Lessons From Death
A write up of Montpelier Death Cafe
"How not avoid what is uncomfortable, how to embrace it. How to make space in this our society for this experience." These were some of the challenges an attendee shared with the group after their experience of being with someone through death. "Death has changed everything for me in the most profound way that I am actually grateful for the experience," admitted another.
To be with someone who is dying is to come close to a profoundly liminal experience. As one member said, "Death is the transition between the seen and the unseen." And while deeply sad, it can be awe inspiring to realize that "whatever we are, we are capable of being with a transition of this magnitude," as one person noted. For the dying the endpoint of that transition is unknown, but as they transition it is possible "to be wherever the dying go, but only from the side of the living." The threshold of death can only be crossed once, but with open enough hearts we can let go in our own way and surrender to the experience of being with dying.
Those who have sat with the dying in such a way are forever changed. The death experience is unique, it is intimate, and it marks us. We are marked by grief and the responsibility of carrying the memories of someone we love. "Grief is work," said someone, "grief is a journey and we should grieve as consciously as we can." Grief is more than sadness. Grief marks the irrevocable passage of who we were before death and who we are after. But that journey has so much to teach us if we let it.
"When you confront someone's passing you come into relationship with your own death, your own dying- it forces you into that reality," someone shared, "and I want my relationship with my dying to include other people." This theme was echoed by many "I don't want to be afraid of my own death, though I know I will be, but the more I talk about it the less dramatic that fear seems to be," said someone. And someone else added, "the more I come to death cafe the more I can speak about my loss, and my own death, with great love instead of great sadness." "It seems," said another person, "that the more I talk about the person I am grieving that they are beginning to let me go and I am beginning to feel less afraid of what happens when I move on." Another person spoke up, "Now, when I think about the people I have lost I ask myself 'Have I completed the tasks I came here to do? What do I want in my next life? Why can't I do that now? Why wait?'"
As one person pointed out, when we are willing to speak about grief, about being with dying, we begin "releasing the trauma we witnessed, we experienced, and replacing it with gratitude for how it brought us closer to the person before we had to let them go."
When you open completely to the experience of death and grief you find there is room not only for gratitude and compassion, but for joy. We do not expect this, but for many of us, there are positive lessons from death.
Michelle Acciavatti, Co-Facilitator
If you would like to submit your own write-up to a meeting please email: montpelierdeathcafe@gmail.com