Death as a Rite of Passage
There's a meme passed around in the community of living folks who interact with the dead and dying that goes something like: “talking about death doesn't make you die, just like talking about sex doesn’t make you pregnant.” So let’s start there and exhale deeply.
At some point, a few years ago, I kept hearing the words “Death Walker.” I’d be meditating, or on my daily 5-mile walk, or just before I fell asleep. Did I say that out loud? I’d wonder. Did anyone actually say that? In a session with a medium around this time, she would tell me I was “she who sees in the dark.” “Death Walker” I’d say. “Well, yeah, that.” she’d confirm. Ancestral whispers. I’m still learning, bit by bit, what exactly this mission means. My life is committed to supporting the dead and the dying. Ancestral Lineage Healing is a large part of this. I’m also a medium. Death Doula training is on the horizon. It also looks like a lot of time talking about death with people and making it less scary, or less taboo. It’s also expanded out to supporting folks in the life/death/rebirth process that can sometimes manifest as an ego death.
Have I always been this way? Have I always been comfortable with death?
No.
Though, I did attend a lot of funerals growing up. My mother really does love a funeral. I’ve been to over 100 funerals in my 3+ decades, most of which before I graduated high school. If anyone in my mother’s social circle passed, or if their parents passed, we would go to their funeral assuming it was within a 2 hour drive. It was rare that I personally ever interacted with the person whose funeral I was attending, but let me tell you, I cried like I did. (Grief Guide-in-training, Death Walker-in-training.) These experiences were very compartmentalized because I didn’t have any relationship with these people. I’d see their photo montages, meet their grieving family members, whisper a forced “good-bye, I love you” to their puffy, pale faces when it was my turn at their casket (what else is a child supposed to say to a dead stranger? It seemed polite.) So I’d show up, cry, and then go home and back to my life, nothing having changed. No hole in my relational field. No one’s belongings to sort though. Not having to watch other loved ones grieve their loss. I didn’t think about death much. The only one of those funerals that was for someone I actually knew was when my grandpa died when I was 3.
In general, our culture is so afraid of death because we've been removed from it. Up until the last 100-200 years when people died, they died at home. Your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, however and whenever they died, it was usually at home. It was in community. There was a lot more interaction with dying and the dead. Now, beyond all the medical intervention that has allowed certain things to not be as deadly as they once were, if someone is dying, they are usually immediately removed from the home. Step one: get them out of here, they are dying! They are dying at hospitals and nursing homes, and because it's not right in front of us, we fool ourselves into thinking we can avoid it.
Our culture is also largely detached from living spiritual lives. There have been decades— centuries!— of propaganda for the more extreme end of Western conditioning that is something like dismissal or unexamined objectifying scientific materialist atheism pretending to be objective or intelligent. To look at generation upon generation, approximately 99.9% of humanity, which was animist or Earth honoring and say: all of you are wrong. To look at every ancient (and not so ancient) elder and society and say: you simply needed a way to explain the world, so you developed an abstract belief system about talking plants and mountains and “spirit” and now that we have science, we don't need any of that. We can confirm that the world is made up of matter, which is lifeless. How bleak. How grim. This is causing a lot of pain. It's a very modern thought: “when I die, it's over, lights out.” It's narcissistic. It's just me and when I die, it ends and that's it, because that's how I want it to be. I don't have to hold that there's something bigger. I don't have to hold that consciousness continues in some way. A buffer to the unknown.
A beautiful mirror for thinking about death, or not thinking about death, is birth. These are the only two guaranteed human experiences. When a woman is pregnant, she can choose to not think about, read, watch, or learn anything about birth. Her birth is going to be no less painful, surprising, beautiful, messy, and life-changing than the birth for a woman that has spent her whole life immersed in the mysteries of birth. The latter is going to have an easier time understanding her experience, which is going to lead to perhaps a more easeful integration. Same with death: you can remove it from your awareness, or you can immerse yourself in it’s mysteries, and either way it’s going to happen, and it's going be a huge, big, life-changing thing. There is a path to give ourselves more ground to stand on when it does happen, either for you or for loved ones.
Another cornerstone of Western culture is an obsession with potential and with length of time as a metrics of success. Relationships have to be long to be successful. Careers have to be long to be successful. Vacations and sabbaticals have to be long to be worth it. Life has to be long to be worth it. If one dies any other way than peacefully in their sleep, at age 120, surrounded by generations of their family, it's wrong. As my teacher Daniel Foor says: we rarely get the fantasy good death. Some people do, most don't. There's not a right or wrong, or aligned or unaligned way to die. Inviting you to let go of that because it's probably not gonna happen. And then that's just going to breed disappointment.
There's a few different axes that we can plot death on: when, how, and “speed.” One can die when they’ve only been incarnate for a small number of years (or even weeks or months) or for a large number of years for humans, like 94 years. Without dwelling too much here, one can die really suddenly or die really slowly. One can die violently or peacefully. Not to reduce it, but these are all a spectrum. There's no pattern. There's absolutely zero correlation. It's not that the young only die violently and suddenly, the old only die peacefully and slowly. Tenderly and with caution, without any indication that I know actually understand even a fraction of this, but to acknowledge that death is a thing that happens to individuals within a relational network. Humans exist alongside bigger patterns and forces, not all of which are benevolent. There are a lot of individual lives that get swallowed up into that. There is so much unseen, so many timelines trying to move through things that are really heavy and complex. It's messy! It’s chaos! None of these combinations are more desirable because in any case the guaranteed the result is death. 100% success rate. That’s… kinda scary for someone who has only ever been alive.
The way that we talk about death, the way that it's often reported on and portrayed in the media, feeds this idea. Lives are alway cut short. It’s always too soon. Whether it's a celebrity, a parent, a pet: it's too soon. It was the wrong time to die. Where did this come from? (Removing death from the home. Stripping our spiritual lives away in the name of science.) We're all here for a certain number of years, beyond that is this mystery that we cannot conceive. Stephen Jenkinson has a beautiful way of pressing into this notion of when is a life fully lived. What does that mean? All of the nuance that we want to ignore around that. He says something like when someone dies at eight years old, the common thought—beyond the utter devastation and grief of that reality— is they didn't get they didn't get to live a full life. Okay, so, what are they missing out on? Having kids? Hitting puberty? Paying bills? Seeing their parents as equals? Jenkinson tenderly points out those milestones are rarely only blissful and some of those things come with a lot of pain.
There is a difference between missing out and simply not experiencing.
There's a lots of things that a 97-year-old hasn't experienced, that doesn't mean their life isn't full. On the other end of the spectrum, there's so many things that children have access to that we as adults have been conditioned out of. They exist in this really beautiful, pure state of wonder and awe and love. If someone's whole life is able to exist in that state, how can it be wrong? Again, this isn't discounting the pain and the grief that is always present with death, but it's asking to really contemplate what is a full life? To sit with what is and honor the life that there was.
We just don't know when we're gonna get there, right? It's this false sense of control: if I don’t think about it, no one I love will die. Then when death— and life— happens, the risk is being engulfed by the shock of an inevitable thing, and just floating off with nothing to grab on to. Immediately dragged underwater, cursing God, repeating “this isn’t fair.”
Another invitation is to start thinking about death as a rite of passage. Amid the grief and shock, can a tone of awe, of celebration, be found? In inverse of birth in which the awe and celebration are centered, but grief and shock are often stifled. Both are messy, initiatory times that interrupt every single pattern of the living. How do we hold the framework for that? Ancestral Lineage Healing, and asking for the outcome of the person to become a loving and wise ancestor. Even when you're sitting at the dinner table, holding your people in your heart and seeing them in a radiant and Whole state after death. Holding that prayer for everyone in conscious moments throughout your life. And in that place, asking what needs to happen in the moments around death to support that outcome. It's not always clear or straightforward. But this can be a guiding principle to holding death in a different way. This also an invitation to live your life consciously. You're aware that you're present, here, you have community— now— you have partnerships and friendships — now—this is your reality. Every time you say goodbye to someone could be the last time, so can we fully embody our humanity?
There is also this false idea that our relationship to someone ends when they die. With this, I’ll bring it back to cross-cultural assumptions about ancestor reverence and ritual. These are just a few of the cross cultural pillars that are the foundation of the Ancestral Lineage Healing process. (Full list here.) This is how folks who weigh in on the topic of ancestors tend to conceptualize and talk about their experiences between the living and the dead:
Something continues. There’s some kind of continuity of consciousness. Something ends and something continues. We’re not only the physical body. That something might be multiple, might be one. People think about this in different ways. Many traditions recognize that the soul is multiple, that the soul is a convergence of different parts or aspects. There is certainly nuance here, and it’s not about universal agreement on what a soul is. You exist before you exist and you exist after you exist. So, something continues after death and that something— those somethings—include what we think of as the ancestors.
Communication is possible between the dead and the living. Yeah. Kinda like talking to dead people. Your dead people. It’s quite normal. It doesn’t necessarily need a very spiritual frame or emphasis to it, any more than communication between two living people. This can happen spontaneously through dreams, or synchronicities, waking encounters with the spirits, and divination or ritual when engaged with intentionally (like Ancestral Lineage Healing.) Even if you don’t feel very good at it, it’s okay. It’s something that can be cultivated. It’s also worth nothing this doesn’t mean that there’s no misunderstanding. Of course, misunderstanding is possible. 100% of us have experienced misunderstanding with a living person that we’re in the same room as, all the more so between the living and the dead.
If reading this is activating, you’re on the edge of panic attack, or you're in tears, wonderful. That means you’re alive and you're feeling a feeling. What a miraculous gift. To ground all of this, spend time in nature. There's constant death and rebirth cycles. Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s autum. It’s Ancestor Season. It’s Spooky Szn. The veil is thin. It’s harvest time. The summer wildflowers are dying. Close the gap between you and death. I'm not suggesting you to go be like a hospice volunteer. Go outside! How is the environment reacting to how much life is coming and going right now? The point of this is to feel uncomfortable, to feel a little prickly. If any of those things are happening, just know that is by design— nothing is wrong. Another deep breathe. Everyone is gonna die. We know that, we've always known that. This is not breaking news.
The more you think about death, the less you worry about most things, including death!
Some resources:
Die Wise – A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson (book)
Today Dreamer: Encountering the presence of grief with Stephen Jenkinson (podcast)
Wednesday October 25th at 5pm PT / 8pm ET is a Group Ancestor Circle
This ritual container is open to anyone who has begun the Ancestral Lineage Healing process with me or another practitioner. It is necessary to have met your ancestral guide before attending a circle.
Connecting with your beloved ancestors in a group setting is potent, may it be nourishing and anchoring for you. You can sign up here.
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Single sessions can be booked here. As always, earn a free session for every 3 folks you refer.
While each lineage healing journey is unique, it’s entirely possible that one could heal an entire lineage in 10 sessions.