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