I Let It Die So I Can Learn to Savor Life
I realized recently that grief is how we humans savor loss. To savor is to slow down to witness and notice a thing, and loss—to lose something—is in many ways to slow down with that thing.
To lose it means we’ll experience less of it from that point forward. No new memories can be made with that person or thing, so we spend more time, slower time, with the memories of them. With the way they did particular things, or the way they sounded, or smelled, or smiled.
When people, relationships, or projects die or end, we experience loss, we slow into the memories by savoring the experiences we’ve had with that person or thing.
I’m writing this fresh off an ending, many endings really, but one particular type has proven itself to be hella necessary for my sanity and my service these days. For sure, my recent journey into Integrative Thanatology has become a profound slow-flow study of the coexistence of life and death.
Over the last six months, I was wading and snorkeling through this transformative certification, a culmination of experiences that started with a whole-ass in-person funeral for a version of myself in 2019 and a virtual living funeral with the wonderful Oceana Sawyer in 2023, and a preceding year of interfaith/interspritual seminary school.
My path has been so enriched by the wisdom of folks whose work support our deschooling with grief and death. People like Wilka Roig, Dr. Tashel Bordere, Olivia Bareham, and a variety of palliative care professionals specializing in tender, skilled care around pediatric deaths and deaths by suicide. You can imagine the emotional spectrum we experienced during those sessions, right? Most of our sessions lasted a full day, and we weren’t just talked at, we were engaged and challenged to examine ourselves and stretch our thinking. Whew chile!
Their insights felt/feel timely as I deal with my (and our collective) reflections and rage around the death and loss people are facing today in places like Haiti, Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo. Wrestling with all this shit has led me to really start seeing the inseparable connection between life and death. Life, as we fight and wail in support of it, and death as we experience it, reject it, ignore it, and ultimately face it and all it comes with. Because death never comes alone. Grief, like life, is death’s faithful companion, and this awareness has become a guiding force in my commitment to exploring and embracing all three of them.
Stumbling out of the ignorance, my ignorance, surrounding these aspects of life, death, and grief, has helped me to see the ways that my windy path to Integrative Thanatology was guided by divine wisdom.
As I transitioned from my seven-year podcast and deep focus on unschooling skills and communities, I found parallels between the deaths of ideas, identities, and expectations within families and my role as invited guide navigating these transitions.
My journey alongside individuals deeply involved in death and dying work has emphasized the value of intentional literacy, education, and skill-building around not only the deaths beyond our control but also those we allow to happen because it is necessary.
For sure, the experiences of a few of my sisterfriends have been instrumental in shaping my perspective. One, back in 2019, shared her thoughts on dignity and death, and how that was so important to her to be part of the one of the people in the world who are thinking about dignity at the end of life and how to support that.
Another sisterfriend engaged in Integrative Thanatology studies sparked not by a program but by the deaths of all the people in her immediate family over a short span of time. Her generous sharing and how her life has shaped her life/work today has allowed me to witness the profound impact of these experiences beyond what I can convey with words.
The intricacies of death and loss are not only external but also internal, as I intentionally let go of that ready-to-die version of myself in 2019. It also help me to shed expectations about motherhood, parenting, and my daughters’ identities. Life as part of an unschooling family taught me to be more present by questioning the weight and value of preconceived notions about my daughters. And being around them today continues to affirm that their father and I did right by them when we decided to recognize and honor them as sovereign beings.
We began to allow “our daughters” to die so that who each of them actually were/are, not our hopes or perceptions of them, could show up and learn to thrive.
What I’m learning is that it's not just about the physical deaths beyond our control. It's about the psychological ones we let happen. The ones we can even facilitate. The intentional, non-physical, “little d” deaths. Death of ideas and habits that determine how I hold power, and how I align with love and liberation, or how I sometimes end up going in the opposite direction of all of that.
At then end of my Integrative Thanatology certification, I shared a ritual that encapsulates my journey—a personal archive of cherished items transformed into an Earth Box, a casket, a Wailing Wall, and four sacred soiled rags. This tangible manifestation represents a collaborative effort between my ancestral guides, my creative energies, and the intangible spaces I've been actively inviting since 2019.
In essence, I see life and death like conjoined twins. Nowadays, my path has become a conscious dance, acknowledging both the inevitability of certain deaths and the empowerment that comes from intentionally allowing other things to be released, to die. The experiences of my friends, their stories woven into the fabric of my narrative, connect me to the shared human journey of understanding and embracing life through the lens of death. I’m savoring this in so many ways.
