The Intelligence of Grief

6 minute read

I first learned about grief in the card aisle at the grocery store when I was around the age of seven. The words “with sympathy” were spelled out in pastels on the front of greeting cards at my eye level. Is grief like a sort of sad holiday that happens when someone died? Sympathy cards and flowers are given, then we all go back to school and act like nothing has changed.

I don’t think the word grief was ever said in my childhood. Looking back now, my grief lessons were all over my adolescence, even though I didn’t know that’s what the lessons were, or that “grief” was the name of the elephant in the room. We were all lugging this elephant behind us without knowing it was there.

Grief remains present, even when we don’t acknowledge it.

My mother’s father died when she was in her twenties, well before I was born. This was back in the “Time heals all wounds” days, in the “Buck up” generation. I’m assuming that her grief was expected to “heal”. I feel like my mom often had a knot in her throat that she was trying to speak around when we were kids. Though her bright countenance and sense of humor are very obvious, my hypersensitive heart could hear that knot throughout my childhood. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why she was always singing, to give the knot some room. And oh, can my mom sing.

Knowing what I know now about grief, I wish I had known then that it was the nameless elephant she was carrying around while also raising us kids practically on her own. Maybe her grief is what gives her such tenacious optimism.

Grief gives room for singing.

My father, a drafted Vietnam War veteran, was so sick with unacknowledged grief that he was diagnosed as mentally ill, hospitalized for mental illness and heavily medicated for it. Nobody anywhere thought that perhaps a front combat Vietnam War veteran, who also suffered a childhood that was a sort of warzone, could possibly be afflicted with grief.

Grief wasn’t on the radar.

His depression and sporadic nervous behaviors colored my childhood with dark tones. While most kids were memorizing state capitals, I was learning to distrust the American government. I was coming up in the fallout of what ‘drafted to the Vietnam War’ meant. But, still, nobody anywhere considered his afflictions to be grief. He died never knowing that it was grief that haunted him. The dark tones of my childhood grew my capacity for holding heavy things with others.

Grief can be passed down from one generation to the next after all.

In my teens and twenties, my own grief began to choke the life out of me. After years of numbing myself with drugs, I began numbing myself with meditation. Thousands of dollars in therapy and decades spent under spiritual teachers and yet nobody anywhere knew what was wrong with me. When I stepped onto the path of death midwifery and learned exactly what grief is, I began to understand myself. When I learned that it was grief that was the elephant in the room, I began to learn how to let it carry me. A grief practice can be a strong foundation after all.

Grief isn’t something that only comes after the loss of a loved one.

Francis Weller, a well-known author, psychotherapist and soul activist teaches us that grief goes well beyond bereavement. He teaches that grief comes for places within us that did not know love. It comes for the sorrows of the world. It comes for ancestral grief. Through my studies of Weller’s theories, I learned that what I was trying to numb or mend within myself was not an illness but was grief. When I began to practice my grief, learning its movements and desires and the weight of it, my mind and body and spirit began to synergistically bring wholeness, inspiration and health to my self. My depressive episodes became focused and purposeful once I learned they were my grief songs trying to be heard.

It is through my grief practice, my body opened and softened, my eyes watered regularly, that I am able to see clearly. Because of my grief practice, I can stay centered in this devastatingly dark and yet also beautiful world.

Grief sharpens our vision.

My grief will never go away, just like my love won’t. Being awake and aware now to the planet and its creatures and people is an invitation to grieve and praise. Every single day we are given something to grieve and something to enjoy. We have our own personal losses, and we have losses that come from being one part of the whole.

Our planet is gasping for air and yet it still is serenaded by birdsong. It seems that school shootings in America are now an unforgivable norm and yet children are still crafting whimsy with their imaginations. A suicide epidemic isn’t being largely discussed yet some deathworkers are now changing the narrative around this topic and saving lives while they do. Multiple genocides are happening to our kin and the terror is breaking our numbness apart. We don’t know where we’re heading, and yet, through our growing grief awareness we are given invitations to unite our hearts. Will we accept the invitations?

Grief knows the way.

Unacknowledged grief is the rootball of our collective pain. It can choke the life out of those of us that don’t know it’s knotted up around our hearts. Unacknowledged grief is deadly. If we want to see change in our world, we must get to the root of the problems. Unacknowledged grief leaves a sinkhole under Americans that many fill with overconsumption, causing more harm. This harm causes more grief. The sinkhole goes deeper.

We need love to fill these spaces in. Love cannot be its fullest expression until grief is in its fullest expression. We don’t pull the rootball up to destroy it. We pull the rootball up, expose it, study it, and replant it in a place where it will serve us.

Grief is a field that we tend.

Living in grief awareness is a way of life. Grief folds into our day-to-day living. Grief wants to move just like love does. We allow grief to move through our joints when we stretch and dance or swing a tennis racket. We allow grief to move when we gather with others and create space and ritual for it together. We allow grief to move when we make art with it, when we put it into our elbow grease in the garden, when we pray and sing it, and when we weep and breathe it consciously.

Grief has a place in our lives.

The gift of grief expression is interconnectedness with all that is. Grief unacknowledged isolates us and shuts life-giving parts of our selves away from others. Grief unmoved becomes stagnancy in our blood. It closes the shoulders down around the heart and stifles our breath. Grief keeps our gaze downward. The very word grief comes from the Latin word gravare which means to make heavy.

The posture of grief is slumped over and closed off. But when grief is expressed, opened up, and carried out in the open collectively, it is made (into) light. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. We should know our grief through our personal relationships with its movement within us and what it does when we share it.

Grief is enlightening.

Having a grief practice is essential. Most mornings I start my day with a cup of coffee and my grief practice. Through my movement practice, I open my body and heart energy to express what has made them heavy. If I go straight to my mind to express my grief, my grief gets tangled up with worries, judgment, and ideas. My body must express my grief first. Some days this opening brings tears to my face, some days it brings inspiration, and most days it brings a keen awareness of what is possible.

Grief is a guide.

Recently, I got to have a tender conversation with grief coach Naila Francis for my Nine Keys Podcast. Naila is a death midwife, interfaith healer, and poet who centers their work around grief awareness.

In this conversation, Naila said something that really stuck with me. She shared that some days her grief will express itself through tears and that she won’t assign a reason for that particular grief expression. There isn’t a vagueness to this way of grief, but there is an allowance for the intelligence of grief. To me, this is a mature place on the path. Through practice, we learn our grief and how it moves. Some days it may write poetry, and other days it may weep in dance.

Grief is inspirational.

Naila and I have a grief thing in common. We have found that our grief practices have opened us up to experience a deep connection with nature and others. Our grief practices keep our hearts flexible and strong enough to hold the sorrows of the world. Our grief practices inspire new thought, new ways to care, and wholeness.

We may not be able to solve our world’s problems with our grief practices, but we can hold our collective’s predicaments with them in a way that allows for more love, patience, tenderness, and understanding to be the joining points between us. We’ve got to unite in grief, don’t we? Maybe our acknowledged grief has the power to move us together in such a way that makes empires fall and truly caring communities arise.

Grief is the way forward.

Keep going!

Narinder Bazen

*New to the idea of having a grief practice?

I invite you to lean into the many grief care communities that are forming within the deathworker movement and to work with one-on-one grief coaches like Naila Frances or myself.

*Are you a deathworker / death doula / death midwife / death companion, etc.?

If you would like to develop your grief coaching and receive soft-business development support, please consider working with me through my Reimagine offering. Deathworkers are just scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done for the collective’s great awakening to grief. If you are a deathworker who offers grief coaching to your community, please know the world is grateful for your work.

Death Midwifery from this Mystic’s Soul-Eyes

6 minute read

Unfolding as roses for the great primordial mother; that’s how I envision the death workers who come into my care. Each one, a gift to the creative source of nature.

My calling as a death midwife includes midwifing midwives to the path of death midwifery. This is a path that is a lifelong journey of personal and collective reclamation.

What can be effective art, activism, advocacy, soft business that rewrites the value of caregiving, and a spiritual path all at the same time? Death midwifery.

The word ‘midwifery’ has an ancient vibration to me.

Though the definition of the word midwifery is “a woman who is with” (usually with another person in childbirth), I feel that the word is non-gendered. As I’ve been this word for almost ten years, I know midwifery as a creative flow for art, a spiritual path, and a divine force that moves through vessels of its own choosing.

Where does the calling originate? I teach that the calling is born from the pulse of the collective-one-heart. It is from the source of all creation, it is from the ancestors, and it is from the earth’s push to survive. To me, the great primordial mother energy beckons our return to land, to community, to rest, to art, and to liberation for all.

This midwifery, like a bell, rings clarity through the one carrying it by clearing the cobwebs that keep them from fully embodying their death midwifery.

It magnetizes situations and people that need its touch to the one who carries it. What do my apprentices say about the nine months that they spend in Nine Keys Apprenticeship? They’ll say that it amazed them with magic, that it opened their eyes and minds and hearts, that it fully prepared them to be death midwives in their communities, that it crumbled the obstacles that impeded them from their work, that it amazed them with its whimsy and creative flow, and that it brought them into great intimacy with what it means to be alive.

The great primordial mother’s energy moves death midwifery through people that she chooses to carry it, be it, know it, and deliver it. When the midwife develops a secure link with their own midwifery and truly understands that they are the vessel for this movement, the work begins to take form on the material plane.

They become the rose, the photosynthesis, and the gardener.

Have you ever met a death worker who said that they don’t know why they are called to death work, but they just know that they are? The question “When did you get into death midwifery?” has always been an existential invitation for me. The answer truly is, “Death midwifery got into me. I was born with it.”

You may know the children who have the midwife’s nature. They may have a curiosity for all things that can’t be explained. They may exhibit a deeply caring nature for sick family members or animals. They may be quiet, acutely attuned to the subtleties in the room, or noticeably observant children. They may talk about things unseen and unheard as though they are seen and heard. They may be labeled or praised for their sensitivities. They may see right through people.

The death midwife who keeps the channel clear between their calling to the midwifery and releases strong attachments to the outcomes of their work will find that their midwifery speaks to them as a guide.

When a death midwife connects to their practice with reverence and an open mind, the calling within them speaks clearly. This is how I guide my death midwifery apprentices to find their death work. I cannot “train” them how to be a death midwife.

I can teach them everything they need to know about the art and the practicalities of the work, I can fill their baskets with the information they need to know about our current death care culture and what to expect when their work takes material form, but I can’t tell them what their death midwifery is. I love to be the mirror that helps them see their work!

Over the years of guiding death midwives, I have witnessed miracles in my apprentices’ and mentees’ death midwifery. My own death midwifery is a string of holy serendipitous moments.

It also weaves throughout the moments in my day-to-day living.  Some of my apprentices live their death midwifery in a cloistered sort of way, their calling brings them into deep devotion for the collective grief. Some of their midwifery takes form through their art and poetry. Some create a business for their work, simultaneously midwifing death while rewriting the value of ‘women’s work.’ Some of their callings weave in and out through all three incarnations.

No matter if their work is cloistered or very visible publicly, they are in service to their communities.

When a death midwife, through their soul-eyes, sees their calling taking shape out in the open, they are met with an added challenge, to remain close to the source of their calling and to relinquish expectations and timing to this midwifery.

When they find their balance between devotion and diligence, their midwifery brings forth the people and places that need their care. The creative flow for the mystical death midwife is powerful. It must be grounded through play and conscious day-to-day living. It has its own timing. It challenges the midwife over and over again to release, to let go, to lean into uncertainty, and to be receptive to its guidance.

I have witnessed miracles for death midwives who answer to their calling this way. I have seen how their work takes shape into something that is beyond their limited ideas about the work. When this happens, I see the great primordial mother’s hand.

Death will take away everything that keeps us from being pure consciousness. In the end, it takes away our body so that we can realize ourselves as pure love.

Death midwives who accept the invitation to this work as a spiritual path and a lifestyle tend to live in liminal places. They have a true understanding of the life/death/life cycles everywhere, and they know the temporary nature of everything. These knowings exude from them. They tend to gather around the threshold that sits between what has died and what is being born.

As we reclaim our sovereignty, as we lament what we’ve done to the planet, and as we bear witness to the violence of white colonial imperialism, the mystical death midwife puts their ears to the ground and their eyes inward.

Their hands remain available to help, and their hearts, breaking and mending, grow to be greater containers of love and creative flow.

They know what being alive in their body truly means.

Narinder Bazen

This Work Is Going to Take Time.

7 minute read

How many times have we made ourselves available to the journey without fixing every hope on the destination? Does anyone really do that? Is it easy to do for some and not easy for others? I’ll admit, I’m prone to fixating on the destination and sometimes forget to stop at the milestones in the journey to give thanks or praise, or even to stop and reassess how the journey is going.

When it comes to the death and grief over-culture in America, my sights are often set on what needs to be fixed, what goodness is possible, and where I would like to see our collective understanding of death, dying, and grief care. I’ll often use the phrasing ‘new paradigm death care’ like I’m putting a flag in the land of it and making a claim about what it is. Is it here? How bold of me! Are we there yet?

Recently I had a conversation with a well-known professional intuitive named Suzanne Jauchius. I learned about Suzanne in 2013 when I found her book You Know Your Way Home to be a page-turner that I couldn’t put down. It is her true story about her journey as a professional intuitive who eventually comes to be known as someone who finds missing people. How fascinated I was reading this book! Where does someone like Suzanne fit into our culture here in North America that is so bent towards logic and skepticism about unexplainable talents? In our recent conversation, I shared with Suzanne that I had been a little bit wearied over my own work’s journey and the snail-slow pace of the unfurling holistic end-of-life care movement. I explained that it sometimes feels like the work isn’t going anywhere. I admitted that even though I do trust the great unseen hand that guides this holistic death care movement, I sometimes still grow concerned that I may be plodding away with my death work for nothing.

Suzanne reminded me that she is seventy-five years old and that it took decades for people to take her work seriously. She told me stories about how she would give intuitive readings in peoples’ houses, driving all over god’s country to do so, and how she was a guest on a radio show for eight years, and still nobody really was taking her work to heart. She shared with me that she was a one-woman show, a single mother, with no financial support from anywhere, and that even though there were hardships, she couldn’t abandon her work because she was undeniably called to do her work. Going to get ‘a real job’ was out of the question for her. This is how many death carers feel about their work. I know they understand this just as much as I do. Suzanne then said to me, “You need to quit whining.” My response to that was a bellowing laugh. I had just been found out. I was complaining. Then she said to me, “Narinder, this work is going to take time. This death care work you are doing is where we are going, but it’s going to take time.” 

There are times when we not only hear the words someone is saying but we also feel a divine pulse behind the message. That was how it felt when Suzanne said this to me, like a message that had fallen out of the stars and landed on the notepad where I was doodling hearts. Was I so consumed with the destination that I have rushed the journey?

I see the destination of the holistic death care movement. It looks like every person in this beautiful and confused society knowing all of their end-of-life care options. It looks like everyone knowing all of their funeral and burial choices. I imagine it looks like a majority of people choosing burial options that are gentle to the earth. I can see it as a time when unnecessarily embalming a body is taboo. Maybe this destination is a time when we all are aware of the ways in which different cultures talk about death and dying, how they care for their dying and their dead, and how they grieve and praise. Maybe the destination of this holistic end-of-life care movement is a place where every caregiver is fully prepared to care for their dying loved one and is absolutely supported in that care. Maybe at this destination point medical professionals are deeply supported in their work and not under the thumb of Big Brother and its ideas about health care as a business.

Perhaps the destination of this holistic end-of-life care movement is a mass awakening to the intelligence of grief. Maybe there, grief in its many tones, is understood, acknowledged, supported, and lifted up. I believe when grief reigns in its fullest expression, is felt and free to move, then love in its fullest expression is felt and free to move too. Who will we be when grief and love are completely reunited?

Admittedly, there have been many days, bogged down in the mire of late-stage corporate capitalism, keeping my own head above water, forgetting the beauty and grace I receive, that I have asked myself, about my death work, “Should I keep going? Should I keep encouraging other death carers? Do other death workers get discouraged with their work?” (I know they do.) And then there are most days, when I know how much this holistic death care movement has done already and I am amazed. We have a long way to go, but we’re going!

What happens if we do give this work time? What happens if we get on board with the idea that we are planting seeds for trees we may not see reach maturity? What happens if we become aware of the milestones in the progress we’re making with our work and stop to enjoy them?

I offer to my apprentices often, “This work takes consistency.” Never have I said, “This work is always easy and comes with quick results.” Consistency means different things for different people. It can have different paces and seasons. Consistency has cycles, yet in the ebbs and flows, there it is. A mass overnight awakening of death awareness hasn’t happened yet. Though, I think it’s safe to say that the terror that is inflicted on the Palestinians (as I write this) has ripped the curtains down, curtains we were hiding behind with our death phobia and addiction to comfort. This unveiling is putting a spotlight on our collective grief wounds. I have seen more grief support groups emerge in the past six months because of this mass grief crisis. Where do we put our gratitude for the Palestinian people? Maybe we show our gratitude by keeping up with our “new paradigm” callings that came at a time like this, in the world like this. Maybe we show our gratitude with our consistent efforts and praise for our death and grief work callings.

The death carers and grief workers out here are doing a phenomenal job as the harbingers of living in death and grief awareness. I am amazed at our tenacious loyalty to our work. I’m celebrating our milestones. I’m celebrating the fact that “grief awareness is trending.” I’m celebrating that more green burial cemeteries are becoming available. I’m overjoyed to hear that hospice groups are becoming educated about holistic death care. I’m inspired by the death workers who are changing the conversations about suicide loss, LBGTQIA+ death care, the many tones of grief, accessible death care, death education, and many other much-needed conversations. The general public has a huge blessing in the death carers emerging through the holistic death care movement. What if the death workers are the rainbows after the storms?

I’m immensely grateful to be a part of this team. And I’m thankful for my community who gives their attention to some of the things I feel called to say to us.

This work is going to take time. It may not reach the results we want to see in our lifetimes, and we still do the work. Our work is guided and supported by a universal force that has its own ideas about time.

I’m here for the long game. Are you?

Narinder Bazen

Art Making at the End of Life

6 minute read

Does an artist’s drawing begin the moment they have picked up their pencil or chosen which type of paper they are going to draw on? Or does the artist’s drawing begin when they have decided what they’d like to draw and have a clear image of it in their mind? Or does an artist’s drawing begin a few years before they picked up their pencils, when they were standing on a street corner when they got the phone call that changed their life? Or does an artist’s drawing begin when they were a child learning how to hold a crayon? Or does an artist’s drawing begin before they were born, a fetus warm in their mother’s womb, tucked in under her heartbeat? Or does an artist’s drawing begin with their very first breath?

When I was a little child, in the first grade of school, my teacher asked me if I wanted to draw a piece of music. I leapt at the chance. She invited me to the wall-to-wall chalkboard at the front of the classroom and told me to choose a piece of chalk. She then instructed me to stand at the left side of the chalkboard so that I could have so much room to move my little hand and feet, as I drew the song (she would choose) across the vast empty dark space before me. 

I didn’t know what song she was going to play on the record player. I waited with great anticipation, my chalk pressed to my starting point, excitement tempting to come through every pore on my body. I knew, without any doubts, that I understood my assignment. This was easy. Learning to read, not so much. The needle landed on the record, and into the air of the classroom burst Sergei Prokofiev’s “symphonic tale for children” titled Peter and the Wolf opus 67.

I did not have to give any thoughts to what my chalk piece was going to draw. The music moved my soul through my arms and into my fingers as I slowly made thick marks to the first low and haunting sounds of the piece. Then as the flutes and oboes bounced notes that sounded like springing steps, my hand turned began to gayly flick the chalk up and down. Though, as the music turned to signal a wolf appearing from the woods by way of the crescendoing timpani and dooming trombones, my hand slowed, and the chalk dipped to low sweeping and serious movements.

I became so happily lost in the musical galaxy created by my chalk marks bouncing and dipping, swooping and rising on the blackboard, that I forgot my classmates sitting behind me. My soul was feeling free. This was me.

Is this how my soul will feel once it has left my body?

Art has been alive in my body my entire life, and I believe that it will continue to exist inside of my body until my very last breath. Though there have been many years where my drawings and poetry have laid dormant, as my creativity swelled to create my death midwifery practice, it has never died.

I’ve picked up my paints and pencils this winter of 2023 and have begun an early morning art practice. There’s something deeply nourishing about making art in the darkness before dawn. I think about making art at the end of life. My art, the expression of my soul, is full of self-comfort, sanctuary, and is teaching me that inspiration that may never die.

What does our creativity do when we are given a terminal diagnosis? Does our creativity stop because our body is slowing down?

I don't believe this has to be so. For I now know, creativity is limitless and soulful, alive and super close to infinity. Creativity will always find a way to exist. Maybe it’s our logic, or fears, maybe even perhaps our values, that can stifle its movements.

The end-of-life period is not only about “getting our affairs in order.” It can also be a time for creative expression. Does creativity stop before our last breath? There are still creative possibilities even during the evening hours of our lives. I believe this! What stories can only be written when infinity has moved in closer? What drawings can pour forth when we’ve lost some of the weight of being perceived? What do watercolors have to do with grief?

When I talk about end-of-life art making, I am not referring to the Legacy Projects that we create for those we are leaving behind.
Legacy Projects are important and beautiful things, but we don’t always have to create at the end of our lives with ‘what we’ll leave behind’ in mind.

We can use creative play for our own enjoyment, fulfillment, and soul exploration at every stage of our life. Through art, we can find life in our bodies, even when it seems all eyes on us (bless them) are preparing for its absence.

Art in action, whether that’s poetry, drawing, decorating our walls with paper stars, or collaging our dreams, is powerful comfort. What happens when we, from our beds, arrange a bouquet of flowers bursting with life for ourselves? What joys are available in the poetry we write, from those beds, about the sunlight dancing on the wall before us? What exploration invitations are there when we draw the symbols we saw in our dreams? What playful and imaginative landscapes can we dream up for future places even when we are sometimes so focused on memories?

There is life and creativity at the “end-of-life.” How shall we animate this threshold? Maybe the soul knows how to sing through our hands and ideas all the way to the end of the blackboard.

May all beings know Inspiration intimately.

*If you’d like to talk with Narinder about art making at the end-of-life, please schedule a free consultation.

Death Work is Activism

6 minute read

When I first officially arrived on the death midwifery scene back in 2017, my naivety about the end-of-life choices the general public were being given was shattered. Not only were the lack of end-of-life care choices noticeable, the lack of death education for people was shocking and the grief illiteracy dumfounded me.

I was overwhelmed for a while, like maybe someone who realizes for the first time that they have access to food in a land where thousands are starving. Like many new death workers, I felt like I gained access to information that thousands of people deserved to have and needed to have. I knew very early on in my death work that being an educator was my responsibility.

While I have worked with families and individuals in their homes and virtually as a death midwife all these years, my focus has stayed with education. Through my work, I gain more understanding of what the people know and don’t know about dying and grief. I have taken that information and trained other death workers with it. My passion for death work has never swayed, it has been the number one topic on my mind for seven years. I wake up every morning thinking about it. I go to bed thinking about it. My struggle with it has been, and continues to be, the smallness of my audience. I pray that my death midwifery apprenticeship takes what I know to wider places for the sake of collective healing.

I didn’t sign up for death work because I wanted to be a death worker activist. Though I was born an activist, calling for fairness in the school yard and praying for peace when bedtime prayers were said, I didn’t see my death midwifery as activism at first. I thought my death work was just about helping people die and offering grief support to the bereaved. Quickly did I realize, the lack of death care and lack of grief literacy in my community was a serious issue. As my scope widened on these issues, I realized that these problems reached beyond my community. These issues were harming the collective and the planet.

Examples of this can be illustrated by the numerous caregivers and dying people I serve who do not understand how much hospice is not going to be involved with their care until they are caught in caregiver burnout or death anxiety. That’s usually when they call me. Through my death midwifery, I learned that medical professionals, nursing facility staff and funeral directors are commonly severely burnt out and compassion fatigued they are victims of the profit-over-people motives held up by their corporate leaders. They too are suffering because of the systemic problems in end-of-life care. This corporate greed trickles down into the dying’s room and steals the sanctity of their last breaths.

I’ve witnessed people who have experienced sudden loss be blindsided by the lack of accessible funeral options then bottlenecked into funeral industry places that take their shock as an invitation to price gouge them.

I’ve seen how the void where grief care should be, and the overall grief illiteracy in communities, leaves bereaved people alone and unsupported furthering their grief into spirals of physical and mental illness. We have been taught to outsource our death care and to not know what grief is. Because we are uneducated about death and grief, we have death phobia and unacknowledged grief. The phobia and displaced grief have become the cancer cells that are killing us through excessive materialism and over consumption, both deadening us into apathy.

I didn’t learn all these things from a book or a teacher. I learned all these things by being in ungraceful death and grief spaces with people. What else shall I do with that insider information, but my best to make something better. I’m not afraid of the dark, in fact, I use it as an art and activist medium. My grief is actionable.

Grief is not exclusive. Grief beckons after the loss of life, and also the loss of hope, the loss of land, the loss of stability, the loss of identity, the loss of time, and biodiversity loss…to name a few. The ancestral grief born from colonialism, and unsung grief in general, have became the root ball of all our collective pain. It’s a big ask, but are we able to take in the enormity of our work? We death workers are not here to just create death care boutiques, we are here for an evolutionary reset in humanity.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this piece and look at the word activist. Many of you, like me, may have been raised to learn that an activist is someone who uses force for the purpose of creating social or political change. Media shows us images of activists as shouting protestors or angry mobs throwing bricks through shop windows. What vibration does the word activist make you feel? Does activist make you feel fear? Does it make you feel safe? Does it feel aggressive?  Does it feel inspiring or exciting?

The word activist comes from the Latin activus which came from the word actus which means “a doing” (from PIE root ag "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). The definition of the word activist is, “a person who campaigns to bring about political or social change.”  In western societies in 2023, death work is mostly activism. It doesn’t matter how you package it, it’s activism.

Death work in western societies in 2023 is about bringing holistic death care, grief schooling, grief care, end-of-life care choices, and many more death and dying related topics to the general public who are bereft of proper death and grief education. Whether the death worker knows it or not, they are participating in a movement that has the intention to bring about social and political change.  Highlighted at the core of death work are the reclamations of death care, death care for the people by the people, and grief literacy, returning grief back to its rightful place in the individuals’ psyches. This is bringing grief back to organic movement in the collective one-mind. Do we understand what is being asked of us, death workers?

We must be very careful that our work does not get hijacked by profit-over-people motives, that it is always centered in respect for indigenous peoples’ death care that never wavered from holistic death care. We must remember that holistic death care and grief literacy are for everyone to have access to. It is for people who are incarcerated, people who seek asylum, it’s for the houseless, it’s for the rich and it’s for the underserved.  We should accept that what we are doing is avant-garde. It won’t be understood for quite some time. We continue to move forward and trust the intelligence of the people. We find sustainability in our work so that it can continue to create good changes. We can be death and grief educators to our communities while we are death workers intimately involved in our client’s death care.

We must individually ask ourselves who the whole of the holistic death care movement is for. Are we to talk about death care sovereignty for one race or all races? Are we, as a whole movement, acting for the grief care of one specific population or all people? Are we to hold space for one type of death, but not all types of death? What type of grief are we talking about? What are we doing our death work for? Who are we doing it for?

Each death worker has a specific calling to their work. While their place in the movement is unique, it would serve all of us for each death worker to understand the societal, cultural, environmental, and global impact their place in the holistic death care movement has.

May we continue to dig up the places unacknowledged grief has been locked away. May we continue to listen to the call from our environments that beckon our death work. May we take our death work out of the personal and place it into the global heart. May we bypass the limiting fears we have, most likely created by patriarchal conditioning, and continue to use death work for what it came to be.

Copyright Narinder Bazen LLC 2023
*This is not an article written by AI. It was written by Narinder Bazen and will most likely contain spelling and grammar errors.

Death Work Folds Into Who We Are

7 minute read

To ‘fold in’, when we are kneading dough or pressing pie crust, means to add in one ingredient by gently turning one part over another until they are combined. As I was making the crust for a delicious tomato pie today, I played with that phrase in my mind.
Lately I’ve been thinking of a way to describe how I view death work (what we call the work of death doulas, death companions and death midwives) and how it merges with who we are. It folds into who we are!

For several years, I have personally guided many death workers to their version of the work through my Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship. I have done this while I have been serving as a death midwife myself. It is with so much experience that I confidently speak about what this holistic death care work is doing.

In western society, particularly North American society, we tend to have a very narrow view of ‘work’, and we assume that anything we have trained for holds some guarantee, somewhere, that we will be doing the very thing we trained for as a vocation. We often unwittingly abide by a ‘trained, graduated, applied, hired’ system. As I have seen, contemporary death work, the work of the doulas, midwives and companions, refuses to be boxed into a system and would rather, for many death workers, be approached as a spiritual practice that folds into their lives, that serves their communities, and serves them as well.

I remember the weeks after my death midwifery became ‘official’ by obtainment of a certificate stating that I had completed a death midwifery training course. In those days, I went headstrong into what I thought would be very busy work as a death midwife. What I failed to pay attention to was that my death midwifery had come out of my counseling practice and the yoga and meditation classes I was teaching. There was no separation.

After the better part of a year as an ‘official’ death midwife, I realized that my death work had an agenda all to itself, and that I was not the owner (or the employee) of it but rather the steward of what the work wanted to be through me. I also learned that if I wanted to make a living wage by only serving people in person at the end-of-life, that I’d not be physically able to do so. To be a death midwife who serves alone and offers on-call support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is physically impossible. This was a hard lesson for me and one I share often with my apprentices so that they won’t have to learn the hard way. I began to surrender to the calling of the work and was repeatedly amazed at all of the places that it took me.

My death midwifery, folded into my life, my counseling practice and my yoga and meditation classes. Eventually it called me to teach death education to the public, death ethics to nursing students, and death midwifery to many death workers. I had no clue in the very beginning that my death work was going to do all of that. My vision for it had been laden with my own ideas about how it would go, a vision that was very limited. Once I learned that my death work would have its own micro-deaths and its own agenda, I began to learn the dance that it had been inviting me to for many years.

Death work, as spiritual practice, folds into what we are doing already. It doesn’t always ask us to do an about-face and become someone entirely different to who we are.  It’s quite the opposite. It wants to merge with where we are, becoming one with who we are, and going forward together to where we are going. At times, the work will pull on a thread in us that does lead to some unraveling that keeps us from the fullest expression of our capacities as death worker.

Through the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, I have guided and witnessed death workers merging with their callings. Some of them are artists whose death work will speak through their art. Their audiences will know them as artist and death midwife.

Some of the Nine Keys apprentices have been yoga instructors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and birth doulas who merged their death work with their current work.

Some of the apprentices have been gardeners, bread makers, and herbalists who will talk about their death midwifery with their customers at the local famer’s market.

Some of them have been licensed therapists, chaplains, a cancer researcher, and nurses whose work became death midwifery informed.

Some of them are passionate about business, so their death work takes on a business model and merges with who they are and where they are in business.
This is my forte! Helping death workers navigate the ins and outs of crafting spiritual and community care into a business that supports them as they do their work.

Some of them are unencumbered spiritual driven people, living nomadically, their death midwifery touching wherever their feet have walked.

The astounding beauty of death work, as spiritual practice, is that it will guide us, challenge us, inspire us and gift us with serendipity, humility, and honor, if we allow it to fold into who we are, where we are, and what’s best for us.

Death work won’t be a part of hustle culture. That’s how death midwifery, long ago, was killed. It has reincarnated as healthy and balanced work and community care. It’s a soft-business, you know?

The calling can bring financial stability to the death worker. It will reward the death worker with a life lived in death awareness, death wisdom, and honors that are beyond words. It can bring sustainable lifestyle options to the death worker. It will spread out through the death workers to heal the death-phobia all around us, to bring the collective’s grief out of the shamed shadows, and to ultimately guide society home. Death work, as spiritual practice, as soft-business, is a part of the evolutionary process of the collective consciousness.

Narinder Elizabeth Bazen
(C) 2016 Narinder Bazen Death Midwifery, LLC All rights reserved 

Death Doulas in Mainstream Media: (Let’s Be Honest Here.)

9 minute read

In June of 2021, an article in the New York Times regarding Death Doulas was circulating around the death worker community, landing on my desk several times. The title of the article read like this, “‘Death Doulas’ Provide Aid at the End of Life: End-of-Life doulas support people emotionally, physically, spiritually and practically: sitting vigil, giving hand massages, making snacks.”  

Before this article, there was an article in USA Today about Death Doulas that included descriptions of Death Doula work like this: “When people are nearing the end of their lives, a doula will visit and often sit vigil with them as they are dying. They also help patients with their will and other advance directives. They help people do legacy projects such as quilts, art projects, scrapbooks or writing letters to leave behind to their relatives.”  

While mainstream media is getting the word out about the work of Death Doulas, it isn’t quite telling the public the truth about all the ways Death Doulas work. Are these articles telling the general public (and Death Doulas) that this work is just an adjunct service to hospice, that it’s an upgrade on your death care? Are these articles describing a service solely focused on the person dying and not the caregivers?  

Over the past several years, as I watch the holistic death care movement grow, I’ve noticed the portrayal of Death Doulas and Midwives in the media continue to repeat this pattern. Are these articles serving or hindering the Death Doulas’ work? They may possibly be doing both. While they are making the Death Doulas’ presence palatable, they are leaving out the fact that oftentimes, the Death Doulas are essential workers.  

Death Midwifery – my term for this work - is a missing piece in the fabric of American humanity. If we lived in multi-generational living situations or in cooperative communities, we would possibly have designs for thoroughly holistic death care spaces. My work falls under the umbrella of Death Doulas, yet the style of Death Midwifery I and several other death workers practice is rarely described in articles. Nobody asked for my opinion, so I’ve taken it upon myself to write this article and set my opinion out there to be read. After so many years serving families and individuals as a Death Midwife, educating hundreds of people about death, teaching nursing students in universities, and training Death Midwives through my Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, I’d say I have a right to have an opinion on what is being told to the general public about Death Doulas.  

While Death Midwifery does include creating legacy projects, helping people get their affairs in order, offering therapeutic touch, and caring for our clients with nourishing meals and spiritual support, it also includes crisis management. That is a part of the work that not many of these articles address. I’d like to give some examples of how Death Midwifery, as a movement of compassion, serves these cases as well. 

A few years ago, a young woman in Atlanta reached out to me, through my website contact page, a few hours after she found her father’s body in his bedroom. He died by suicide after suffering for several years with multiple sclerosis. I called her immediately, assessing the crisis over the phone and giving her directions for immediate care as they waited for my arrival. I was at their house shortly after the call. By the time I arrived, the body had been removed by the medical examiner. Upon my arrival I began to triage the different articulations of this trauma among the suddenly bereaved. I knew what was ahead of them, and I wanted to slow things down for them before they would be rushed into the throes of after-loss plans. It was a few hours later, when everyone was sitting on the sofa—and I on the floor—that we were able to find a moment for holistic death care on this devastating day.  

All deaths are holy passages.  

In February of 2020, I was serving a gentleman whose mother was dying of congestive heart failure. This woman expressed to me that she did not want to burden her family with caring for her. She wanted her dying process to speed up. Her resistance to care from her family and hospice made things very difficult for all involved. My weekly visits with this woman looked like what the New York Times and USA Today said Death Doulas do. We sat together, had tea, listened to oldies music, and held hands. I did lead her through guided meditations, and we did have conversations that drew her closer to accepting her situation.  A few days after what would be my last visit with this family, I received a shocking phone call from her son. His mother tried to end her life by suicide and the method she chose did not work completely. She was in intensive care with serious injuries. This is exactly what she didn’t want for her death. My Death Midwifery went from making tea, to managing the family crisis.

She died the next day. Death brought mercy, as it often times will do. 

In May of 2020 I was called by a gentleman who got my name and number from a health food store clerk who knew of my services. The gentleman was in the store seeking homeopathic pain relief for his condition. He was dying of pulmonary fibrosis. In our phone call, I could hear that he was struggling to breathe. I arranged a visit for us for later that day, as speaking in person would not be as taxing as speaking over the phone. I found him in his front room, sitting upright in his Eames lounge chair, ringing his hands in anxiety. His oxygen tank was humming, but the nasal cannulas were pulled down under his chin.  

 
I noticed a silk ascot peeking up over his collar and his neatly pressed trousers. His wife was sitting on the sofa next to him, her legs curled up underneath her and there were dark circles under her eyes. I often can gauge a death and dying situation by the countenance of the caregiver’s face. After introductions, I sat on the floor, at this man’s feet.  

“What would you like to ask me?” I said. “I see that you are having a difficult time.”  

He went on to explain that he was on hospice care, though he refused their help and medications. He explained that he saw his father die of the same disease.  He said, “I understand that you’re a Death Midwife. I assume that you help people die. I want to die soon.” 

My heart went out to this man and his wife. I could tell that they’d been in a constant state of stress for some time. I asked him if I could speak plainly. I am good at speaking plainly, and I can see when someone, nearing death, has lost all patience with death euphemisms and false-hope-speak. What I struggle to do is to beat around the bush, though I’ll manage it when necessary. He was appreciative of plain speech. 

“You are going to die soon, we both know this,” I said. “Going about it with anxiety and hurry like this will make it even more unbearable. I see you here, you are sitting upright, fully dressed, ringing your hands. I sense that death would like for you to find relaxation and surrender, sir.”  

He leaned back in his chair, putting his head on the headrest. “Okay. How do I do that?”  

I looked around his shoulder at the wet-bar on the wall behind him. I knew that getting this man to practice long, deep breathing for relaxation was out of the question. He could barely breathe. So, I asked him if he’d like a cocktail. He said yes. The look on his wife's face went from bewilderment to a sort of comfortability. She jumped at the opportunity for normalcy and made three martinis, one for each of us. As we sipped our drinks, and the evening went on, he began to relax. He told me stories about his travels around the world and his great affinity for art and for natural medicine.  

After we finished our drinks, I explained to him that it was time to rest. I went so far as to ask him if he had a lovely set of pajamas, which he did. He promised me he’d go upstairs and climb into bed and relax. 

We said our goodbyes. Three weeks later his wife sent a text message to me. He died in his bed, relaxed and at peace. 

Death Midwifery, at times, manages crises. It shepherds families who may fall to pieces in their loved one’s dying process. It holds things together when heart strings are breaking. Death Midwifery midwives a dying person through their caregivers. It’s whole-family focused. It aims to get everyone on the same page. When the caregivers are dangerously exhausted, or are feeling lost, or are unable to let go, their lack of well-being impacts the one they are caring for. In my experience, Death Midwifery does more than sit bedside; it sits beside the family as they sit bedside.  

As I tell my apprentices, it is an anomaly to be called to serve a family by holding vigil, lighting candles, and playing music.  We’re not there yet as a culture. Most people don’t know how the body dies. My apprentices can hold space for someone who is dying, but they know this may not occur as often as they hope. They are inspired to be death-educators. They are taught to consider the caregivers as highly as they do the one who is dying.  And they are taught how to arrive to traumatic death and dying spaces, without consternation. I tell them the truth: Death Midwifery is sometimes crisis management. 

To make quilts, work on legacy projects, and write letters to leave behind would require a dying person to admit that they are dying. To invite a Death Midwife into the home is to admit that there is dying happening in the home. There’s a certain level of acceptance that must be reached before a Death Midwife is called upon. Many times, that acceptance doesn’t come until they are close to the end, when acceptance is one of the last remaining options. Death Midwives are rarely called by a person who is dying. They are called by the dying person’s caregiver, yet so much of the mainstream media is reporting something that points to the opposite.  

If mainstream media continues to only tell the palatable narrative about this work, telling the general public that Death Doulas provide emotional support, give hand massages, and make snacks— without telling the stories of Death Doulas and Midwives who are also managing family crises, supporting caregivers who have reached burnout levels that are dangerous to their health, sitting with people who are dying who don’t want anything to do with a Death Midwife - their adrenal fatigued caregiver in the other room - being on-call for families who feel lost in the medical death care systems, available for sudden death situations— then how will this movement be able to truly grow? Goodness grows well through truth. It’s radical, compassionate community care. It’s not just an add-on to the current death-care status quo. 

It's important to the work of Death Doulas and Midwives that the many sides of our stories be told.  Death Midwifery is not an upgrade on the death-care for a financially privileged person who is dying. Death Midwifery is an ever-evolving mission that is returning holistic death care, death literacy, and person-centered care to communities. In its current incarnation, it is often times essential crisis management. 

 
With all due respect, this work reaches far beyond hand massages and making snacks. 

Narinder Elizabeth Bazen
(C) 2016 Narinder Bazen Death Midwifery, LLC All rights reserved 

 *Details of stories have been changed to protect the privacy of my clients.

There’s Work to be Done. (How Are We Defining the Word, “Work”?)

7 minute read

Recently, someone sent an article to me with the title “What’s a Death Doula? Growing profession brings peace, plans at the end of life.” It fills me with purposeful hope to see articles like this one available for the public to read. The general public deserves to know about the beautiful Holistic Death Care Movement, as I’m calling it, that is growing up among it. Holistic Death Care Workers (Doulas/Midwives/Companions) need articles like the once mentioned above to help hold their work up.

However, as a Death Midwifery mentor, I do cringe when I read the words “Death Doula / growing profession.” In my experience, phrasing such as this can lead prospective Holistic Death Care Workers to think that there are going to very possibly be many families calling them to be their Death Doula once they complete a Holistic Death Care Worker training program. I am very transparent with my apprentices, and mentees who come to me outside of the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, when I say, “This work is not a trained/graduated/applied/hired situation. Barely anybody knows they need you. We learn dying and death care in real time in this country and nine times out of ten, that’s too late to be searching for a Death Doula.”

I know these things because I’ve been doing the work officially for eight years, loosely for almost ten. I’ve watched the swelling tides of Holistic Death Care Workers coming into this calling.

It is obvious to me that my Death Midwifery work with families in Atlanta and nationwide grew so quickly because I was a part of a large yoga community. I remind my apprentices of this often. My yoga classes grew to seventy-five attendees at the height of my yoga teaching career. I was a contributing writer for the online publication that belongs to this particular yoga organization. The readers are worldwide.  I knew a lot of people. A lot of people knew me. I’ve taught hundreds of people through my death education classes in Atlanta. Word spread quickly about my Death Midwifery. I’m a been-there-done-that Death Midwife. In 2017, I spent six months as a steward for a green burial cemetery where I met families who use my services and a funeral director who still sometimes refers families to me. I created the Death Midwifery Journey Course that year and mentored individuals in my yoga community who reached out to me for Death Midwifery training. That course eventually transformed into the Nine Keys Death Midwifery apprenticeship.  Through these programs I have walked intimately with almost one hundred death workers, not hundreds. As I mentioned earlier, I also mentor many other Holistic Death Care Workers as they figure out the ropes of this budding ‘profession’ that barely anyone is hiring them for.

I am not aware of a death worker going through a ‘Death Doula’ training program and finishing it to then find themselves knee deep in death work. What I find are Holistic Death Care Workers who go through quick training programs, unaware of the steep reality that their work is going to take some entrepreneurial elbow grease. I’ve watched this for the past several years. They leave the program, set up a website, maybe some social media pages, some may volunteer for hospice, then they get discouraged and move on to something else.

I’m acutely aware of the financial limits on Holistic Death Care Workers who can’t quit their day jobs to focus on building their death care practice full time. I think people forget that I essentially have four jobs and that I’m trying to make ends meet as a recent divorcee with no family financial support.

I’m an Intuitive Counselor with a growing practice, a Numinous Communicator with a slow but steady trickling-in of clients in Atlanta, a Death Midwife myself, and a Death Midwifery ‘trainer.’ (Though, I prefer the phrasing “Death Midwifery Auntie.”)

While the general public isn’t coming in mass sweeps banging down the doors of Holistic Death Care Workers’ businesses, thousands of individuals ARE being called to step into the role of holistic death care worker. Why is that? Death Midwifery isn’t a fad job, a flash in the pan trend, it’s a dire need and Holistic Death Care Workers know it.

As the bard Stephen Jenkinson puts it in his book Die Wise, we are living in a ‘death-phobic’ society. We live in a society where someone with terminal illness is referred to as a ‘fighter’ until they are ‘losing their battle’, and if we accept their fate, we’re ‘giving up on them.’  We live in a society that grew up thinking that when it came time for their loved one to die that the local hospice was going to step in and take care of all of the death and dying needs. This false advertising leaves caregivers with fatigued adrenals and not many places to put their grief but stuffed down into their stomachs and it leaves nurses who are under great strain. I know, I see it.

We don’t know our funeral and burial options in this country, but we know a GoFundMe is usually employed to take care of the options we do know of. We same-ole-same-ole the whole end-of-life narrative because we, raised to deny limits, the American way, just don’t give serious thought to our dying until it’s sitting next to us. Even then, some refuse to look at it. We don’t know what to do with a mother whose newborn died while being born. We don’t know what to do with the family whose son shot his wife. We sure as hell don’t know what to do with the opioid crisis and the unprocessed grief that’s causing it. We don’t know what to do with grief here.

We don’t know what to do with death and grief because neither of those work well for a hustling consumerist society that touts that we are limitless and can work more more more. We hide death and grief away; we outsource their care.

So, if you ask me, all of these Holistic Death Care Workers coming up right now are educators. They are Death Educating their communities, they are Death Educating their clients and they are Death Educating anyone who will listen. As I say to my apprentices, “The byproduct of Death Education is marketing. When you hold the Death Café or you create a Grief Group at your local yoga studio, you are giving your community so much opportunity for healing and empowerment, but you are also letting your community know where to find you.”  Hospice is ‘hiring’ Death Doulas as volunteers. Volunteers are the lowest paid employees in death care. This arrangement isn’t sustainable.

Hospitals don’t want anything to do with us (yet). Have you ever heard of a funeral home with a Death Midwife on staff? Yeah, me neither. Recently I heard, the story of a mother who called the funeral home to ask what time her son’s cremation would be. The funeral director told her, “It’s on my list of things to do today.” That’s death industry speak. That’s not death care. A Death Midwife on that funeral director’s staff would keep the heart of the business steady when he’s overwhelmed, as most funeral directors are.

Holistic Death Care Workers get into these remarkable death worker communities and often fail to remember that they’re sitting in an echo chamber. They’re talking about Holistic Death Care Work to holistic death workers. Often their work is stunted by comparison or a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen worry. They don’t fully understand that there is room for them, and more than this, they are needed. If we ask Holistic Death Care workers to go to their neighbors’ houses and ask them if they know about the importance of Holistic Death Care workers, they’ll find that barely anyone knows what a Holistic Death Care worker is. In Los Angeles, California or Portland, Oregon you’ll find more folks may know about Holistic Death Care workers, but in Indianapolis, Indiana or Atlanta, Georgia, the neighbors are clueless.

One could ask me, and one has asked me, “What are you doing training Death Midwives when the work isn’t out there for them when they leave your apprenticeship?” And my answer will have to be a question, “How are we defining the word ‘work?’ “ Once you start to peel back the reality of our current death industry options, you begin to find there is much work to be done. If you peel it back too far, you may become overwhelmed by the need for Holistic Death Care workers.

I have great expectations for the Holistic Death Care Movement. Some may say I have pipedreams, but I’d be safe to say those who say such things haven’t seen what I’ve seen.  There is going to come a day when people won’t ask us, “What’s a Death Midwife? I’ve never heard of that.” There is going to come a day when the caregiver of a dying person has enough support. There is going to come a day when the after-loss process isn’t rushed out the door to the funeral home. There is going to come a day when those who struggle with suicidal ideations are not only medicated and hospitalized but rather held by their community. There is going to come a day when the general public knows that expressions of grief support go far beyond the first few weeks after loss and that there is a difference between grief and depression.

There is going to come a day when hospitals have deep and holistic support for bereaved parents AND their hospital staff. There is going to come a day when every single person in this country knows all of their death care, funeral and burial options. There is going to come a day when knowing the importance of getting your end-of-life affairs in order will be common knowledge. On that day, a great healing will happen. It most likely won’t be a day that I see, but that day will come. In the meantime, education is the Holistic Death Care worker’s job and my job is to educate Holistic Death Care workers.