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.
