Death doula to a dying empire

This article Death doula to a dying empire was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This is an edited version of a chapter from the author’s new book “Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse,” available now through Parallax Press.

A while ago, my partner LiZhen turned me onto a TEDx talk by Deborah Frieze. In this talk, titled “How I Became a Localist,” Frieze said something that really made me think: “You can’t fundamentally change big systems. You can only abandon them and start over or offer hospice to what’s dying.”

She went on to explain that systems — our educational systems, economic systems, criminal justice systems — are nonlinear and incredibly complex. These aren’t machines but living systems. And as with anything alive, they go through a natural cycle of rise, peak and decline. It’s the nature of life. In breath, out breath. Expansion, contraction. Birth, death. The inevitable cycle of any living system. Frieze shared her belief that our big systems are on their death beds. I agree. Our medical systems make us sick. Our food systems create malnutrition. Our educational systems are failing our kids. Our criminal justice system makes our communities less safe. Our democratic systems are run by a select few. Our economic systems continue to create poverty. And, of course, our ecological systems are collapsing all around us.

Frieze’s talk made me think about how we would design our public actions differently if we viewed part of our role as being death doulas to dying systems, empires and worldviews. “Death doula” is a term consciously chosen to echo “birth doula” and bring attention not only to the fact that death, like birth, is labor, but that both are important transition points in life. Michelle Mondia, a death doula, told me her work “is about midwifery. We’re preparing them for another world. It’s the same work. It’s the death of the physical and the birth of the spiritual. Some of us call ourselves death midwives.”

I don’t believe we’re approaching the “end of the world.” But I do believe we’re approaching the end of something, and it’s something big. Whatever it is, I think it’s big enough that we’re all starting to feel its decay. What would it mean for us, as movements, to play some role in helping ease the transition to whatever comes next, even if that “next” involves the death of something? As I was almost done writing this book, I discovered “Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. The book offers a framing I find deeply resonant: Modernity as we know it is in its last days, and we can play a role in supporting its transition.

Just as our massive systems are failing, the governments and nongovernmental organizations we created to fill the gaps left by these systems are also going through extraordinarily difficult times. Many of our social justice nonprofits are falling apart. The exact organizations working on conflict transformation are collapsing under the weight of internal conflict, and groups working on racial justice have been pushed to the limit by internal racial strife. It makes sense, because nonprofit organizations are a part of modernity. As modernity is dying, all its tentacles are in the midst of collapse as well. We have to find ways to build movements where our relationships and shared purpose aren’t defined by some corporate charter or bylaws.

When a similar idea — that large systems around us are dying and we would be wise to consider the role of hospice — emerges simultaneously from different sources, I feel like there is something to explore. I ended up having conversations with over a dozen death doulas and hospice care workers to better understand their work. One such person, Gwi-Seok, a yoga teacher and death doula based in Hawai’i, told me, “As a society, we’ve forgotten how to die.” We’ve forgotten how to accept that death is inevitable and to go into it gracefully. Instead, our society grasps onto life at all costs. All sentient beings want to live. But this clinging — this attachment we have to something as impermanent as life — causes incredible suffering.

In all the conversations I had, the importance of normalizing death emerged as the most common theme. Death is one of the most natural aspects of life. We experience it every single day. As many as 50–100 billion cells die each day in our bodies alone. There is nothing more normal in life than death. I learned from Jeanne Denney, hospice worker and founder of the School of Unusual Life Learning, or SoULL, that death is not in opposition to life. Death is an integral part of life. But in our death-phobic world, we’re taught there’s life, and then there’s death. This false duality creates the delusion that death is not a part of life. Part of what we need is to remember not all death is undesirable: As I learn to undo the patriarchy that lives inside of my body, the part of myself that grew up with toxic messages of how to “be a man” is dying every day. As I entered into fatherhood for the first time, my identity as someone who had never been a parent died.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been around several people accompanying their own loved ones in their final days. I’ve seen the potential that opens up when someone looks at and begins to accept the inevitability of their own death. It is perhaps the hardest thing for us as human beings to do, but there’s incredible liberation in the work of accepting our own mortality. Of course, this process can create complicated feelings. I’ve known people who accompanied abusive, hurtful parents and caretakers and been with people suffering so much it came as a relief when they finally passed. Because of our binary worldview, it can be hard to reconcile feeling love and anger or grief and relief at the same time. Even when accompaniment is complicated, people found it possible to be present with love and compassion.

Many of us have wildly mixed emotions toward the systems, cultures and worldviews dying around us. Can we lovingly accompany and support these systems and worldviews in their final days, even if they’ve caused us so much harm?

When people don’t accept their own mortality, their final days can be filled with great fear. This fear, often expressed as grasping, is a desperate energy that can lash out and cause harm. Our systems, empires, and worldviews are dying. Many of us are too scared to accept this reality. Fear blinds us, so we continue to live in the delusion everything is okay. But in that unacknowledged fear, our systems are grasping too, refusing to acknowledge the inevitable. And that grasping is leading to an escalation of harm, which we can see manifested in the increase in political violence, hostility toward those we see as “other,” and growing apathy and indifference toward the horrors of war and the worldwide refugee crises. Throughout their life cycles, our systems have grown so massive and powerful that if we aren’t careful, their grasping and thrashing could take down everything we love and hold sacred. We are called to become interventionist death doulas, to bring ease, skillfulness and wisdom to this transition.

In nonviolent resistance work, “pillars of support” is a common analysis tool. The idea is you’re trying to take down a dictator (or CEO, politician, etc.), propped up by many societal pillars: the police, the military, the courts, the media, etc. The dictator is at the top of a pyramid held up by these pillars. If we can identify and knock down a couple key pillars, the entire house may come crumbling down.

Movements need to be spirited, but they also need to be strategic. Tools like this will always be important. But think about this visual for a second. We’re all still living under the systems we are trying to take down. If we simply topple these pillars and the whole house comes crashing down, it’ll crush us all. The work of a death doula isn’t to go to people who are dying and knock them down so they transition quicker. It’s to accompany them, to help them be with what is inevitable, to breathe deeply through discomfort, to help heal any relationships while there’s still time, to support those around them who are in pain, to ease suffering, and support dignity in a precarious time of transition. Even in the final moments before death, it is still possible to heal, affirm life and create beauty.

The gift of grief

Gwi-Seok also shared that we’re an “under-grieving society.” Unprocessed and unnamed grief shuts us down. We bury our grief in the depths of our unconscious, and it ends up controlling us. The work of “normalizing” death can be tricky. In our society, we normalize death all the time. We normalize mass shootings, we normalize murder, we normalize war. But I don’t get the sense this is what all those death doulas mean. We normalize killing; this isn’t the same as normalizing death as an inevitable part of the life cycle. Birth is a gift, but death is considered a curse. Normalizing death includes accepting the grief that naturally comes with it. If we bury grief, we don’t normalize death; we suppress it.

On May 24, 2022, a former student walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers. Eighteen others were injured, including his grandmother, whom he shot before heading to the school. The shooter himself was killed when the police finally raided the classroom in which he’d locked himself. I was in Southern California when I heard the news. I’d just finished facilitating a fierce vulnerability workshop and was on my way to another presentation, followed by a work retreat. It was a back-to-back-to-back week, and I didn’t have time to process the news. When I finally got home a week later, I could feel the tension in my body. LiZhen was overseas, so I was alone when I finally had time to process the news. I sat down on my bed and, with intention, looked up the names of each of the victims and read their stories.

I looked at each of their pictures, printed them out, and placed them on my altar. I cried. I grieved.

Previous Coverage

We need to build a movement that heals our nation’s traumas

There’s a way in which it would have been easier for me to ignore the grief. But this would have meant normalizing their killings without acknowledging their deaths. I don’t enjoy crying and thinking about the loss of almost two dozen children. Yet I needed to do this for myself to be able to move forward. I have to have some balance. When I read the news, there’s something to grieve every day, and it could be easy to fall into a never-ending spiral. But if I don’t take some intentional time to grieve every once in a while, grief builds up in my system and cripples me. Once there’s built-up grief, it becomes harder for me to accept mortality. The more I suppress these things, the more I get buried under their weight and the more my awareness becomes muted and heavy.

Though I read the stories of the Uvalde shooting alone in my bedroom, I believe it’s critical we do grief work in community. We need our grief to be witnessed and reflected back. We need to know we’re not alone. Spaces for collective grief are transformative. When I’m around a community holding space for grief, it feels less scary. When I know I’m not alone, when I see grief modeled by others, when I know I’m in a space explicitly designed as a container to hold our grief, I can touch into it and find the richness there.

We’re used to imagining the “end of the world as we know it” as this terrible, scary, dark thing, thanks to so many post-apocalyptic movies. Maybe it will be that way. But it doesn’t have to be. We can create something more beautiful than we can possibly imagine. Accepting death is upon us may be the first step. Once we accept it, we can make conscious choices about how we want to accompany it. Grief is an emotion that, if left unattended, can live in your body for years and become debilitating. This is why I felt the need to read the stories of each child killed in the Uvalde school shooting and grieve their loss.

We need people activated at scale. It won’t be enough for small groups of activists and progressives to hold grief rituals on our own, though that’s an important start. We need public interventions — direct actions, if you still want to call them that — to bring grief to the masses. We live in a world filled with so much normalized violence and chaos. We don’t realize our bodies need to grieve every time we hear a story of a mass shooting or a climate catastrophe. We just continue with our lives. We turn on Netflix and move on to the next thing. And at times, maybe that’s what we need to do. Sometimes, the pain is just too much. It’s important to give ourselves time to prepare for grief. But other times, the inability to allow ourselves to grieve is toxic.

Francis Weller talks about “grief muscles.” Grieving is a practice, much like going to the gym. The more we grieve, the more able we are to grieve and to grieve deeply. Creating regular, explicit spaces for communal grief is like going to the gym and preparing our grief muscles for what is to come. Grieving, paradoxically, creates strength.

To serve life

So many systems — human-made systems like governments and capitalism, as well as natural ecosystems — are in the midst of collapse. Demise is a natural and sacred part of the life cycle. Accepting death and helping others do so by playing the role of death doulas and public mourners is part of the work we are called to do in this moment.

And throughout this book, I’ve continued to talk about the need to fight for, affirm and honor life.

Accepting death and fighting for life are not in contradiction to one another, because death isn’t in opposition to life. It’s a part of it. Only when we fully accept that reality can we honor the fullness of life.

Jeanne Denney helped me to see how much understanding and science there is around birth — there are so many related traditions, books to read, classes to attend, products for new and expecting parents to buy. But we don’t study death in the same way. Maybe we don’t think it’s “worth” it. Because, well, we just die, and that’s it. There’s nothing more to understand, and there’s nothing we can do to prepare. To the extent we study death, it’s only to study every possible way to prevent it. That’s not an honoring of life.

There are traditions that help us normalize death. The Mexican celebration of Día de Muertos, the Chinese Qingming Festival or the Japanese tradition of Obon welcome home the spirits of our deceased ancestors, giving us a closer relationship with the dead on a regular basis. Other cultures have a much stronger honoring of elders and of eldering. Many cultures celebrate not only the rite of passage of a young person becoming an adult, but of adults becoming elders. Elders are viewed and honored in the same way an old-growth forest is — with awe and inspiration, as opposed to people just getting older and less productive and useful.

When a whale dies and its carcass sinks to the bottom of the sea, it’s teeming with life within hours. When a giant tree falls to the forest floor, it doesn’t just disappear. As it decays, it becomes a nurse log, a home for countless seedlings. The 100 billion cells that will die in your body today will be replaced by 100 billion new cells tomorrow. So much life surrounds each moment of death. In the conventional realm, the work of hospicing and midwifing may be different. But in the ultimate realm, becoming a death doula to dying empires means we’re giving birth to a new one. The work of accepting death isn’t about giving up on life. It’s about honoring the fullness of it.

This article Death doula to a dying empire was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

People-powered news and analysis

Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/death-doula-to-dying-empire/