Even You, Most Gentle Death It is inevitable. We all die. Some of us die alone Or in pain Or empty, While others pass through this life Embraced within a constellation Of those who love us And hold our hands As we leave them behind To tend to the memory of our names. For some, Death is a gift: An open door Into comfort Or mystery. But for others, Death is a specter, Cold and calculating As he waits behind the steering wheel Of each oncoming car Or hiding beneath the bed Eager for a moment to snatch us Into icy fingers. I have seen death In the owl’s ivory talons Silently descending Beneath great wings of whispering fringe To snatch some poor morsel In a flash of rising liminality, Just as I have felt death A thousand times In the grieving lives of others, And in the burnt offerings The gods of my own life Demand I place upon their altars. One day I know I will see the great mother Death, Her face grave Or inviting, As she comes for me. Even now I await her eventual touch, Either cold or welcoming , Upon the bodies Of those I love. I hope I live to greet her After many and abundant years In familiar welcome: As even you, most gentle death, waiting to hush my final breath, Calm and caring, Come to deliver me With all her young daughters Who strip away All that I no longer need, Helping me shed invisible cells Of grief Of fear Of resistance So that lightly And with grace I may go home.
I recently co-hosted a retreat dedicated to the concept of Catharsis. It was the first in a series on modern secular interpretations of ancient Greek and Cretan healing practices that I’m leading with my partners in the Taproot Alliance, a group of practitioners dedicated to modern secular ritual for people who may not feel connected to any particular spiritual path or community.
According to Wikipedia, “Catharsis is from the Ancient Greek word κάθαρσις, katharsis, meaning ‘purification’ or ‘cleansing.’ It is most commonly used today to refer to the purification and purgation of thoughts and emotions by way of expressing desired result is an emotional state of renewal and restoration.”
We had to make some last-minute adjustments due to rain, such that nearly half of the program had to be adapted to an indoor space rather than following the origin plan of going out on a trek into nature to practice some of our cathartic practices.
Thankfully we had prepared for something like this, but even so, we were caught off-guard, and so the module on my Everyday Divinas practice had to be massively truncated.
When I originally came up with the idea of the Everyday Divinas process in 2022, I was looking for a way to make Lectio Divina into a modern, secular, and accessible practice. I had been practicing some form of Lectio Divina since childhood, and it has been a very meaningful tool for me throughout the years. As I’ve grown away from organized religion and toward a much broader sense of communion with the sacredness of everything around us, I needed to figure out resources for tapping into that same wisdom, divination, care, discernment, and awe — but free from the baggage I had around scriptures, codified texts, orthodoxies, and congregations.
If you aren’t familiar with Lectio Divina, it is a contemplative Christian practice developed in the 3rd century by Origen, an early theologian and scholar. The original practice (and most versions of it even today) involved meditating upon scriptures to look for discernment, direction, and inspiration. It had become widely practiced throughout the world, and was even secularized famously in “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” a popular podcast that treats the Harry Potter books as a source for the practice.
I wanted to go further. What would happen if we used this practice to approach the entire universe as a sacred text, freeing it from the written word? Anything (and anyone) could become a gateway to epiphany when approached this way, and I was excited to teach a group of participants how to do this for themselves.
In all the last-minute changes, however, I ended up needing to condense the introduction, explanation, and time for group practice into less than half an hour, so I decided to demonstrate the process myself instead of just teaching them all how to do it.
As I think back to that split-second decision, I have to chuckle at the chutzpah I somehow mustered in that moment. What could go wrong?
I had brought a stack of poetry books for people to use if they wanted to do their Divina practice with an actual text, so I picked up the one closest to me, which happened to be a Mary Oliver poetry collection. I opened to a random page, and then I started reading out loud, extemporaneously demonstrating each step of the practice.
I don’t remember the poem I landed on, but it immediately started to speaking to me, and I found myself suddenly having an intensely personal and vulnerable experience — in front of everyone. It was as if God and Mary Oliver were there in the room telling me that I had to face reality: my dad’s death is inevitable, so I might as well accept that, along with all the complicated and sorrowful and grace-filled things that realization represented.
I could not believe this was happening in front of a group of people, much less after having to already make so many last-minute decisions and adjustments. I was completely overwhelmed, choking back tears at the sudden and stark revelation, but I had to keep it together so I could continue teaching.
As soon as I was done making sure everyone was able to begin their own process, I went outside in the rain and started writing a stream-of-consciousness entry that eventually became the poem accompanying this week’s offering, Even You, Most Gentle Death.
Since that moment, life has been full of so many synchronicities, gentleness, harried obligations, exhausting work, uplifting work, delight, humor, and sorrow — along with the themes of death and resurrection encompassed within Holy Week and Easter. Eventually I was finally ready to go back to the blank notebook I’d taken to the retreat and see what I’d written.
I had remembered writing the poem in a deep feeling of grief and remorse, combined with a sense of foggy vulnerability from sharing something so personal in front of strangers who had paid me to facilitate their own catharses. And so I’d been hesitant to go back and revisit it. But then, after reading a tender offering from Sophie Nicholls about her own grief, numbness, disappointment, and connection, I decided to base my Everyday Divinas practice on what I’d written, along with several other pieces of writing form other people in this Substack community. (Sophie’s piece is medicine for the soul, so I’ll share the link here. I wholeheartedly encourage you to savor it later.)
What came out was another catharsis — the central theme of our recent workshop — as I wept at all the pent-up grief, rage, disappointment, and fear that have been bundled up for years as I’ve kept moving forward through this uncertain life and culture. Again I became numb and raw, and after about half an hour of purgative weeping, I finally felt like I had moved something out of myself. I had experienced true catharsis in feeling, owning, and releasing everything that needed to be expressed.
And in doing so, I realized that my rushed scrawling words from that demonstration during the retreat were actually full of hope, gentleness, and wonder. There was some part of me that recognized that death and disappointment may be inevitable, but that does not mean they must be feared or avoided. All of us face death, at the end of our lives and in the lives of those we love, and also in the intertwined tiny cycles of deaths we depend on for growth, transformation, and renewal. In this way, death is a great nurturer, enabling transformation into new life.
In our wedding ten years ago, my husband and I had the choir sing “All Creatures of Our God and King,” and we purposefully included the verses that include the following:
And even you, most gentle death, Waiting to hush our final breath, Oh, praise him! Alleluia! You lead to heav'n the child of God, Where Christ our Lord the way has trod. Oh praise Him Oh praise Him Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia
I was in such a different place spiritually back then, in ministry in a large Episcopal church, beloved by almost the entire congregation, and feeling so certain of my future. Everything in my life was pointing in a single direction.
But then it all changed. The future I thought was certain was burned to ash, and I found myself completely lost.
It took a few years to learn to trust again — trust myself, trust in a higher power, trust other people and institutions…I was truly lost in utterly new territory, and so I had to start making new maps from scratch.
This morning I was talking with friends who are both in the same place. Two of my closest friends, D and H, are divorcing each other. Their lives were completely intertwined with a shared home, shared business and office space, shared passions, shared collection of art and antiques, shared academic and spiritual practices, and, of course, shared friends.
One of their friends, P, is actively dying. She will probably pass away before I publish this.
D and H have known P for twenty years and have been caring for her for almost as long. P’s cancer recently returned, and this morning she had a severe stroke. Her doctors give her a day or two to survive.
Things were already hard for my friends, and then this happened. Both of them are already mired in the grief and uncertainty following an acrimonious divorce, and now they have to somehow navigate this deep loss — without being able to support each other.
Both of them reached out separately to process all of this, and they both used the same phrase to describe how they feel right now: “so fucking lost.”
And both of them felt shame for feeling that way.
Grief is hard enough on its own, but sometimes grief arrives with her twin, uncertainty. In my friends’ case, both of them are facing a complete restructuring of their lives, and both of them are about to lose a significant portion of their income when P, their friend and client, passes away. Their future was already uncertain, but now they don’t even know how they are going to pay their bills.
This is where I was fifteen years ago when my ex relapsed into multiple addictions. I lost my house, three businesses, all my savings, and my marriage — all in a day — when I discovered that he had spent everything we had to feed his double life. That would have been hard enough, but back then my entire identity was wrapped up in our relationship.
We had been together since I was a teenager, and I simply didn’t know who I was without him.
I felt the same way when I left the Church years later — because once I figured out my life without my relationship, I threw myself back into ministry, and I made ministry my life instead. In each case, my entire identity was wrapped up in things that were not me.
The loss of self is a serious loss, and I think it’s far more common than we realize. As an intersex multipotentialite with an unusual academic background, I’ve lived most of my life in the margins, without the ability to easily or honestly answer questions about who I am or what I do. Even so, I’ve clung to whatever titles and accomplishments I could because, deep down, I needed some kind of external metric to figure out where I belonged. (Or perhaps more accurately, to figure out to whom I belonged.) I guess you could say that I was always letting everything outside of me determine who, what, and where I was. And without that, I was lost.
I think maybe most of us are a little lost. And that’s okay.
And it’s also scary.
This is especially true now, as the systems we all knew and relied upon at one time have eroded. National trust has decreased in most countries around the world. Economic injustice and inequity are more common than they have been in generations. Anyone reading this has survived a global pandemic in which we had to come to grips with the reality that there are massive, deadly things we simply can’t control. Technology is shifting in alarming ways, and we are quickly approaching an era when we will no longer be able to trust our own eyes as deepfakes and propaganda reach us through intentionally addictive platforms that have been designed to keep us hooked. Cancer in young people has surged, autoimmune disorders are at an all-time high, and infant mortality and maternal deaths have increased, even as women’s rights here in the US have eroded. A person can lose their entire career for saying the wrong thing even as someone else gets praised for truly sociopathic behaviors. There is just so much happening that doesn’t make any sense, leaving us to ask:
Who are we in this world?
Well, I don’t think we know. I think most of us are trying to figure out where we fit into this rapidly changing world, which naturally results in feelings of being totally unmoored from the life we once took for granted. Add to this the recent cultural push toward “self discovery” and the postmodern task of questioning everything we knew, and you’ve got a recipe for every type of identity crisis there is.
I recently listened to a podcast that called this sense of overwhelming mistrust “societal long covid.”
I think that’s a great metaphor. The speaker mentioned symptoms like paranoia, fear, generalized anxiety, isolation, and feelings of hopelessness, stemming from the fact that the pandemic exposed the both fragility of our global systems and the ephemerality of life. When the whole world faced death, the people who were supposed to be in charge largely could not be trusted — and those who could be trusted often couldn’t provide what we needed soon enough. In its own way, this was another great death — the dashing of our fantasy that we could truly depend on our fellow humanity to do what is right., that our governments, communities, families, and friends could keep us safe.
And so we mourn. And in that grief, we acknowledge that we also belong to a society that has lost its way.
Who are we when we lose our sense of community, of belonging, of national identity? In many ways, we have all become refugees, seeking out a safe place to rebuild our lives.
So perhaps we can learn a thing or two from actual refugees.
Several years ago my husband and I were part of a program called “Arizona Welcomes Refugees.” This was a local movement started in response to our then-governor’s “Muslim ban” during the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis. Every month we hosted a refugee dinner at the church where I worked at the time, and American families could “adopt” refugee families that had recently been placed in Tucson.
We adopted a family from Iraq who spoke no English and had only been in the United States for a few days.
At first we worked with interpreters and clunky translating apps, working mostly as advocates to help them get their basic needs met, but over time our sponsorship became much like the “adoption” we signed up for. They quickly became part of our family, and they still are today.
As we eventually learned their stories, which I can’t fully share here, we became awestruck by their tenacity, strength, resilience, and ability to cultivate joy after unbelievable loss, heartbreak, and uncertainty.
They had been successful in Iraq, and W, the adult son and provider for the family, even had top security clearance with the US forces during the war. Their family faced incredible danger, culminating in torture and murder, and they fled to Turkey for their lives. Even with his security clearance and years of service in our military, it still took over four years for W and his family to be granted refugee status, and once they got here, they only had financial support for six months.
They landed in Tucson after losing everything and were expected to integrate into our culture and become financially independent in half a year — without knowing the language, without having any friends or allies here, without any papers attesting to their education or qualifications, and without even knowing our alphabet. Every document, every street sign, every number and letter, every word, every custom, every law, every agency, every store and road and map — all of it was foreign and illegible to them, and they were expected to learn all of this in mere months.
And they were expected to learn all of this while navigating the trauma and grief form the horrors that made them refugees in the first place!
And yet they are happy. Joyful even! Their lives are much better than they were when they first arrived, but their lives are by no means easy. W and his mom both have significant health problems, much of which is trauma-related or made worse by the trauma. English is still sometimes hard for them to navigate. Even all these years later they have been unable to find a spiritual or cultural community. Plus they still don’t understand the intricacies of our legal, immigration, and health systems. W’s beautiful fiancée still awaits her own visa, even though W has become a US citizen, so they are still separated by thousands of miles.
And yet…joy.
I have seen in that lives of my Persian friends too. It is hard to imagine a group more prone to celebration and ebullience than them. At the church where I worked we also had a specific outreach for Sudanese refugees, and again, their lives were often full of joy. One of my friends there had witnessed three quarters of her family get violently slaughtered by northern Sudanese militants who completely razed her village, and yet despite her horrific trauma, she and her surviving family had learned to love life in Tucson.
All of this points to the triumphant resilience of the human spirit. I can’t help but be inspired by the dancing and singing and art and shared feasts that our refugee friends continue to enjoy.
I will hopefully never face such hardships, and I think sometimes we get lost in some sort of “suffering Olympics,” comparing our own suffering with that of others and feeling guilty when we complain about “first world problems.” But really, death and loss are universal — and grief is universally painful. Just because someone else is going through more than I am, that doesn’t mean that I should feel guilty for also feeling grief from my own losses.
Grief is grief.
This was so evident to me when I left the church. I had all the privilege I needed to navigate my spiritual and identity crises with spiritual, emotional, and financial support. And yet it was still incredibly painful. W’s very real trauma and struggle didn’t eclipse mine. In fact, sharing our respective losses helped us both get through our own. He deeply understood my sense of directionless uncertainty and loss of identity in ways very few others did, and he was grateful to have an American friend who understood some part of what he was going through. He was also grateful that he could finally reciprocate the support we had given him and his family. The whole thing brought us closer. Also, as an observant and devout Muslim who was navigating his own feelings of spiritual isolation and disconnection here, he truly understood what I was going through spiritually as well.
Even as we both rebuilt our lives, we learned to share food, share culture, share beautiful things, share time, share encouragement, and share trust. And in doing so, we built our own little society of shared humanity, knowing that we could depend on each other.
Now I can see the same thing happening with my friends, D and H, who are rebuilding their lives in the midst of their divorce. In addition to everything I mentioned before, they’ve lost many of their mutual friends because their situation is complicated and sad. Both of them really need community and support right now, but some of their friends just don’t have the capacity for that at the moment, or they’ve found it awkward, so they’ve simply checked out.
That adds to the heartbreak and further complicates the grief D and H are each experiencing, and yet even though they are in the midst of incredible loss and uncertainty, they are both separately able to keep reorienting themselves to noticing the beauty around them. For each of them, the loss of what they had made them even more grateful for what they’ve been able to learn or retain.
Just last night I was with D, the soon-to-be-ex-husband. A group of us went to the free night program at the Tucson Museum of Art and then went back to his place to eat a fantastic meal he had prepared for all of us. I took a very special bottle of wine I’d inherited from one of my fun-loving Persian friends when he died, and we toasted to his memory as we ate outside under the stars, surrounded by burning torches. Right there in the middle of his sea of grief, our little community created a sanctuary cove on a momentary island of art, food, and fellowship.
Sometimes when it feels like we are lost at sea, all we can do is surrender and float — but sometimes, and especially when we are connected to community, we can find islands here and there to sustain us on our journey through the ocean of the unknown.
Looking back on the times in my life where I’ve found myself completely unmoored, I can see how community has saved me. Even at my loneliest, when I couldn’t depend on my family, I could depend on friends. Or when I couldn’t depend on friends I could depend on support groups like Twelve Step groups for codependents or groups for grieving and spiritual growth. Always, always, always, there was someone there to hold me in my pain and isolation — even if it was just a stranger in an online forum or an author I might never meet who wrote the book that showed me that I was not alone in my struggle.
Looking back, I can see how my life has been full of deaths — some metaphorical and some literal, some enormous and some tiny — but in all of them I can also see that life was changing me. As Elizabeth Gilbert famously wrote in Eat, Pray, Love:
"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing..."
We all face that change. At some point or another death comes to swallow up some part of our lives, stripping away pieces of what we knew, what we had claimed, what we loved, what we had called ourselves…and it changes us. Sometimes it changes us so deeply that we no longer know who we are without those things, but that’s okay. Right there, in the middle of that uncertainty, in the midst of that grief and sorrow, in the crucible of that painful transformation, something is being born. We are drawing new maps. And just like all the people before us and around us who have left it all behind to start anew, we can do that too.
Someday, somehow, the way will become clear again, and we will once more know where we belong. And if we allow it, we will learn ever more deeply who we really are as we surrender all those relationships, titles, awards, identities, and other qualifiers we once thought defined who we were. Yes, this is a death, and probably one that we will experience multiple times in our lives, and it deserves to be grieved. And yet, when these deaths come to change us, even these times of utter loss hold the potential to lead us to where we are meant to be, and who we are meant to be there with.
Epilogue:
The evening after writing all of this, I was having trouble sleeping and did another Everytday Divina practice, using Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s Twelve Words for Moss. It was the perfect way to close the day, and I was also amazed at the synchrony of what it said in relation to what I’d written earlier that day. I’ve decided to share it here:
HOME FIRES Brachythecium rutabulum, Rough-stalked Feather-moss If lost in a forest, if held in the dark, if caught underwater, if coming apart, there are ways to surface, there are heaps of breath, there are leaves that are burnished and strung with strength, stretching and stirring in the mulchy depths, full of a comfort that you don't know yet —the patter of velvet paws, the opening of a thousand doors onto the place you have walked to night after night, you knew it was there waiting for you — your life.
Even You, Most Gentle Death It is inevitable. We all die. Some of us die alone Or in pain Or empty, While others pass through this life Embraced within a constellation Of those who love us And hold our hands As we leave them behind To tend to the memory of our names. For some, Death is a gift: An open door Into comfort Or mystery. But for others, Death is a specter, Cold and calculating As he waits behind the steering wheel Of each oncoming car Or hiding beneath the bed Eager for a moment to snatch us Into icy fingers. I have seen death In the owl’s ivory talons Silently descending Beneath great wings of whispering fringe To snatch some poor morsel In a flash of rising liminality, Just as I have felt death A thousand times In the grieving lives of others, And in the burnt offerings The gods of my own life Demand I place upon their altars. One day I know I will see the great mother Death, Her face grave Or inviting, As she comes for me. Even now I await her eventual touch, Either cold or welcoming , Upon the bodies Of those I love. I hope I live to greet her After many and abundant years In familiar welcome: As even you, most gentle death, waiting to hush my final breath, Calm and caring, Come to deliver me With all her young daughters Who strip away All that I no longer need, Helping me shed invisible cells Of grief Of fear Of resistance So that lightly And with grace I may go home.
I love you,
Eric
Dear Eric,
A beautiful piece.
Yes. Something is being born.
And you already belong... In fact, I've just been writing about this myself... thinking about one of your favourites, Mary Oliver, and her wild geese... I'll post it on Friday.
In the meantime, I treasure this community of writing that we share with so many gorgeous people.
Thank you for sharing my post, which I never would have been able to write had it not been for your kindness and thoughtfulness.
PS
Love that moss quote.