GRIEVEYARD

They call themselves death doulas, or death midwives. Some prefer the term ‘end-of-life doula’ or ‘soul midwife.’ And some, like me, are simply hospice volunteers. The roles vary, as do the titles. Some are paid, but most are not. Nevertheless these people are connected by a common thread—they are all drawn towards serving the dying. And whatever the moniker, a growing number of individuals, many with a background in yoga and meditation, are joining them.

Compassion for the dying is in our bones, as revealed in the fossils of our distant ancestors… In the Republic of Georgia, the remains of an individual with just one tooth were found several years back. This Homo erectus lived around 1.8 million years ago to the incredibly then-ripe age of 40. With a sole tooth remaining in his final years, it would have been almost impossible for this creature to have survived, and so, paleoanthropologists believe he must have been cared for. His last meal was quite likely fed to him by another. Similarly there is evidence from Neanderthal skeletons that indicate clans 40,000 years ago cared for the sick and dying right up until their final breath.

The Lonely Death

But, fast forward to the 21st century, and our role as community caretakers and witnesses to the dying seems to have devolved. In Western countries, thousands of elderly will die alone this year—some within the institutions that care for them, but many in their own homes. In Japan, where one in four of its 127 million inhabitants are over the age of 65, it has become such a common occurrence—where the dead are not found for many weeks—it even has a name: kodokushi, lonely death.

In some part, the increase of the “lonely death” is the result of an aging global population where people are outliving relatives and friends—12.5 million Americans over the age of 65 live alone. And with more than 50 percent of the world now living in urban areas, the anonymous and transient culture that cities foster adds to our collective unawareness of who might be dying next door.

But we must also take personal responsibility. Our society has become increasingly fearful and intolerant of aging and dying. It is as if we would rather be immortal machines than face the rite of passage that comes with being part of nature.

“It’s not for me to say now ‘I appoint you a doula.’ It’s very personal how people want to serve, and I believe people are called to it.” – Deanna Cochran

The introduction of hospice care in the last century has sought to ease the final days of the living, but it serves just a tiny fraction of the population. Now end-of-life volunteer programs are stepping in. The volunteer-led No One Dies Alone (NODA) program was introduced by a nurse in Oregon in 2001. It involves volunteers holding “vigil shifts” for the dying in hospitals, and has been adopted in hundreds of institutions across the U.S., Singapore, and Japan. In the last 10 years, the efforts of NODA have been taken one step further with the introduction of tailored end-of-life volunteer training programs held beyond hospital wards.

The Deeper Lessons

Deanna Cochran, a former hospice nurse, founded Accompanying the Dying, an end-of-life doula training program, in 2010. An end-of-life doula herself since 2005, Deanna says that most of the inquiries she received were not from the dying, but rather from those who wanted to serve them, which led her to set up the program. Hers is one-year long, as are most program commitments for end-of-life volunteer work.

In a hospice training program, like those of the doulas, practical advice is shared: Don’t tell grieving family members that their loved ones are ‘in a better place’ after passing. And don’t discuss the patient with anyone. But do take the patient’s hand and ask them questions.

These programs can also be introspective, discussing: How can we provide comfort for those in fear? How can we listen with love? As well as intense: What are the clues that a patient may soon be passing? (Mentions of past relatives, talk of serene vistas.) And how can you know if you are the one holding the patient back from moving on?

Primarily, Deanna says her aim is to empower individuals to find their own expression of service for the dying. “It’s not for me to say ‘I now appoint you a doula,'” says Deanna. “It’s very personal how people want to serve, and I believe people are called to it.”

You become acutely aware of the fragility of life, but also the strength and purpose of the spirit that the body encases.

This appears to be an apt belief as an increasing number of people are being called to serve. Juliet Sternberg, manager at The Doula Program to Accompany and Comfort in New York—which also trains volunteers—says they receive more than 300 applications a year, and choose only 12 to 15. The slots in next year’s training are already filled. Funding is their biggest drawback, she says, not lack of volunteers.

End-of-Life Companions

While relatively new, the role of the end-of-life doula has been found to be helpful to the one dying. “So often the only contact the dying have is with someone who is looking at them over a clipboard, or asking about their bowel movements,” my own mentor says. With volunteers and doulas, patients feel more comfortable sharing their celebrations on life, and their trepidations around death. It can help them process their situation. Patients are also more likely to talk to volunteers about what music they like or what religion they adhere to—this is all useful knowledge which can help a hospice team provide an art therapist, or a chaplain.

The role of the volunteer and the service they provide vary from individual volunteer to individual patient, as one may expect. Some may provide aromatherapy, meditation, or reiki. Others may help with chores at home. “Yes, volunteers may be serving individuals who are dying, but really they are providing a service for the living,” says Juliet. Some become traveling partners for “bucket list” activities. One volunteer within my hospice discovered her patient had never seen the Statue of Liberty, so she took him there.

Above all, it’s a healing role, says Deanna. “End-of-life companions can help relax a traumatic situation by allowing those involved to feel loved, and heard.”

Letting Go of Expectations

While training can offer some preparation, ultimately the most learning is done while in service. Learning firsthand to: Be an empty vessel. Let the person in front of you fill you up. Remember, this is a gift to you, not just from you. Listen.

No death is quite the same, after all.

Indeed, Deanna says mentoring is as much preparing an end-of-life doula on to what to expect, as it is teaching them to let go of expectations. One story shared with me was of a volunteer who was sitting silent vigil—breathing with the patient’s breath—when she noticed that her next breath she took alone, and the next, and the next… The patient had passed without warning, and without fanfare. We often expect life-shaking moments around death. It can be alarming how passing can almost go unnoticed.

And while we want everyone to have a beautiful death, Deanna says we have to let that go too. “Deaths are different. And they are not always beautiful,” says Deanna. “It doesn’t mean the experience is a failure.” In real life, not all conflicts get resolved, nor do all life reviews get finished. And sometimes, hospice nurses say, people do choose to die alone.

The Aha Moments

These are the aha moments that you have when you serve the dying. You are let into a brief, but intimate moment of an individual’s world as they straddle the here and the there. You become acutely aware of the fragility of life, but also the strength, purpose, and mystery of the spirit that the body encases. There are relationships formed that are complex, beautiful, and heart-breaking.

For Juliet, the volunteers themselves cause her aha moments. “When I see the integrity of those who want to give—who believe in being part of something greater than their own lives—it gives me hope about the future of society. In spite of what we see on the news, it is comforting to know the world has good people.”

There was no fear of death, no judgment of a life, no religiosity, or even spiritual wordiness—just kindness, gentleness, and incredible gratitude and humility…

I felt similarly when I first interviewed with hospice. My trainers spoke of death as a transition. They spoke of the volunteer as “holding space” for a person as they take the next step in their journey. There was no fear of death, no judgment of a life, no religiosity, or even spiritual wordiness—just kindness, gentleness, and incredible gratitude and humility for those who they serve. Like Juliet, I find it deeply comforting to know these people, these kind volunteers, are here on Earth. I don’t feel I was “called,” I just knew this was a community I wanted to join. I wanted to learn what they had learned, and serve as they had served.

A Shift in Mindset

Deanna finds the increasing number of people wanting to serve encouraging. She is hopeful that a shift in our collective mindset towards death is occurring. She has just returned from a retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan master and author of the bestseller The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, who, she says, advises us that death is not to be feared. Death is our friend, for it teaches us to love life more. And so we would do well to form an intimate relationship with the dying, rather than averting our gaze. Some Tibetan monks hold a skull every day. Deanna suggests weekly visits to graveyards, and daily meditations on our own mortality.

“In the Middle Ages, the Christian monks bent over and whispered in each other’s ears—memento mori—remember death,” says Zen Buddhist and end-of-life care pioneer, Joan Halifax Roshi, in an interview with School of Lost Borders. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity for each of us to observe those who are dying in order to not just help them, but to liberate ourselves from the continuum of suffering.”

She references poet Rainer Maria Rilke: Love and death are the greatest gifts given to us, but mostly they are passed on unopened.

“The fact is, love and death are about fully letting go,” says Joan. And by choosing to hold hands with the dying, we open both gifts.

—

A young boy beachsand dried to ankles finds a dead gull washed ashore and holding quiet weight and feeling stiff satin plumage resolves Burial at Sea     So while oars in old locks creak probable gull-tones the mourned     carefully placed on the back seat glides just above calm blue waters     only now     wings tucked     eyes closed     feet bound to a round rock Well off shore the young boy halts the boat to listen to hear     water gurgle beneath wooden strakes         Come, come home         Come, come home Clenched innocent hands relax around splintery oars to move lightly the weighted bird         over the edge        to hold        a long moment upon the surface        eternity          this matter of natural balanced fact            then              Releases              and wide-eye watches            the World          too, too rapidly        sink        almost from view        to where          in blue-green ripple            and sun-streak distortion               Sudden great wings unfold                 reach out                   to fly                     a new                       soft                      spiral                    wonderfully                  silent                away

1. Why should I have been surprised? Hunters walk the forest without a sound. The hunter, strapped to his rifle, the fox on his feet of silk, the serpent on his empire of muscles— all move in a stillness, hungry, careful, intent. Just as the cancer entered the forest of my body, without a sound.

2. The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river— remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn't remember the sun rising, if I couldn't remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't even remember, beloved, your beloved name.

3. I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the eyes and the listening ears. Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste. Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened. Or not. I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years, none of which, I think, I ever wasted. Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going? Let me be urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats, so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, he had a lifetime.

4. Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat, all the fragile blue flowers in bloom in the shrubs in the yard next door had tumbled from the shrubs and lay wrinkled and fading in the grass. But this morning the shrubs were full of the blue flowers again. There wasn't a single one on the grass. How, I wondered, did they roll back up to the branches, that fiercely wanting, as we all do, just a little more of life?

It’s being hailed as a great horror film. But at its heart it is also about the realities of grieving and loss—both monsters that don’t have to consume us.

There may be some wonderful places to watch the rightly acclaimed scary movie The Babadook, but screen five of New York’s IFC cinema the night I went was not to be one of them.

At a packed-to-capacity recent screening, there was a couple making out in front of me, beside me a guy twitching and turning in his seat like a human kebab, and behind me four college-age guys laughing lustily at the film’s wilder moments. Why is watching a film in public so stressful now even in one of New York’s artsier cinemas?

With The Babadook my irritation was maximized because, as The Daily Beast noted, this may well be “the best, and most sincere, horror movie of the year.”

Yes, there are some witty moments in the film—just because things get so out of hand, and extremes breed extremes—but, for the most part, the film is not only scary and disturbing, it is one of the most moving—and true—movies about loss and grief, and how they can corrode and consume, yet also make us, re-shape us, change us.

The sense that grief and loss and their discontents were the bedrock of The Babadook, and the grim intensity that gave the film made me want the moronic young men behind me to vaporize themselves.

In Jennifer Kent’s film, a mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), has barely recovered from the death of her husband many years before. He died in a car crash on the way to the hospital where she gave birth to her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Mother and son live in a silent, airless house painted a really attractive grayish-blue, which—in the films grosser moments—proves usefully diverting for décor fans. 

The film feels funereal. It is lit and designed in the color of mourning, and in its propulsive, crazy way, is its very own funeral march, even before the Babadook itself appears—a mix of monsters from nightmares, including Edward Scissorhands, Freddy Kruger, with dashes of a dark angel, unkillable spider, bird of prey, and The Cat in The Hat.

“At the Babadook’s moment of most vicious, from its dark heart, emerges her dead husband: the literal, handsome embodiment of what she and Samuel have lost.”

But long before he announces his presence, the film’s unease and horror accrues with deathly, heavy knocking on doors, silent rooms, a cellar where the weapons-obsessed Samuel is building something that immediately carries the portent of horrifying injury.

Her husband’s death has shattered Amelia, almost literally. She moves, pale as a ghost, through the shards of daily life she must negotiate: her work in a care home among other living ghosts, the elderly patients with dementia. She is incapable of responding to kindness and enquiry, even very gentle flirting on the part of a co-worker.

Her sister’s exasperated criticism—of her, and of creepy Samuel who is becoming far too scary to play with—are piercing, but her loss and grief have removed her from the world in a fundamental way. She is numb. Wiseman as Samuel is alternately Devil-child and a cute young kid.

Kent herself has said the movie is about parenting, the unsayable extremes of what mothers can feel.

But the death of Amelia’s husband is not just the heart of the film, but—for this viewer—the heart of its subterranean message. This film is about the aftermath of death; how its remnants destroy long after the dead body has been buried or burned; it’s about how a loved one’s death can erode, and then threaten to kill a family.

Samuel is not weapons-obsessed because he is the kind of young boy who gravitates to wars and fighting. His refrain, as he imagines vanquishing monsters, is that he must protect his mother, a common—and in its own way heartbreaking—trope familiar to many children who have lost one parent, and who fear losing the other. They intensely want to keep safe what is left of a decimated home life, and the all-too-visible shell of a parent they have been left with.

The Babadook is present before it is officially summoned up by Amelia when she reads Samuel the story of it, which speaks of a shadowy figure and its desire to consume and kill all in its path. Then the stalking and siege of Amelia and Samuel begin: the knocking, the terrifying monster invasion of a bedroom, the sleepless nights.

Yet it is significant that when the Babadook seems to take over Amelia it passes over her: a shadow of darkness; she may swallow it, or its horror, at one point. In its presence--jolting, sudden, horrific—the monster is the monster of grief. The grief in this house is extreme of course; this is a horror movie, after all. It controls, differently, mother and son. It warps them and yet makes them, and horrifies them both as it does so—just as grief does.

Amelia in the film is quite literally driven mad by grief. It imperils her relationship with Samuel. Her sister is disbelieving that she cannot get over and move on from her husband’s death. Her sister’s insensitivity and pig-ignorance will be familiar to many of those who’ve lost loved ones. Their intentions may be good, but their execution and insight are lousy.

But it is another great and piercing truth of The Babbadook that the reality of grief, the horrible truth, is that—unlike what you typically see on TV and in movies—is that you don’t get over the loss of a loved one. Time yanks and chivvies you forward, edges are softened, life trajectories evolve, but years down the line that baseline, incontrovertible grief is still there.

You can be doing some cleaning and bam, you’re floored. You can be working, and then you remember. Suddenly, you are crying, breathless, raging, and on quieter days just going through the motions. “Moving on” from the death of a loved one is rarely uniform.

Once The Babadook’s metaphorical imperative had gripped me, I wondered—as the boys behind me laughed inanely, and Mr. Kebab Man next to me tied himself in knots—would something happen in the film to torpedo my grief theory? But it doesn’t. As the bloodiness rises, and surprises mount, The Babadook’s grief mirror only reflects more harshly.

Amelia says some truly terrible things to Sam, supposedly inhabited by the Babadook but really consumed in grief. Sam watches her fall apart, tear herself apart and is desperate. And then, at the Babadook’s moment of most vicious, from its dark heart, emerges her dead husband: the physical, literal, handsome embodiment of what she and Samuel have lost.

He is at the heart of the Babadook, not because he was a monster, but because his loss—and the grief it enshrined—has become a monster. The Babadook is the shape of grief: all-enveloping, shape-shifting, black, here intensely, terrifying, then gone. The house decays around Amelia and Samuel, their world narrows and becomes mad, undealable with. Energy is sucked from them, the world around them becomes impossible—the Babadook of grief and loss exerts its force everywhere.

The matter of life and death in the movie becomes whether her husband’s death will kill not just mother and son’s relationship but also mother and son. This is obviously heightened for dramatic purposes—a Greek tragedy meets Nightmare on Elm Street in modern-day Australian suburbia—but it is no less true or heart-breaking.

The fantastic Babadook is released at the same time as the lush, big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, which again makes you cry, not because of the thwarted hopes and imperiled dreams of its characters, but because what links them is loss—various losses of dreams, children, loved ones, safety.

Each major character faces loss head-on, and even when superficially evil, like Meryl Streep’s Witch, you root for them to come to terms with that loss before more damage flows from the tangled paths they are following because of it.

The brilliant sleight of hand at the denoument of The Babadook is that after a final confrontation in which Amelia finally finds her voice to face this home-wrecking demon down, after she has literally vomited its poison from her, that is not the end. We know the monster is not dead, and so we are primed for a darkness-streaked Carrie coda, a Final Destination sting in the tail, where mother and son are left the opposite of safe.

But Kent will not let us off the familiar horror hook so easily. Amelia and Samuel, it emerges, live with the Babadook. They are not threatened by him. But he has his place, and they feed him. The two parties—mother and son, and monster—live in the same house, and are safe and healthy.

Of course, you can read this just as a brilliant, subversive coda to a horror movie. (Hell, you can read The Babadook as a horror movie.) But, for this viewer, it again underscored the thrum of grief and loss at the movie’s heart.

Just as in real life, you can come to live with grief, so Amelia and Sam do at the end of the film. It doesn’t have to destroy you, but it may never leave. Oddly you nurture it, it is part of you, and inescapably part of your past, present, and future.

But it has its place. It has a presence, it remains potentially destructive, but all we can do is attempt to marshal it.

Grief is part of us, living with loss is part of us. We do not “get over it.” Grief, like the Babadook, never leaves. Terrible loss may never be surmounted. But it needn’t warp us, destroy us, kill us. You can accord it a place, and then—hopefully—like Amelia and Sam find a way to get on with your life. Rather than terrifying me, The Babadook moved me to tears—like Into The Woods, it is an unflinching exposition of the realities of grieving and loss, but in very unexpected, and vivid, clothing.

Writer and director Sarah Adina Smith (GOODBYE WORLD, THE SIRENS, ONE CUP OF COFFEE) premieres her debut narrative feature THE MIDNIGHT SWIM this year at the Fantasia Film Festival. I had the privilege to screen her evocative narrative short, THE SIRENS, a few years back and find Sarah's voice compellingly original, honest and psychologically profound. 

THE MIDNIGHT SWIM follows three half-sisters as they travel home to settle the affairs of their mother who went missing in Spirit Lake. The middle sister, JUNE, a documentary filmmaker, captures their bittersweet homecoming. But when the sisters jokingly summon a local ghost, their relationship begins to unravel and they find themselves drawn deeper and deeper into the true mystery of the lake.

Below is the director's statement. Haunted and profound, Sarah's words (and the creations born from them) reveal an emotional depth and sensitivity toward death and bereavement that are simultaneously tragic and beautiful, without being overly sentimental. I will eagerly await the release of this gem. 

Mother calls to us from the deep.

The Seventh Sister takes our hand, she guides us to her.

Every birth is a death, this much we know.

The cycle continues, over and over again.

A relentless wheel of suffering, the terrible machine.

Cranking out a picture show, a flickering in the dark.

(We are grateful for that)

(The stars)

(The festering, unfolding manifold of energy in motion)

Our heart is heavy, it beats fast like a bird.

We breathe in, drowning. We exhale, drowning.

This is how the end begins.

A black hole.

Infinite loneliness.

And the first resounding “I am.”

I breathe in, I breathe out.

I accept this fate cheerfully, my only rebellion.

I find solace in the boiler room -

Like the planet, we seemed

to be traveling through space

but we're always in a holding pattern

between earth and sky, 

waiting to unbecome, plural once more. 

Anyone who has lost a loved one knows that there is an awkward and painful stage of sorting through the deceased's belongings.  Photographer Jennifer Loeber explores this tension in an exquisite photo essay of the strange reality of objects outliving the flesh.  

She writes:  

I found myself deeply overwhelmed by the need to keep even the most mundane of my Mom's belongings when she died suddenly this past February.  Instead of providing comfort and good memories they became a source of deep sadness and anxiety and I knew the only way I would be able to move past that was to focus on a way to interact with them cathartically.  

I had recently become active on Instagram and realized that utilizing the casual aspects of sharing on the app was a way to diminish my own sentimentality toward the objects my Mom left behind.  Each image is paired with an archival image of her that speaks to its subject.  

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom; taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.