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
