Deathwork is Cultural Change Work
Sarah Kerr is a death doula and educator based in Victoria. This is a transcript from her video.
As a death doula, I help dying people and their families navigate endings. I help them to navigate the loss of something incredibly precious – of relationships, of love in this physical dimension. It’s a huge process of saying goodbye, and of doing it in a way that builds resilience and capacity. It’s about being able to say goodbye to what’s going and also live on in the future where that thing or that person we love isn’t here anymore.
That skill is incredibly important at a micro level for families and individuals, as we say goodbye to our loved ones. It’s also incredibly important as a society, and as a culture to learn how to do that, because we are in a time where these cultural patterns aren’t going to sustain. We can’t continue living in this resource dense, petroleum based economy. There are just some aspects of modern life that have to change, and we have to learn how to let them go. And in many cases, we’re very fond of them, and very attached to them. And they bring a lot of often very good things to us. But they aren’t sustainable and they have to go.
I really see the work that I do with dying people and families at bedsides as being anchored in this much larger framework of – what does it mean to say goodbye to a way of life? What does it mean to let go of an entire epoch, in a way? Things need to change and if we can allow them to die in the way they need to die, and if we could have faith that there is something on the other side, then we can move forward. But if we are gripped and we won’t let go and we won’t let go because we’re so afraid of change, it’s not going to be good.
Death work is embedded in this much larger frame of ecological survival. If we can learn how to let go – we in dominant culture who have and do and use the most – if we can learn how to let that go, and move back into a lower resource use, more human interconnected way of being, we have a chance of surviving. But we have to let it die in order for that to happen.
As spoken by Sarah Kerr.