There are many things you can seemingly avoid in life, and death is not one. You will experience your own death or a loved one's death, the death of one you've just met, or the death of a mosquito you swat on your arm. If you are living life alive (not the most common mode of being in many places these days), you will experience the death of the physical body and the death of marriages, jobs, ways of living, homes, concepts, or strategies of surviving while still in your physical body.

While I offer support for leaving the physical body, I also offer you accompaniment in deaths of all kinds.

I know some about death from my time on Earth: living dead, zombie-like, barely making choices and unknowingly acting with preprogrammed behaviors. I tried to find a girlfriend, settle down, make compromises. I went to school for over two decades. I thought I should have enough money and more, always. I've worked jobs that are "good enough, it could be worse, at least I'm getting money." Also, I experience what happens when I make choices that bring me alive. I look back at that person that was "me" a year ago and see the things I can do with ease that were impossible or even invisible as possibilities to that person. Aliveness does not mean only joy and happiness. Aliveness means fear, sadness, and anger. The quest for aliveness, what I think some people call "happiness," is rife with explosions, eruptions, and hazards of all kinds.

I know some about death from being a witness and a participant in dying. Recently, my Grandmother died, anaesthetized, sedated in a hospital: the last place she wanted to be. Many around her said, "At least she died peacefully and did not suffer." "We're doing what she would want." In times like these, much of my family agrees with each other and tries to console, hiding inner feelings and truths. Really, this is not that different from other times. Alive and present, I said in response to some, "I do not know that she didn't suffer," and, "No, that was not what she wanted, based upon the words she said. She never wanted to be in a hospital." I say this not to blame any individual. The act of not listening to people when they tell you what they want is a rampant "cultural" problem. What I experienced of dying, among many other things, was, with breathing failing, and with the physical strength that Grandma maintained at 92 years of age, a physical fight. She grabbed my arms and pleaded with me to pull her up, and tried to pull herself up. "How could you do this to me, an old woman?!" "I want to get up, get my cane!" For two days, she wanted to stand up as she entered different realities - being in her house, being in another house, getting ready for a wedding, asking me to "clear the table" that I was seeing as the hospital wall, being at a garage sale, pulling things I could not see out of the sky. Those around me said she was not allowed to stand up, that her physical body could not handle it. What no one said was that the end of her physical, earthly life was coming. If we were in agreement about this, then perhaps we would have listened to her, and helped her stand. 

Malidoma Somé's Grandfather walked back to his Village from the hospital after he "died," and then died again. Martín Prechtel's mentor died for 3 hours and came back to life, and lived for years more. Our view of what is possible is so often blocked and uncreative, and hospitals manage death in such a way that it is controlled, predictable, and tamed. This is not wrong or bad, and yet I ask whether this manner of dying is for the living, the dying, the dead, the culture, or for any of them really?

For weeks, at least, Grandma, Katalin, knew she was dying. She was telling those around her, "In my village, they say, "when one comes, one has to go."" She grabbed a relative's hand and held it close to her leg, the way she did when she wanted to make sure you heard her. My sister's daughter was born just weeks before Grandma died. Katalin knew what was happening. Instead of preparing for death, those around her largely went on about, "how do we extend this life?" This is the danger that modern culture perpetually poses to life: you don't have to die, and you don't have to suffer. This, in both, "life" when we are healthy and vital, and, in death, when we are heading for it. This comfort-seeking says a lot about modern culture and the crises that we find ourselves in with wars, climate disruption, "mental health" issues, loss of soil, and living dead robots submitting themselves to abuse and indignity from beneath bosses, priests, doctors, school teachers, and hierarchies of all kinds.

All of this does not have to be so.

I have lived in modern culture consciously and unconsciously for 35 years. It is an insane place, and to maintain our sanity, we often numb ourselves. Sometimes I shove food down my throat to get the endorphins kicking, or look at my phone, or block myself from connection with other humans to push aside something in me that is sitting below the surface and ready to move or come out. Sometimes I don't numb myself, and I experience true aliveness. Is this experience of aliveness how life could be all the time? How can death feed life? We can dance, sing, scream, laugh, make music, swim, be still, yell, weep, paint, write, relate with each other and the more-than-human world.

When Grandma died, we had family meetings about how the "services" would go. I feel glad that we did so. Many families do not have such a moment of togetherness at times like these: asking questions about who would read the readings at church, sing the songs, carry the casket, what type of flowers to get. Yet, there was no culture around death, as there was no culture about life, in my family. The stoic, measured, controlled, show that are often the "services" around a Catholic funeral in the corner of the world I was born into, are painful to be party to, and then, in an act of insanity, people pay people to provide such services: the hospital, the funeral home, the church, the cemetery. In the cemetery, the dead are buried among strangers far from home, unfathomably preserved with chemicals and then inside of chambers inside the ground to prolong the body's decay. It's as if modern culture is still fighting life after death, keeping the microbes and worms at bay. The grass is cut by a landscaper.

Different things are possible. You are infinitely creative and capable. So am I.

I feel sad and angry about the state of living and dying in modern culture. I feel glad and afraid to open a different space with you for you and your people, whatever that looks like. I did this with a small group of reluctantly willing family members: something like an ancestral grief ritual. I leapt into the unknown with joy and fear, standing on the shoulders of Ancestors, teachers, trainers, and my deepest being. We all survived. I was changed by it: in part it has allowed me to write these words. Perhaps it changed others, too, those living and those in the ancestral realm.

Death opens a space for the living and the dead, and we live in a society where logistics and back-to-normal are the default if we do not hold the space open.

I am holding the space open in ways that I can for Ancestors, for the living, for Earth that is in turmoil because of what humans do and do not do. To you, I offer: not to tell you what to do or how to do it. Instead, I hold open a space for something different to emerge and provide possibilities for you and yours.

You and I will determine the format and exchange for such an offering through conversation and making proposals and offers to each other.

Contact Matthew at site@matthewcolombo.com.

A possibility of what a part of a funeral can be like:

https://youtu.be/zEbxbkyDckc

Letters to my family about Ritual for Grandma's death and Ancestors:

Part 1. Opening a space following a Catholic funeral

Part 2. Possible Ritual details