Seeding Deathcare Communities
by Omni Kitts Ferrara, Director of Education INELDA
Generative questions for further discovery of who we are in the delivery of communal deathcare
In different ritual spaces, the basis of the actions begins with the elements. What sustains us? Who will do what necessary jobs underlie what steps are taken? To answer these questions we must listen first to the needs expressed to be able to do this.
I am a gatherer and have always been able to hear what different people bring to the table and to envision or imagine what possible webs may be spun from unique collaborations of talents. A mutual aid network is a decentralized body in which each participant holds necessary knowledge and this knowledge is generously shared to empower each body. There is no gatekeeping—rather the understanding that if more people understand how to do the act being collaborated upon, the more it will be done. In a world that primarily values top-down models, it can be hard to imagine just how powerful this type of relational strength can be.
Everyone who is part of the web must learn the needs of the whole community for this to function. In reflection on how to activate or light up global cells of deathcare-aware communities, I am thinking on how to equip doulas with good, generative questions to energize their local cells and begin to create mutual aid communities that address the needs at end of life. My hope is to offer questions that help understanding emerge—not to create reliance on any organization in particular, but to deepen our knowledge of what pieces are necessary for death to be cared for, no matter who shows up.
Questions to help grow autonomous, mutual-aid driven deathcare networks:
- Someone must hold the education that death is an inevitable part of being alive.
- Who will teach about change as a constant and something we can trust?
- Someone must be able to attend to the feeling of grief as we encounter loss.
- Who will hold these spaces? How will these spaces be held?
- Someone will need to help us understand the nuance of advance care planning, dealing with passwords and banks and wills and estates.
- Who has the awareness to create such understanding?
- Someone will need to be able to listen to our emotions: our lived experience, our RUGS (regrets, unfinished business, guilt, and shame), our anger, our pride, our joy.
- Who will sit and be able to hold the fullness of someone without trying to fix them? We all have broken, missing, and extra pieces, and that is not a problem to solve.
- Someone will need to clean and tend to wounds, bathe people, and attend to their human needs of food, water, and going to the bathroom.
- Who wants to hold this role? Who feels safe and empowered to care for the very basic needs of being human?
- Someone will need to understand the physiology of the body, medicine, and possible interventions to create comfort and pain reduction.
- Which people have this skill? Do they offer this skill in traditional health care settings only? Street medicine?
- Who will help with medical aid in dying for those who choose this option?
- Who understands integrative approaches to psychedelics for end of life for those who ask?
- Someone will need to understand how to care for bodies postmortem, to prepare bodies for chosen disposition methods.
- Who has expertise? Who can help with home funerals? Who can assist with traditional funerals? What is the protocol for unclaimed deceased persons?
- Where do the bodies go?
- Who has the land, the permissions, the ability to bury, cremate, compost, etc.? Who knows the choices? Who enacts the choices?
- Someone may need to help with celebrations of life, memorials, end-of-life projects.
- What locations are needed to have celebrations, and what are the restrictions of those spaces? What does each memorial encompass, and are there printed materials? Who can create these materials? Are the materials available locally?
- Someone will need to provide the circle of care with respite, bereavement services, and general support in loss.
- Who cares for the support network? Are there support groups to support those who support or endure loss?
- Who helps with the children who are dying?
- Who has the ability to meet the needs around sudden death from car accidents, violence and accidental trauma, and overdose?
- Who has the ability to support those who have experienced loss by suicide?
- Who are the artists? The poets, the creators who can make reflective art that helps the community understand and process their experiences?
- Who holds the resource list and the web of deathcare blueprint for the community?
- How do we educate and develop others into the community web? The more who understand the parts and can hold many parts, the more sustainable and adaptive the organism of community is.
- Who provides the transportation needs?
- Who shows up in the immediacy of mass casualties? Of deaths resulting from mass shootings, climate change disasters, toxic spills, war?
- Who cares for those who fall beyond the traditional systems of care? Those who have chemical dependency to drugs/alcohol? Those who are actively being trafficked?
- Are the people who are showing up culturally receptive and inclusive? Does our mutual aid system act on bias and preference?
- Are we listening to the self-determination of the community and its needs, or has our structure become too coercive?
- Does religious or spiritual belief create exclusivity within this deathcare network?
- Does our network continue to perpetrate systems of oppression based on beliefs from the dominant culture’s narrative?
- Are we tolerant of violence? Hate? Discrimination? Shame?
- Does the work we do around end-of-life impose ecological harm and debt?
- Are we focused on a particular outcome? Can we allow things to emerge?
- Is there space for discomfort, confusion, and disagreement—without a response of exile or othering? How do we create space for repair when harm is done?
- Who brings the flowers?
- What have I missed? Fill in my gaps in questioning.
Allow mutations. What we create today may not suffice for tomorrow. Mutation is adaptation and growth; it is response-ability. May these questions continue to be useful as we support this movement of death awareness and capacity for community care.