great awakening to grief. If you are a deathworker who offers grief coaching to your community, please know the world is grateful for your work.

Death Midwifery from this Mystic’s Soul-Eyes

6 minute read

Unfolding as roses for the great primordial mother; that’s how I envision the death workers who come into my care. Each one, a gift to the creative source of nature.

My calling as a death midwife includes midwifing midwives to the path of death midwifery. This is a path that is a lifelong journey of personal and collective reclamation.

What can be effective art, activism, advocacy, soft business that rewrites the value of caregiving, and a spiritual path all at the same time? Death midwifery.

The word ‘midwifery’ has an ancient vibration to me.

Though the definition of the word midwifery is “a woman who is with” (usually with another person in childbirth), I feel that the word is non-gendered. As I’ve been this word for almost ten years, I know midwifery as a creative flow for art, a spiritual path, and a divine force that moves through vessels of its own choosing.

Where does the calling originate? I teach that the calling is born from the pulse of the collective-one-heart. It is from the source of all creation, it is from the ancestors, and it is from the earth’s push to survive. To me, the great primordial mother energy beckons our return to land, to community, to rest, to art, and to liberation for all.

This midwifery, like a bell, rings clarity through the one carrying it by clearing the cobwebs that keep them from fully embodying their death midwifery.

It magnetizes situations and people that need its touch to the one who carries it. What do my apprentices say about the nine months that they spend in Nine Keys Apprenticeship? They’ll say that it amazed them with magic, that it opened their eyes and minds and hearts, that it fully prepared them to be death midwives in their communities, that it crumbled the obstacles that impeded them from their work, that it amazed them with its whimsy and creative flow, and that it brought them into great intimacy with what it means to be alive.

The great primordial mother’s energy moves death midwifery through people that she chooses to carry it, be it, know it, and deliver it. When the midwife develops a secure link with their own midwifery and truly understands that they are the vessel for this movement, the work begins to take form on the material plane.

They become the rose, the photosynthesis, and the gardener.

Have you ever met a death worker who said that they don’t know why they are called to death work, but they just know that they are? The question “When did you get into death midwifery?” has always been an existential invitation for me. The answer truly is, “Death midwifery got into me. I was born with it.”

You may know the children who have the midwife’s nature. They may have a curiosity for all things that can’t be explained. They may exhibit a deeply caring nature for sick family members or animals. They may be quiet, acutely attuned to the subtleties in the room, or noticeably observant children. They may talk about things unseen and unheard as though they are seen and heard. They may be labeled or praised for their sensitivities. They may see right through people.

The death midwife who keeps the channel clear between their calling to the midwifery and releases strong attachments to the outcomes of their work will find that their midwifery speaks to them as a guide.

When a death midwife connects to their practice with reverence and an open mind, the calling within them speaks clearly. This is how I guide my death midwifery apprentices to find their death work. I cannot “train” them how to be a death midwife.

I can teach them everything they need to know about the art and the practicalities of the work, I can fill their baskets with the information they need to know about our current death care culture and what to expect when their work takes material form, but I can’t tell them what their death midwifery is. I love to be the mirror that helps them see their work!

Over the years of guiding death midwives, I have witnessed miracles in my apprentices’ and mentees’ death midwifery. My own death midwifery is a string of holy serendipitous moments.

It also weaves throughout the moments in my day-to-day living.  Some of my apprentices live their death midwifery in a cloistered sort of way, their calling brings them into deep devotion for the collective grief. Some of their midwifery takes form through their art and poetry. Some create a business for their work, simultaneously midwifing death while rewriting the value of ‘women’s work.’ Some of their callings weave in and out through all three incarnations.

No matter if their work is cloistered or very visible publicly, they are in service to their communities.

When a death midwife, through their soul-eyes, sees their calling taking shape out in the open, they are met with an added challenge, to remain close to the source of their calling and to relinquish expectations and timing to this midwifery.

When they find their balance between devotion and diligence, their midwifery brings forth the people and places that need their care. The creative flow for the mystical death midwife is powerful. It must be grounded through play and conscious day-to-day living. It has its own timing. It challenges the midwife over and over again to release, to let go, to lean into uncertainty, and to be receptive to its guidance.

I have witnessed miracles for death midwives who answer to their calling this way. I have seen how their work takes shape into something that is beyond their limited ideas about the work. When this happens, I see the great primordial mother’s hand.

Death will take away everything that keeps us from being pure consciousness. In the end, it takes away our body so that we can realize ourselves as pure love.

Death midwives who accept the invitation to this work as a spiritual path and a lifestyle tend to live in liminal places. They have a true understanding of the life/death/life cycles everywhere, and they know the temporary nature of everything. These knowings exude from them. They tend to gather around the threshold that sits between what has died and what is being born.

As we reclaim our sovereignty, as we lament what we’ve done to the planet, and as we bear witness to the violence of white colonial imperialism, the mystical death midwife puts their ears to the ground and their eyes inward.

Their hands remain available to help, and their hearts, breaking and mending, grow to be greater containers of love and creative flow.

They know what being alive in their body truly means.

Narinder Bazen

This Work Is Going to Take Time.

7 minute read

How many times have we made ourselves available to the journey without fixing every hope on the destination? Does anyone really do that? Is it easy to do for some and not easy for others? I’ll admit, I’m prone to fixating on the destination and sometimes forget to stop at the milestones in the journey to give thanks or praise, or even to stop and reassess how the journey is going.

When it comes to the death and grief over-culture in America, my sights are often set on what needs to be fixed, what goodness is possible, and where I would like to see our collective understanding of death, dying, and grief care. I’ll often use the phrasing ‘new paradigm death care’ like I’m putting a flag in the land of it and making a claim about what it is. Is it here? How bold of me! Are we there yet?

Recently I had a conversation with a well-known professional intuitive named Suzanne Jauchius. I learned about Suzanne in 2013 when I found her book You Know Your Way Home to be a page-turner that I couldn’t put down. It is her true story about her journey as a professional intuitive who eventually comes to be known as someone who finds missing people. How fascinated I was reading this book! Where does someone like Suzanne fit into our culture here in North America that is so bent towards logic and skepticism about unexplainable talents? In our recent conversation, I shared with Suzanne that I had been a little bit wearied over my own work’s journey and the snail-slow pace of the unfurling holistic end-of-life care movement. I explained that it sometimes feels like the work isn’t going anywhere. I admitted that even though I do trust the great unseen hand that guides this holistic death care movement, I sometimes still grow concerned that I may be plodding away with my death work for nothing.

Suzanne reminded me that she is seventy-five years old and that it took decades for people to take her work seriously. She told me stories about how she would give intuitive readings in peoples’ houses, driving all over god’s country to do so, and how she was a guest on a radio show for eight years, and still nobody really was taking her work to heart. She shared with me that she was a one-woman show, a single mother, with no financial support from anywhere, and that even though there were hardships, she couldn’t abandon her work because she was undeniably called to do her work. Going to get ‘a real job’ was out of the question for her. This is how many death carers feel about their work. I know they understand this just as much as I do. Suzanne then said to me, “You need to quit whining.” My response to that was a bellowing laugh. I had just been found out. I was complaining. Then she said to me, “Narinder, this work is going to take time. This death care work you are doing is where we are going, but it’s going to take time.” 

There are times when we not only hear the words someone is saying but we also feel a divine pulse behind the message. That was how it felt when Suzanne said this to me, like a message that had fallen out of the stars and landed on the notepad where I was doodling hearts. Was I so consumed with the destination that I have rushed the journey?

I see the destination of the holistic death care movement. It looks like every person in this beautiful and confused society knowing all of their end-of-life care options. It looks like everyone knowing all of their funeral and burial choices. I imagine it looks like a majority of people choosing burial options that are gentle to the earth. I can see it as a time when unnecessarily embalming a body is taboo. Maybe this destination is a time when we all are aware of the ways in which different cultures talk about death and dying, how they care for their dying and their dead, and how they grieve and praise. Maybe the destination of this holistic end-of-life care movement is a place where every caregiver is fully prepared to care for their dying loved one and is absolutely supported in that care. Maybe at this destination point medical professionals are deeply supported in their work and not under the thumb of Big Brother and its ideas about health care as a business.

Perhaps the destination of this holistic end-of-life care movement is a mass awakening to the intelligence of grief. Maybe there, grief in its many tones, is understood, acknowledged, supported, and lifted up. I believe when grief reigns in its fullest expression, is felt and free to move, then love in its fullest expression is felt and free to move too. Who will we be when grief and love are completely reunited?

Admittedly, there have been many days, bogged down in the mire of late-stage corporate capitalism, keeping my own head above water, forgetting the beauty and grace I receive, that I have asked myself, about my death work, “Should I keep going? Should I keep encouraging other death carers? Do other death workers get discouraged with their work?” (I know they do.) And then there are most days, when I know how much this holistic death care movement has done already and I am amazed. We have a long way to go, but we’re going!

What happens if we do give this work time? What happens if we get on board with the idea that we are planting seeds for trees we may not see reach maturity? What happens if we become aware of the milestones in the progress we’re making with our work and stop to enjoy them?

I offer to my apprentices often, “This work takes consistency.” Never have I said, “This work is always easy and comes with quick results.” Consistency means different things for different people. It can have different paces and seasons. Consistency has cycles, yet in the ebbs and flows, there it is. A mass overnight awakening of death awareness hasn’t happened yet. Though, I think it’s safe to say that the terror that is inflicted on the Palestinians (as I write this) has ripped the curtains down, curtains we were hiding behind with our death phobia and addiction to comfort. This unveiling is putting a spotlight on our collective grief wounds. I have seen more grief support groups emerge in the past six months because of this mass grief crisis. Where do we put our gratitude for the Palestinian people? Maybe we show our gratitude by keeping up with our “new paradigm” callings that came at a time like this, in the world like this. Maybe we show our gratitude with our consistent efforts and praise for our death and grief work callings.

The death carers and grief workers out here are doing a phenomenal job as the harbingers of living in death and grief awareness. I am amazed at our tenacious loyalty to our work. I’m celebrating our milestones. I’m celebrating the fact that “grief awareness is trending.” I’m celebrating that more green burial cemeteries are becoming available. I’m overjoyed to hear that hospice groups are becoming educated about holistic death care. I’m inspired by the death workers who are changing the conversations about suicide loss, LBGTQIA+ death care, the many tones of grief, accessible death care, death education, and many other much-needed conversations. The general public has a huge blessing in the death carers emerging through the holistic death care movement. What if the death workers are the rainbows after the storms?

I’m immensely grateful to be a part of this team. And I’m thankful for my community who gives their attention to some of the things I feel called to say to us.

This work is going to take time. It may not reach the results we want to see in our lifetimes, and we still do the work. Our work is guided and supported by a universal force that has its own ideas about time.

I’m here for the long game. Are you?

Narinder Bazen

Art Making at the End of Life

6 minute read

Does an artist’s drawing begin the moment they have picked up their pencil or chosen which type of paper they are going to draw on? Or does the artist’s drawing begin when they have decided what they’d like to draw and have a clear image of it in their mind? Or does an artist’s drawing begin a few years before they picked up their pencils, when they were standing on a street corner when they got the phone call that changed their life? Or does an artist’s drawing begin when they were a child learning how to hold a crayon? Or does an artist’s drawing begin before they were born, a fetus warm in their mother’s womb, tucked in under her heartbeat? Or does an artist’s drawing begin with their very first breath?

When I was a little child, in the first grade of school, my teacher asked me if I wanted to draw a piece of music. I leapt at the chance. She invited me to the wall-to-wall chalkboard at the front of the classroom and told me to choose a piece of chalk. She then instructed me to stand at the left side of the chalkboard so that I could have so much room to move my little hand and feet, as I drew the song (she would choose) across the vast empty dark space before me. 

I didn’t know what song she was going to play on the record player. I waited with great anticipation, my chalk pressed to my starting point, excitement tempting to come through every pore on my body. I knew, without any doubts, that I understood my assignment. This was easy. Learning to read, not so much. The needle landed on the record, and into the air of the classroom burst Sergei Prokofiev’s “symphonic tale for children” titled Peter and the Wolf opus 67.

I did not have to give any thoughts to what my chalk piece was going to draw. The music moved my soul through my arms and into my fingers as I slowly made thick marks to the first low and haunting sounds of the piece. Then as the flutes and oboes bounced notes that sounded like springing steps, my hand turned began to gayly flick the chalk up and down. Though, as the music turned to signal a wolf appearing from the woods by way of the crescendoing timpani and dooming trombones, my hand slowed, and the chalk dipped to low sweeping and serious movements.

I became so happily lost in the musical galaxy created by my chalk marks bouncing and dipping, swooping and rising on the blackboard, that I forgot my classmates sitting behind me. My soul was feeling free. This was me.

Is this how my soul will feel once it has left my body?

Art has been alive in my body my entire life, and I believe that it will continue to exist inside of my body until my very last breath. Though there have been many years where my drawings and poetry have laid dormant, as my creativity swelled to create my death midwifery practice, it has never died.

I’ve picked up my paints and pencils this winter of 2023 and have begun an early morning art practice. There’s something deeply nourishing about making art in the darkness before dawn. I think about making art at the end of life. My art, the expression of my soul, is full of self-comfort, sanctuary, and is teaching me that inspiration that may never die.

What does our creativity do when we are given a terminal diagnosis? Does our creativity stop because our body is slowing down?

I don't believe this has to be so. For I now know, creativity is limitless and soulful, alive and super close to infinity. Creativity will always find a way to exist. Maybe it’s our logic, or fears, maybe even perhaps our values, that can stifle its movements.

The end-of-life period is not only about “getting our affairs in order.” It can also be a time for creative expression. Does creativity stop before our last breath? There are still creative possibilities even during the evening hours of our lives. I believe this! What stories can only be written when infinity has moved in closer? What drawings can pour forth when we’ve lost some of the weight of being perceived? What do watercolors have to do with grief?

When I talk about end-of-life art making, I am not referring to the Legacy Projects that we create for those we are leaving behind.
Legacy Projects are important and beautiful things, but we don’t always have to create at the end of our lives with ‘what we’ll leave behind’ in mind.

We can use creative play for our own enjoyment, fulfillment, and soul exploration at every stage of our life. Through art, we can find life in our bodies, even when it seems all eyes on us (bless them) are preparing for its absence.

Art in action, whether that’s poetry, drawing, decorating our walls with paper stars, or collaging our dreams, is powerful comfort. What happens when we, from our beds, arrange a bouquet of flowers bursting with life for ourselves? What joys are available in the poetry we write, from those beds, about the sunlight dancing on the wall before us? What exploration invitations are there when we draw the symbols we saw in our dreams? What playful and imaginative landscapes can we dream up for future places even when we are sometimes so focused on memories?

There is life and creativity at the “end-of-life.” How shall we animate this threshold? Maybe the soul knows how to sing through our hands and ideas all the way to the end of the blackboard.

May all beings know Inspiration intimately.

*If you’d like to talk with Narinder about art making at the end-of-life, please schedule a free consultation.

Death Work is Activism

6 minute read

When I first officially arrived on the death midwifery scene back in 2017, my naivety about the end-of-life choices the general public were being given was shattered. Not only were the lack of end-of-life care choices noticeable, the lack of death education for people was shocking and the grief illiteracy dumfounded me.

I was overwhelmed for a while, like maybe someone who realizes for the first time that they have access to food in a land where thousands are starving. Like many new death workers, I felt like I gained access to information that thousands of people deserved to have and needed to have. I knew very early on in my death work that being an educator was my responsibility.

While I have worked with families and individuals in their homes and virtually as a death midwife all these years, my focus has stayed with education. Through my work, I gain more understanding of what the people know and don’t know about dying and grief. I have taken that information and trained other death workers with it. My passion for death work has never swayed, it has been the number one topic on my mind for seven years. I wake up every morning thinking about it. I go to bed thinking about it. My struggle with it has been, and continues to be, the smallness of my audience. I pray that my death midwifery apprenticeship takes what I know to wider places for the sake of collective healing.

I didn’t sign up for death work because I wanted to be a death worker activist. Though I was born an activist, calling for fairness in the school yard and praying for peace when bedtime prayers were said, I didn’t see my death midwifery as activism at first. I thought my death work was just about helping people die and offering grief support to the bereaved. Quickly did I realize, the lack of death care and lack of grief literacy in my community was a serious issue. As my scope widened on these issues, I realized that these problems reached beyond my community. These issues were harming the collective and the planet.

Examples of this can be illustrated by the numerous caregivers and dying people I serve who do not understand how much hospice is not going to be involved with their care until they are caught in caregiver burnout or death anxiety. That’s usually when they call me. Through my death midwifery, I learned that medical professionals, nursing facility staff and funeral directors are commonly severely burnt out and compassion fatigued they are victims of the profit-over-people motives held up by their corporate leaders. They too are suffering because of the systemic problems in end-of-life care. This corporate greed trickles down into the dying’s room and steals the sanctity of their last breaths.

I’ve witnessed people who have experienced sudden loss be blindsided by the lack of accessible funeral options then bottlenecked into funeral industry places that take their shock as an invitation to price gouge them.

I’ve seen how the void where grief care should be, and the overall grief illiteracy in communities, leaves bereaved people alone and unsupported furthering their grief into spirals of physical and mental illness. We have been taught to outsource our death care and to not know what grief is. Because we are uneducated about death and grief, we have death phobia and unacknowledged grief. The phobia and displaced grief have become the cancer cells that are killing us through excessive materialism and over consumption, both deadening us into apathy.

I didn’t learn all these things from a book or a teacher. I learned all these things by being in ungraceful death and grief spaces with people. What else shall I do with that insider information, but my best to make something better. I’m not afraid of the dark, in fact, I use it as an art and activist medium. My grief is actionable.

Grief is not exclusive. Grief beckons after the loss of life, and also the loss of hope, the loss of land, the loss of stability, the loss of identity, the loss of time, and biodiversity loss…to name a few. The ancestral grief born from colonialism, and unsung grief in general, have became the root ball of all our collective pain. It’s a big ask, but are we able to take in the enormity of our work? We death workers are not here to just create death care boutiques, we are here for an evolutionary reset in humanity.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this piece and look at the word activist. Many of you, like me, may have been raised to learn that an activist is someone who uses force for the purpose of creating social or political change. Media shows us images of activists as shouting protestors or angry mobs throwing bricks through shop windows. What vibration does the word activist make you feel? Does activist make you feel fear? Does it make you feel safe? Does it feel aggressive?  Does it feel inspiring or exciting?

The word activist comes from the Latin activus which came from the word actus which means “a doing” (from PIE root ag "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). The definition of the word activist is, “a person who campaigns to bring about political or social change.”  In western societies in 2023, death work is mostly activism. It doesn’t matter how you package it, it’s activism.

Death work in western societies in 2023 is about bringing holistic death care, grief schooling, grief care, end-of-life care choices, and many more death and dying related topics to the general public who are bereft of proper death and grief education. Whether the death worker knows it or not, they are participating in a movement that has the intention to bring about social and political change.  Highlighted at the core of death work are the reclamations of death care, death care for the people by the people, and grief literacy, returning grief back to its rightful place in the individuals’ psyches. This is bringing grief back to organic movement in the collective one-mind. Do we understand what is being asked of us, death workers?

We must be very careful that our work does not get hijacked by profit-over-people motives, that it is always centered in respect for indigenous peoples’ death care that never wavered from holistic death care. We must remember that holistic death care and grief literacy are for everyone to have access to. It is for people who are incarcerated, people who seek asylum, it’s for the houseless, it’s for the rich and it’s for the underserved.  We should accept that what we are doing is avant-garde. It won’t be understood for quite some time. We continue to move forward and trust the intelligence of the people. We find sustainability in our work so that it can continue to create good changes. We can be death and grief educators to our communities while we are death workers intimately involved in our client’s death care.

We must individually ask ourselves who the whole of the holistic death care movement is for. Are we to talk about death care sovereignty for one race or all races? Are we, as a whole movement, acting for the grief care of one specific population or all people? Are we to hold space for one type of death, but not all types of death? What type of grief are we talking about? What are we doing our death work for? Who are we doing it for?

Each death worker has a specific calling to their work. While their place in the movement is unique, it would serve all of us for each death worker to understand the societal, cultural, environmental, and global impact their place in the holistic death care movement has.

May we continue to dig up the places unacknowledged grief has been locked away. May we continue to listen to the call from our environments that beckon our death work. May we take our death work out of the personal and place it into the global heart. May we bypass the limiting fears we have, most likely created by patriarchal conditioning, and continue to use death work for what it came to be.

Copyright Narinder Bazen LLC 2023
*This is not an article written by AI. It was written by Narinder Bazen and will most likely contain spelling and grammar errors.

Death Work Folds Into Who We Are

7 minute read

To ‘fold in’, when we are kneading dough or pressing pie crust, means to add in one ingredient by gently turning one part over another until they are combined. As I was making the crust for a delicious tomato pie today, I played with that phrase in my mind.
Lately I’ve been thinking of a way to describe how I view death work (what we call the work of death doulas, death companions and death midwives) and how it merges with who we are. It folds into who we are!

For several years, I have personally guided many death workers to their version of the work through my Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship. I have done this while I have been serving as a death midwife myself. It is with so much experience that I confidently speak about what this holistic death care work is doing.

In western society, particularly North American society, we tend to have a very narrow view of ‘work’, and we assume that anything we have trained for holds some guarantee, somewhere, that we will be doing the very thing we trained for as a vocation. We often unwittingly abide by a ‘trained, graduated, applied, hired’ system. As I have seen, contemporary death work, the work of the doulas, midwives and companions, refuses to be boxed into a system and would rather, for many death workers, be approached as a spiritual practice that folds into their lives, that serves their communities, and serves them as well.

I remember the weeks after my death midwifery became ‘official’ by obtainment of a certificate stating that I had completed a death midwifery training course. In those days, I went headstrong into what I thought would be very busy work as a death midwife. What I failed to pay attention to was that my death midwifery had come out of my counseling practice and the yoga and meditation classes I was teaching. There was no separation.

After the better part of a year as an ‘official’ death midwife, I realized that my death work had an agenda all to itself, and that I was not the owner (or the employee) of it but rather the steward of what the work wanted to be through me. I also learned that if I wanted to make a living wage by only serving people in person at the end-of-life, that I’d not be physically able to do so. To be a death midwife who serves alone and offers on-call support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is physically impossible. This was a hard lesson for me and one I share often with my apprentices so that they won’t have to learn the hard way. I began to surrender to the calling of the work and was repeatedly amazed at all of the places that it took me.

My death midwifery, folded into my life, my counseling practice and my yoga and meditation classes. Eventually it called me to teach death education to the public, death ethics to nursing students, and death midwifery to many death workers. I had no clue in the very beginning that my death work was going to do all of that. My vision for it had been laden with my own ideas about how it would go, a vision that was very limited. Once I learned that my death work would have its own micro-deaths and its own agenda, I began to learn the dance that it had been inviting me to for many years.

Death work, as spiritual practice, folds into what we are doing already. It doesn’t always ask us to do an about-face and become someone entirely different to who we are.  It’s quite the opposite. It wants to merge with where we are, becoming one with who we are, and going forward together to where we are going. At times, the work will pull on a thread in us that does lead to some unraveling that keeps us from the fullest expression of our capacities as death worker.

Through the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, I have guided and witnessed death workers merging with their callings. Some of them are artists whose death work will speak through their art. Their audiences will know them as artist and death midwife.

Some of the Nine Keys apprentices have been yoga instructors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and birth doulas who merged their death work with their current work.

Some of the apprentices have been gardeners, bread makers, and herbalists who will talk about their death midwifery with their customers at the local famer’s market.

Some of them have been licensed therapists, chaplains, a cancer researcher, and nurses whose work became death midwifery informed.

Some of them are passionate about business, so their death work takes on a business model and merges with who they are and where they are in business.
This is my forte! Helping death workers navigate the ins and outs of crafting spiritual and community care into a business that supports them as they do their work.

Some of them are unencumbered spiritual driven people, living nomadically, their death midwifery touching wherever their feet have walked.

The astounding beauty of death work, as spiritual practice, is that it will guide us, challenge us, inspire us and gift us with serendipity, humility, and honor, if we allow it to fold into who we are, where we are, and what’s best for us.

Death work won’t be a part of hustle culture. That’s how death midwifery, long ago, was killed. It has reincarnated as healthy and balanced work and community care. It’s a soft-business, you know?

The calling can bring financial stability to the death worker. It will reward the death worker with a life lived in death awareness, death wisdom, and honors that are beyond words. It can bring sustainable lifestyle options to the death worker. It will spread out through the death workers to heal the death-phobia all around us, to bring the collective’s grief out of the shamed shadows, and to ultimately guide society home. Death work, as spiritual practice, as soft-business, is a part of the evolutionary process of the collective consciousness.

Narinder Elizabeth Bazen
(C) 2016 Narinder Bazen Death Midwifery, LLC All rights reserved 

Death Doulas in Mainstream Media: (Let’s Be Honest Here.)

9 minute read

In June of 2021, an article in the New York Times regarding Death Doulas was circulating around the death worker community, landing on my desk several times. The title of the article read like this, “‘Death Doulas’ Provide Aid at the End of Life: End-of-Life doulas support people emotionally, physically, spiritually and practically: sitting vigil, giving hand massages, making snacks.”  

Before this article, there was an article in USA Today about Death Doulas that included descriptions of Death Doula work like this: “When people are nearing the end of their lives, a doula will visit and often sit vigil with them as they are dying. They also help patients with their will and other advance directives. They help people do legacy projects such as quilts, art projects, scrapbooks or writing letters to leave behind to their relatives.”  

While mainstream media is getting the word out about the work of Death Doulas, it isn’t quite telling the public the truth about all the ways Death Doulas work. Are these articles telling the general public (and Death Doulas) that this work is just an adjunct service to hospice, that it’s an upgrade on your death care? Are these articles describing a service solely focused on the person dying and not the caregivers?  

Over the past several years, as I watch the holistic death care movement grow, I’ve noticed the portrayal of Death Doulas and Midwives in the media continue to repeat this pattern. Are these articles serving or hindering the Death Doulas’ work? They may possibly be doing both. While they are making the Death Doulas’ presence palatable, they are leaving out the fact that oftentimes, the Death Doulas are essential workers.  

Death Midwifery – my term for this work - is a missing piece in the fabric of American humanity. If we lived in multi-generational living situations or in cooperative communities, we would possibly have designs for thoroughly holistic death care spaces. My work falls under the umbrella of Death Doulas, yet the style of Death Midwifery I and several other death workers practice is rarely described in articles. Nobody asked for my opinion, so I’ve taken it upon myself to write this article and set my opinion out there to be read. After so many years serving families and individuals as a Death Midwife, educating hundreds of people about death, teaching nursing students in universities, and training Death Midwives through my Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, I’d say I have a right to have an opinion on what is being told to the general public about Death Doulas.  

While Death Midwifery does include creating legacy projects, helping people get their affairs in order, offering therapeutic touch, and caring for our clients with nourishing meals and spiritual support, it also includes crisis management. That is a part of the work that not many of these articles address. I’d like to give some examples of how Death Midwifery, as a movement of compassion, serves these cases as well. 

A few years ago, a young woman in Atlanta reached out to me, through my website contact page, a few hours after she found her father’s body in his bedroom. He died by suicide after suffering for several years with multiple sclerosis. I called her immediately, assessing the crisis over the phone and giving her directions for immediate care as they waited for my arrival. I was at their house shortly after the call. By the time I arrived, the body had been removed by the medical examiner. Upon my arrival I began to triage the different articulations of this trauma among the suddenly bereaved. I knew what was ahead of them, and I wanted to slow things down for them before they would be rushed into the throes of after-loss plans. It was a few hours later, when everyone was sitting on the sofa—and I on the floor—that we were able to find a moment for holistic death care on this devastating day.  

All deaths are holy passages.  

In February of 2020, I was serving a gentleman whose mother was dying of congestive heart failure. This woman expressed to me that she did not want to burden her family with caring for her. She wanted her dying process to speed up. Her resistance to care from her family and hospice made things very difficult for all involved. My weekly visits with this woman looked like what the New York Times and USA Today said Death Doulas do. We sat together, had tea, listened to oldies music, and held hands. I did lead her through guided meditations, and we did have conversations that drew her closer to accepting her situation.  A few days after what would be my last visit with this family, I received a shocking phone call from her son. His mother tried to end her life by suicide and the method she chose did not work completely. She was in intensive care with serious injuries. This is exactly what she didn’t want for her death. My Death Midwifery went from making tea, to managing the family crisis.

She died the next day. Death brought mercy, as it often times will do. 

In May of 2020 I was called by a gentleman who got my name and number from a health food store clerk who knew of my services. The gentleman was in the store seeking homeopathic pain relief for his condition. He was dying of pulmonary fibrosis. In our phone call, I could hear that he was struggling to breathe. I arranged a visit for us for later that day, as speaking in person would not be as taxing as speaking over the phone. I found him in his front room, sitting upright in his Eames lounge chair, ringing his hands in anxiety. His oxygen tank was humming, but the nasal cannulas were pulled down under his chin.  

 
I noticed a silk ascot peeking up over his collar and his neatly pressed trousers. His wife was sitting on the sofa next to him, her legs curled up underneath her and there were dark circles under her eyes. I often can gauge a death and dying situation by the countenance of the caregiver’s face. After introductions, I sat on the floor, at this man’s feet.  

“What would you like to ask me?” I said. “I see that you are having a difficult time.”  

He went on to explain that he was on hospice care, though he refused their help and medications. He explained that he saw his father die of the same disease.  He said, “I understand that you’re a Death Midwife. I assume that you help people die. I want to die soon.” 

My heart went out to this man and his wife. I could tell that they’d been in a constant state of stress for some time. I asked him if I could speak plainly. I am good at speaking plainly, and I can see when someone, nearing death, has lost all patience with death euphemisms and false-hope-speak. What I struggle to do is to beat around the bush, though I’ll manage it when necessary. He was appreciative of plain speech. 

“You are going to die soon, we both know this,” I said. “Going about it with anxiety and hurry like this will make it even more unbearable. I see you here, you are sitting upright, fully dressed, ringing your hands. I sense that death would like for you to find relaxation and surrender, sir.”  

He leaned back in his chair, putting his head on the headrest. “Okay. How do I do that?”  

I looked around his shoulder at the wet-bar on the wall behind him. I knew that getting this man to practice long, deep breathing for relaxation was out of the question. He could barely breathe. So, I asked him if he’d like a cocktail. He said yes. The look on his wife's face went from bewilderment to a sort of comfortability. She jumped at the opportunity for normalcy and made three martinis, one for each of us. As we sipped our drinks, and the evening went on, he began to relax. He told me stories about his travels around the world and his great affinity for art and for natural medicine.  

After we finished our drinks, I explained to him that it was time to rest. I went so far as to ask him if he had a lovely set of pajamas, which he did. He promised me he’d go upstairs and climb into bed and relax. 

We said our goodbyes. Three weeks later his wife sent a text message to me. He died in his bed, relaxed and at peace. 

Death Midwifery, at times, manages crises. It shepherds families who may fall to pieces in their loved one’s dying process. It holds things together when heart strings are breaking. Death Midwifery midwives a dying person through their caregivers. It’s whole-family focused. It aims to get everyone on the same page. When the caregivers are dangerously exhausted, or are feeling lost, or are unable to let go, their lack of well-being impacts the one they are caring for. In my experience, Death Midwifery does more than sit bedside; it sits beside the family as they sit bedside.  

As I tell my apprentices, it is an anomaly to be called to serve a family by holding vigil, lighting candles, and playing music.  We’re not there yet as a culture. Most people don’t know how the body dies. My apprentices can hold space for someone who is dying, but they know this may not occur as often as they hope. They are inspired to be death-educators. They are taught to consider the caregivers as highly as they do the one who is dying.  And they are taught how to arrive to traumatic death and dying spaces, without consternation. I tell them the truth: Death Midwifery is sometimes crisis management. 

To make quilts, work on legacy projects, and write letters to leave behind would require a dying person to admit that they are dying. To invite a Death Midwife into the home is to admit that there is dying happening in the home. There’s a certain level of acceptance that must be reached before a Death Midwife is called upon. Many times, that acceptance doesn’t come until they are close to the end, when acceptance is one of the last remaining options. Death Midwives are rarely called by a person who is dying. They are called by the dying person’s caregiver, yet so much of the mainstream media is reporting something that points to the opposite.  

If mainstream media continues to only tell the palatable narrative about this work, telling the general public that Death Doulas provide emotional support, give hand massages, and make snacks— without telling the stories of Death Doulas and Midwives who are also managing family crises, supporting caregivers who have reached burnout levels that are dangerous to their health, sitting with people who are dying who don’t want anything to do with a Death Midwife - their adrenal fatigued caregiver in the other room - being on-call for families who feel lost in the medical death care systems, available for sudden death situations— then how will this movement be able to truly grow? Goodness grows well through truth. It’s radical, compassionate community care. It’s not just an add-on to the current death-care status quo. 

It's important to the work of Death Doulas and Midwives that the many sides of our stories be told.  Death Midwifery is not an upgrade on the death-care for a financially privileged person who is dying. Death Midwifery is an ever-evolving mission that is returning holistic death care, death literacy, and person-centered care to communities. In its current incarnation, it is often times essential crisis management. 

 
With all due respect, this work reaches far beyond hand massages and making snacks. 

Narinder Elizabeth Bazen
(C) 2016 Narinder Bazen Death Midwifery, LLC All rights reserved 

 *Details of stories have been changed to protect the privacy of my clients.

There’s Work to be Done. (How Are We Defining the Word, “Work”?)

7 minute read

Recently, someone sent an article to me with the title “What’s a Death Doula? Growing profession brings peace, plans at the end of life.” It fills me with purposeful hope to see articles like this one available for the public to read. The general public deserves to know about the beautiful Holistic Death Care Movement, as I’m calling it, that is growing up among it. Holistic Death Care Workers (Doulas/Midwives/Companions) need articles like the once mentioned above to help hold their work up.

However, as a Death Midwifery mentor, I do cringe when I read the words “Death Doula / growing profession.” In my experience, phrasing such as this can lead prospective Holistic Death Care Workers to think that there are going to very possibly be many families calling them to be their Death Doula once they complete a Holistic Death Care Worker training program. I am very transparent with my apprentices, and mentees who come to me outside of the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, when I say, “This work is not a trained/graduated/applied/hired situation. Barely anybody knows they need you. We learn dying and death care in real time in this country and nine times out of ten, that’s too late to be searching for a Death Doula.”

I know these things because I’ve been doing the work officially for eight years, loosely for almost ten. I’ve watched the swelling tides of Holistic Death Care Workers coming into this calling.

It is obvious to me that my Death Midwifery work with families in Atlanta and nationwide grew so quickly because I was a part of a large yoga community. I remind my apprentices of this often. My yoga classes grew to seventy-five attendees at the height of my yoga teaching career. I was a contributing writer for the online publication that belongs to this particular yoga organization. The readers are worldwide.  I knew a lot of people. A lot of people knew me. I’ve taught hundreds of people through my death education classes in Atlanta. Word spread quickly about my Death Midwifery. I’m a been-there-done-that Death Midwife. In 2017, I spent six months as a steward for a green burial cemetery where I met families who use my services and a funeral director who still sometimes refers families to me. I created the Death Midwifery Journey Course that year and mentored individuals in my yoga community who reached out to me for Death Midwifery training. That course eventually transformed into the Nine Keys Death Midwifery apprenticeship.  Through these programs I have walked intimately with almost one hundred death workers, not hundreds. As I mentioned earlier, I also mentor many other Holistic Death Care Workers as they figure out the ropes of this budding ‘profession’ that barely anyone is hiring them for.

I am not aware of a death worker going through a ‘Death Doula’ training program and finishing it to then find themselves knee deep in death work. What I find are Holistic Death Care Workers who go through quick training programs, unaware of the steep reality that their work is going to take some entrepreneurial elbow grease. I’ve watched this for the past several years. They leave the program, set up a website, maybe some social media pages, some may volunteer for hospice, then they get discouraged and move on to something else.

I’m acutely aware of the financial limits on Holistic Death Care Workers who can’t quit their day jobs to focus on building their death care practice full time. I think people forget that I essentially have four jobs and that I’m trying to make ends meet as a recent divorcee with no family financial support.

I’m an Intuitive Counselor with a growing practice, a Numinous Communicator with a slow but steady trickling-in of clients in Atlanta, a Death Midwife myself, and a Death Midwifery ‘trainer.’ (Though, I prefer the phrasing “Death Midwifery Auntie.”)

While the general public isn’t coming in mass sweeps banging down the doors of Holistic Death Care Workers’ businesses, thousands of individuals ARE being called to step into the role of holistic death care worker. Why is that? Death Midwifery isn’t a fad job, a flash in the pan trend, it’s a dire need and Holistic Death Care Workers know it.

As the bard Stephen Jenkinson puts it in his book Die Wise, we are living in a ‘death-phobic’ society. We live in a society where someone with terminal illness is referred to as a ‘fighter’ until they are ‘losing their battle’, and if we accept their fate, we’re ‘giving up on them.’  We live in a society that grew up thinking that when it came time for their loved one to die that the local hospice was going to step in and take care of all of the death and dying needs. This false advertising leaves caregivers with fatigued adrenals and not many places to put their grief but stuffed down into their stomachs and it leaves nurses who are under great strain. I know, I see it.

We don’t know our funeral and burial options in this country, but we know a GoFundMe is usually employed to take care of the options we do know of. We same-ole-same-ole the whole end-of-life narrative because we, raised to deny limits, the American way, just don’t give serious thought to our dying until it’s sitting next to us. Even then, some refuse to look at it. We don’t know what to do with a mother whose newborn died while being born. We don’t know what to do with the family whose son shot his wife. We sure as hell don’t know what to do with the opioid crisis and the unprocessed grief that’s causing it. We don’t know what to do with grief here.

We don’t know what to do with death and grief because neither of those work well for a hustling consumerist society that touts that we are limitless and can work more more more. We hide death and grief away; we outsource their care.

So, if you ask me, all of these Holistic Death Care Workers coming up right now are educators. They are Death Educating their communities, they are Death Educating their clients and they are Death Educating anyone who will listen. As I say to my apprentices, “The byproduct of Death Education is marketing. When you hold the Death Café or you create a Grief Group at your local yoga studio, you are giving your community so much opportunity for healing and empowerment, but you are also letting your community know where to find you.”  Hospice is ‘hiring’ Death Doulas as volunteers. Volunteers are the lowest paid employees in death care. This arrangement isn’t sustainable.

Hospitals don’t want anything to do with us (yet). Have you ever heard of a funeral home with a Death Midwife on staff? Yeah, me neither. Recently I heard, the story of a mother who called the funeral home to ask what time her son’s cremation would be. The funeral director told her, “It’s on my list of things to do today.” That’s death industry speak. That’s not death care. A Death Midwife on that funeral director’s staff would keep the heart of the business steady when he’s overwhelmed, as most funeral directors are.

Holistic Death Care Workers get into these remarkable death worker communities and often fail to remember that they’re sitting in an echo chamber. They’re talking about Holistic Death Care Work to holistic death workers. Often their work is stunted by comparison or a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen worry. They don’t fully understand that there is room for them, and more than this, they are needed. If we ask Holistic Death Care workers to go to their neighbors’ houses and ask them if they know about the importance of Holistic Death Care workers, they’ll find that barely anyone knows what a Holistic Death Care worker is. In Los Angeles, California or Portland, Oregon you’ll find more folks may know about Holistic Death Care workers, but in Indianapolis, Indiana or Atlanta, Georgia, the neighbors are clueless.

One could ask me, and one has asked me, “What are you doing training Death Midwives when the work isn’t out there for them when they leave your apprenticeship?” And my answer will have to be a question, “How are we defining the word ‘work?’ “ Once you start to peel back the reality of our current death industry options, you begin to find there is much work to be done. If you peel it back too far, you may become overwhelmed by the need for Holistic Death Care workers.

I have great expectations for the Holistic Death Care Movement. Some may say I have pipedreams, but I’d be safe to say those who say such things haven’t seen what I’ve seen.  There is going to come a day when people won’t ask us, “What’s a Death Midwife? I’ve never heard of that.” There is going to come a day when the caregiver of a dying person has enough support. There is going to come a day when the after-loss process isn’t rushed out the door to the funeral home. There is going to come a day when those who struggle with suicidal ideations are not only medicated and hospitalized but rather held by their community. There is going to come a day when the general public knows that expressions of grief support go far beyond the first few weeks after loss and that there is a difference between grief and depression.

There is going to come a day when hospitals have deep and holistic support for bereaved parents AND their hospital staff. There is going to come a day when every single person in this country knows all of their death care, funeral and burial options. There is going to come a day when knowing the importance of getting your end-of-life affairs in order will be common knowledge. On that day, a great healing will happen. It most likely won’t be a day that I see, but that day will come. In the meantime, education is the Holistic Death Care worker’s job and my job is to educate Holistic Death Care workers.