5 Things I’ve Learned
Yesterday, my wise and wild teacher @narinder.bazen.death.life said “It’s not all singing bowls and Reiki, is it?”. And that’s the biggest lesson from Year One. Many, many of my situations are 1000x harder than I anticipated. Even the kind, deep, beautiful people I serve struggle through the dying process. Because dying, just like living, requires 100% humanity. And whatever baggage we carried through life, we’ll carry it through death unless we’ve learned how to let it go. Furthermore, whatever tools we’ve used to cope with the hard business of living will be the tools that we rely upon for the hard business of dying. Unless mindfulness and Reiki and singing bowls were your coping strategies for life, they won’t be much help when utilized by your death midwife to help you journey through its end.
This is hard work y’all. Sacred. Profound. Illuminating. But also hard, hard, hard. Instead of marketing mistruths about what our work really looks like, let’s talk about the reality. Because the general public isn’t buying it. They smell the illusion we are trying to sell them, that death care can bring peace and magic to the end of life. That’s not truth. Deathcare brings presence to end of life. We witness, we honor, we offer, we serve. But we are pushing away those we could serve by talking about healing when we’re still inflicting the wounds of toxic positivity. Anyone working in private practice as a death doula or death midwife knows how hard, how isolating, how hopeless dying in America today can feel. Until we get honest about what we see, what we do, how we serve, and why it’s valuable, no one will trust us. Why should they? Here in my little space in the death work world, I’m about to get real.
I believe that death care needs to be valued as a profession and not a charity or generosity or community service that we offer out of the goodness of our hearts. And the definition of a profession is “a paid occupation”. I get it … capitalism sucks. But how can we make this a viable profession that is not exploitative to the deathworkers? Especially since they’re being trained in droves and not always honestly told what to expect.
As long as some of us work for free, the rest of us are taking a pay cut. And as long as some of us offer siding scales, the rest of us have to individually value the worthiness of our work and it fragments us further as a profession. Maybe we can establish a fair baseline that allows death work to be the bread and butter of a home by coming together with compassion for our other death care workers who want to be paid a living wage for their work.
