The Epiphany of a Good Death

Dear Reader,

What is loss? What is it to lose: Something. Someone. A feeling. A love. A mind. A relationship. A presence.

I lose my keys. Sometimes I find them. Once I didn’t.

I’ve lost friendships. Some are not meant to last a lifetime. Some seem to always exist, regardless of time, contact, or circumstances.

I “lost” my mother for nine years when I was growing up, then I got her back when I was 18 and had gained some freedom. I still mourned her during those nine years and even now, I still feel the loss of my mother of that almost decade when I did indeed, lose her. My mother “lost” her daughters for nine years and that was grief, mourning, and loss, even though none of us had physically died. It still lies within our relationships, a presence, sometimes silent, sometimes not.

That didn’t feel the same as losing my father this January. Losing my father didn’t feel the same as losing Wybie this January, our bestest doggo of twelve years after a very violent illness.

A lifetime of loss. A month of intense loss. A pandemic of global loss. It all left me quite…verklempt.

And…this is important. I am loved. I am graced with a support network of love, support, and care beyond what I could ever ask for, anticipate, or even wish for. Father Anne, or Anne as I met her, is a huge piece of this support. In this span of intense grief recently, Anne held me up in those tough emotional spaces that I didn’t really know how to take steps. Sometimes my feet would move, sometimes they would freeze in time, a lot of in-be-tweens. She held space for me, she held me physically, she held my Wybie as he died, she shared me a letter after he passed, she checked on me often, it was so necessary for my healing and functioning. I wish each human had an Anne, and I know they do not.

It was my honor to have her share this month of You’re on Mute with me for Women’s History Month, although I didn’t plan it, and how could it be otherwise?

After these past few years and months and our discussion, we fell on the topic of The Epiphany of a Good Death.

It is an epiphany for me. Not for Father Anne. It was a gift she shared with me. We are sharing it with you.

For this co-creation, Father Anne and I wrote letters to each other, instead of a traditional versed article. It felt like a letter she sent me post Wybie’s death and also a lost connection in our world of texts, emails, and social media. I am going to share the letter she sent me post Wybie’s passing as I know so many of you have lost your pet friends and pet families, or soon will. I want to hold that emotional love as I did, a gift from Father Anne to all of us. I will send it next week.

The Video: The Epiphany of a Good Death

The Letters: The Epiphany of a Good Death

Dear Father Anne,

To know you is to know grace, support, short phone calls, bits of treasured time in a busy schedule, and a fantastic smile.

To know you is know a bread that our ancestors baked and ate, unleavened, unsweetened, unrisen, and at it’s core: simple, pure, and a foundation.

Loss has been a consistent companion of mine since my early years, and I knew it as many do: a deep sadness, a forlorn companion that I didn’t honor. Something that was so deep and so overwhelming, I wanted to hide it, relegate it to the shadows, tuck it beneath the folds of my heart, so that I didn’t have to sit with it.

Death is painful. Loss is painful. What in hell is good about it? It hurts. Like hell. Loss never, never fully goes away. Time softens the edges a bit, yet, the corners remain, sometimes waiting, in an unexpected arena of time and space. Poking, with a sharp edge, seemingly unwarranted and unasked for.

Then you introduced me to the idea of a good death. And with the gift of grace from you, my heart opened like a flower in the light spring of rain.

What I see now, what I feel now, is there was an imbalance in how I viewed death, how I viewed loss before this awakening. ?I was raised to be unconsciously incompetent regarding my emotions, my feelings, and how to be a humane human. I believe that many of us are. It isn’t an intent as a parent to raise our children this way. It’s a cycle, an unspoken ritual of our society and our dominant culture. We wear black to funerals, we tuck the loss away, we remove evidence immediately, or some can never remove a trace in any space in their lives. It lives in a range of realities.

In the professional realm, we have even set a determinate number of days for the allotted grieving period: you have this many days of bereavement…then, get back to it! And, I say this knowing, not everyone has the luxury of paid bereavement. It’s a gift from the more humane companies.

We can know better… so we can do better. We can. We can learn no matter who we are or how old we are. We owe it to ourselves. To the future generations. To our future selves.

Not most especially, yet, particularly amidst a point of historical loss. Global trauma. Whether you see it this way or not, I believe it to be true. Going back to “normal” isn’t an option. That normal does not exist anymore, nor should it.

We have changed, we have shifted. We owe it ourselves and each other to ensure each human is given a good death. As much as we work towards a thriving life. We need to work to ensure each human, each animal, has the dignity of a good death.

Your presence in my life, this epiphany of a good death is residing within me, sitting with me, shining a light upon the world, the people, the animals that my eyes see, that my heart feels, and Anne, so many are not given a good death.

Thank you, Anne. Thank you for your love, your guidance, your support of me, my family, my dog, and my still living very old cat that adores you.

Thank you for sharing the Epiphany of a Good Death with me and all our dear readers.

I love you.

Aisha

Dear Aisha,

I often visualize my own death. In my imagination, it is a good death. I am laying on my death bed, aware that I have reached the end. I am readying to make the final surrender, the biggest transition we must make in our lives—the letting go of our bodies, so that we can pass into the next life.

I live my whole life to feel a certain way in this moment. Totally empty, having poured my whole self out for the world, having done everything I could to become the person God dreamed me to be. I feel satisfied for the gift that has been my life, I give thanks, and I let go.

Then I think about the moment I leave my body and enter the process of joining God. I finally encounter God in God’s total fullness, without any veil. Meeting God, I will say, “I did it, Lord--I did everything you have asked of me.” And God will smile and say with tenderness, “Thank you.”

I live my whole life for those two moments. The inevitability of my death shapes my life: it shapes my path, my decisions, my heart and mind and soul. It helps me become the person I desire to be for myself, for others and for God. I want to die well, empty, yet totally full at the same time. Full of gratitude and love and joy.

What does a good death look like for you? Every day we witness people being robbed of a good death: George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor; men experiencing homelessness who are shot in their sleep; Indigenous women and girls who are disappeared; those dying in refugee camps or in prisons; those dying in the heartless wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen; animals dying in laboratories, in factory farms, and at the hands of poachers, as if they are objects that mean nothing.

You, my dear friend, embody the goodness that God desires for the world. You have had so much loss, yet you do not steel yourself against it. Instead, you allow your heartbreak to break you wide open, so that you can pour out even more kindness, generosity and compassion onto others. This is God’s Holy Spirit shining out through you to heal the world. Wherever you go, Love is present.

God sees all. Every single creature means everything to God. Every creature deserves to live--and to die--with dignity. May we all do our part to create the world that makes this possible.

In prayer,

Father Anne+