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.