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.