Extraordinary crazy opportunities – all kinds of love projects

My understanding of life affirming is that we appreciate life’s extraordinary opportunities. Those of you who’ve read a little way into the book will know that my friend Glenda’s story weaves through it.  When the boxes of books arrived and we’d begun sending them out I had a strong impulse to share the news with her. She was a generous supporter of her friends and such a gift giver.

It was a Saturday morning. Parcels were piled up round the room. I was surprised by how strongly I felt that I should tell her it was all done. But along with my thought came the rational pause button. ‘Isn’t that a bit kooky?’ Strangely I felt I might be judged for wanting to express myself to a person who died several years’ ago.

I’d just successfully completed a guide ‘exploring the life in death’. A conundrum that can’t be sorted out logically.  In the book I try to say that life and death aren’t best understood by using one’s brain. A well worked out linear logical trajectory may miss what could equally compel us in setting a course of action – that something simply feels right. The heart knows.

Yet deeply sown in me is the value of being reasonable, the dread of being seen as crazy or odd. It was interesting to notice how easily an impulse could be dampened by fear.

Cultivating. I care.

Glenda’s work created the legacy of a small public garden, and it’s not too far away. I went there taking seed and cuttings to plant. I felt good as I lit a candle and a stick of incense. ‘Hello dear buddy,’ I said, ’the book and your story are soon going to be read.’ That was all.

It’s been a great rainy season in Melbourne and weeds were running rampant. A possum or a person had trampled a feijoa tree. For the next couple of hours I fixed the tree, weeded and planted and picked up rubbish.

That garden has always been an extraordinary crazy opportunity. Glenda’s life is still love project for me. And it’s life affirming.

Choking on a name

In South African language there’s an expression ‘Wat die hart van vol is, loop die mond vol oor’, in rough translation ‘what is filling the heart pours out of the mouth.’ It appears in songs about losing love, and wanting to hug someone who isn’t there.

With this verity in mind, why wouldn’t a bereaved person want to talk about the person who died? Yet for some it’s very very difficult even to speak the name. Perhaps, as I allude to in the book this is the social discomfort of not wanting to give way to tears. The fear of not being able to hold up the self one normally presents.

I was recently a guest at a small event, in a roomful of a friend’s family members who were grieving. Hearts were very full. Here we were, gathered to remember this beloved man who’d died some months before. I waited for memories and stories to be shared but none came. And I felt as if, in that room many were choking, unable to say his name.

Easy to feel a freer conversation should or could be had. Yet the circumstances of each situation are what they are.

Making it a little easier

In circumstances like these a facilitator can make it easier to talk and share. When in this role, I see awkwardness as an opportunity. If a group is avoiding what is really going on, even little openings can feel quite a relief. Self-consciousness can be turned out to others. Behind someone’s controlled self presentation is often a person who feels a lot. Who knows what they might say? And silence is okay.

Although so much in the space of death and grieving has to be taken care of alone, there’s quite a bit that has to be navigated with family or friends. You don’t have to do these difficult or awkward things without support. A companion who knows the territory can help. Wanting to talk in a group isn’t crazy. If you’re ever looking for this kind of help with a gathering, do get in touch.

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In Facebook commentary by a victim’s partner, I read that Ballarat has an exceptionally high rate of suicide. It is higher than the overall average in Victoria or Australia. Coverage in Thursday’s Herald Sun suggests the likelihood of self harm as a result of suffering the St Alipius school environment.

My mind turns to the deep suffering when someone loses a friend or family member to suicide. And I think of suicide and friendship, and its role in the funerals I’ve helped to shape and facilitate after death by suicide. I’ve seen how much friendship groups add to the life celebration of the person who has died. Family has an assumed position in any death. But the position friends occupy is often very important.

The person who has died has been through a lot. Friends are often key supports. Sometimes there have been unsatisfactory family relationships at one time or another. The person may have fended for himself or herself, and chosen to live their life with friends. Sometimes the person who has died is young, and the sudden and shocking loss has to be absorbed by their peer cohort. 

Grieving with family and friends after death by suicide 

After a sudden death people speak of their sense of reality not lining up, or of not being able to bring it into focus.  

The funeral marks the start of grieving process. The more collaborative friends and family are able to be, depending on particular circumstances of course, the more satisfactory the beginnings of a grieving process are. This may be the most difficult event ever in some of the mourners’ lives. Hearing stories and witnessing the qualities of important bonds helps everyone to grieve.

Shock, anger, shame and confusion are difficult emotions to navigate. However a key intent with a funeral is firstly to find the individual and community story that people can take away and ‘live in’ in future. That story will be made meaningful in the way friends are included.  

‘What I liked about Steve’s funeral’ said Nicky, ‘is that the speakers painted an incredible picture of his unique contribution. Yet they didn’t shy away from talking about his difficulties.’ She paused. ‘He had the most interesting friends.’ 

Trusting conversations between strangers 

Another thing we want from a funeral is to create opportunities for connection between people who knew the person who died but don’t know each other. When I’m helping with planning, my aim is to create a space where people can trust in having a conversation with strangers. 

I look to set up the most favourable context for friends and family to feel that there’s a way of going forward together after death by suicide. I can be contacted through my website – it outlines more about how I work. Below I’ve listed a few useful resources.

Headspace’s resource You can talk about suicide

Beyond Blue’s Guiding their way back

Bereaving from Suicide a useful Canadian resource

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What kind of Death Cafe do I offer? Well, participants get a chance to be together and explore experiences, values and views on death and grief in a safe setting. And to eat lovely food and see something attractive in front of them. Here’s a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald by a journalist who came along.

At the end of a Death Cafe I ask people to write a word or a phrase that the time talking together has evoked. Today I opened the folder they sit in on my shelf, and had a look. I had the idea I might put every single one that’s been added in, in one death conversation after another, into a post. But there are just too many! All I can do is give you a flavour – what people say about death cafe may surprise you.

Kindness
Precious Life
Giving
Real!
Ripples
Connection

At each death conversation there is someone who writes Connection. I offer ceremonies and funerals through Kinship Ritual. I’m glad when a participant experiences this sense of kinship at an event.

Sometimes the pieces of card I hand out have a lot of space on them and people to write a phrase.

Talking death brings interesting people together
Freedom is ever-evolving, it is never really over
Living for its own sake
Death is part of life, we need to talk about it
Life is too short not to live it to the full.
Beautiful stories shared.
Death is not the end
The importance of living in the here and now.

When I see in the bunch of cards how many references there are to life and how we live, I remember the stories that have been told in different sessions. I’m heartened. At the 2018 Winter Solstice Death Cafe a young woman spoke movingly of how her father’s death had changed her understanding of life and how she would live in future. That was what had made her come along, to be with others who wanted to face the reality of death. Two women talked of their husbands’ deaths and both had warm and humorous stories of how these companions stay with them in a vital way.

When anyone holds the idea that death is opposed to life it’s hard. In a death cafe conversation participants come to a nuanced perspective of the way life and death sit together, and how life and death weave together. Perhaps that led to someone writing Not to live with death dictating choices.

I no longer remember the circumstances, conversation and stories on the occasion someone wrote: There’s no shame in fear. On reflection though I know that facilitated exchange between participants can validate all kinds of experiences. Perhaps those words came from someone who had an experience of losing an important relative at a young age, who was isolated and frightened, and came to feel that there was inevitably something terrible to fear about death. Sharing that story led him to understand that he was just a child then, or that others had also been strongly influenced by experiences they were unprepared for.

Among the cards there are questions, not many, but one person has asked: Why? Another asks: What is the place of meaning?

I’m grateful to have been part of so many rich conversations, in which groups of strangers inform each others’ understandings, in an atmosphere in which death is both ordinary and in some way sacred. Thanks to Jon Underwood for advocating for this hospitable style of open conversation about death through the Death Cafe movement. What people say about death cafe is It’s good to talk!

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