Even If You're ‘Not Into Politics’, Death Worker, Your Work Is Political

The death workers I roll with are doing political work. We know this work touches systems: power, capitalism, patriarchy, race, culture, history. We know you can't do it well without seeing all that.

But there's a trending version of the death doula movement right now that’s selling a kind of sanitized, apolitical death care. It feel ‘white washed’ and pastel with no mention of injustice. That version often insinuates things like, “I’m here to hold space, not get political.”

But here’s the truth: if you are supporting people through death, grief, and loss in this world, you are doing political work.

Whether you name it or not, you're challenging systems that have devalued care, grief, slowness, and community for generations.

Death workers are reclaiming something that institutions have sterilized and monetized. We’re pulling death care back into the hands of regular people, families, neighbors, friends, chosen kin. That is political. That is cultural repair.

And we’re not just here for “the dying.” The death workers I know not only support people who are dying and people taking care of the people who are dying, they also support the grieving, the exhausted, the disillusioned, and the enraged. We hold space for grief about climate collapse, genocide, racial violence, ancestral wounds, lost futures, broken systems, school shootings, and stolen time. Our work touches every layer of culture.

This work is also a challenge to the way society sees value. Care work, especially when done by women, femmes, queer folks, and BIPOC, has always been expected, unpaid, or underpaid. But death workers are rewriting that story. We’re asserting that our time, skill, presence, and labor are valuable. We are setting boundaries in a world that demands endless giving. We’re refusing to be martyrs. That refusal alone is a disruption.

In my Nine Keys apprenticeship, I see this political awakening happen again and again. Apprentices often begin their journey wanting to help people in their community have “a good death.” It’s a beautiful and honest starting point. But then they learn about how the funeral industry profits off of grief. They see the gaps in hospice care and the damage done by bureaucracy. They discover that the roots of this work were erased because they belong to women and to the marginalized.

They start to see that death work isn’t just about care, it’s about power, erasure, history, and justice. Some even begin to reckon with how they’ve upheld systems of oppression themselves, through people-pleasing, overgiving, or assuming a single (often Western) framework for death care is the only way. That kind of reckoning is political. It’s what decolonizing actually looks like in practice.

And we are doing more than holding the ending of things, we are building new ways forward. Death workers are creating loving economies rooted in collective liberation. We’re asking: what would it look like to center the most vulnerable and build systems of support that don’t leave anyone behind? What happens when we place care at the center of everything…including our own care as worker?

Every time a death worker teaches a workshop, helps a family reclaim home funerals, or models radical self-care, they are participating in future-making. They’re easing pressure off a hospice system that is being crushed under the weight of the for-profit medical machine. They’re building resilience in communities that have been abandoned by formal institutions.

And yes, rest is part of the blueprints. Protecting your energy is a part of the resistance. Setting your rates is a part of the work. Because this work is not sustainable if we’re constantly running on fumes. We cannot center the vulnerable while abandoning ourselves.

So even if you don’t speak the language of activism or politics, your work is still shaping the culture. You’re not just hosting Death Cafes, dear. You are participating in something bigger. And that something is political.

written by Narinder Bazen
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