NTM Issue Two: the Greening of End of Life

Natural Transitions Magazine Issue 2:

Issue 2: Greening End of Life - Summer 2011

By Natural Transitions Magazine in Health & Fitness

Interview with eco-journalist, Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters. How to reduce the ecological impact of the dying and disposition process. Comparing the eco-friendliness of various methods of after death care. The ultimate recycling- organ/tissue and whole body donation. And More!

Body-Soul Recycle

See how my body eagerly droops earthward as I age?
It rushes to pay back
the sun- the soil - the rain-
all that it’s borrowed these many years of eating and breathing.
My final breath will be an exhale.
Do not deny me, then, the joy of feeding a rose bush with my abandoned flesh & bones
after ages of plucking petals to celebrate beauty & strength .

When my soul finally flies into the Big Bang of Death,
Leaving behind this food body in gratitude to Mother Earth,
Remember
Both,
Yes,
Both holy trajectories.

When Death is Now

When Death is now-

My body bereft of the Living Me is

Still sacred, though scarred-

Still divine, though diminished-

Still me, though mortal-

DO NOT give my body to a stranger, hired.

Don’t zip me up in body bag, like leftovers,

soon to be forgotten in the back of the refrigerator.

No draining of my blood.

No filling my vessels with formaldehyde.

No trocanters piercing and sucking out my once-vital organs.

Some who love me PLEASE

Gently wash me, anointing me with sandalwood & rose.

Dress me in my favorite clothes.

Spritz rose water, like love, on everyone.

Surround me with my familiar objects, still telling my story.

Sweeten my death bed with rose petals, homegrown if possible-

(Thank you Rose, Thank you Rose, Thank you Rose

for assisting with this healing.)

Say goodbye, as much as you each need to.

Laugh & cry over this flesh that laughed and cried with you so many times.

And then, let this Beloved Corpse rest -

nestled in Mother Earth’s womb-

wrapped in the shroud I’ve already embellished-

enfolded by Her, shovel-full by shovel-full-

this clod returning to clod.

Dance and sing on my grave, but leave soft entrance

For the native rose bush planted there--

My monument will be

flowers in the summer

rosehips in the winter.

When Grandma Died

The plants were coming back to life outside, in the Wisconsin springtime, when Grandma Johnson died. I was at college, the end of my first year, but still in the same time zone, just on the other edge of Minnesota from her.
It was Uncle Fred who found her. He was my Mom’s uncle, Grandma’s brother-in-law. He stopped by to say hello. Grandma lived alone then, since Grandpa died a few years earlier.
It was her heart. She’d been taking her nitro pills for awhile for her angina. I’d wondered if those little pills she kept in a little metal tube would explode like dynamite, since I knew nitroglycerine was an explosive. She also gave up her room upstairs, sleeping in the corner of the living room. The stairs were too much for her.
He found her in her living room chair, with the TV still on. So many times we’d sat there together, munching green grapes or some popcorn, while watching “Jeopardy” or “the Walt Disney show”. I wonder still what the last show was that she had seen.
We’d also sat there quietly reading for hours at a time, indulging our bookworm tendencies with glee.
I don’t remember the last time I saw her alive. But I remember the last time I didn’t go see her. At Easter that year I stayed on campus instead of going home for break and I would have seen her then. Looking back, there are many reasons I wish I had gone home instead and seen her.
Her funeral was at the First Lutheran Church of Falun, which I had frequented when I stayed with her those many summers , school breaks and weekends of my life. It looked just like you’d imagine a small town church would look like from the movies. I still can picture the larger than life painting of Jesus, suspended in front, behind the altar. He was standing in a blue sky heaven, clouds billowing around him. His arms were opening to the sides, as though beckoning me closer for a hug.
Grandma’s body lay in the coffin, below Jesus. I didn’t approach, although everyone else seemed to. Finally Dad cornered me. “Aren’t you going to go say goodbye to your Grandma?”
“No Dad. That’s not her, just her body. She’s not here anymore. I want to remember her alive, not dead.”
“Well, just don’t say that to anyone one else around here.”
And I do remember her, almost forty years later. She still lives in me and my reading, my playing solitaire, my caring for plants, and my eating green grapes and popcorn, watching TV.

-Terra Rafael

Journey to Letting Go

It’s an overcast day. The edge of my skin tightens where the cool fall air touches it. I’m walking on a path I’ve walked before, not far from where I live. It is called Gregory Canyon by white people. This is where I first came to know the poison hemlock plant. There is a creek here, barely trickling in this season. The dry crackling of branches and grasses rattles with my footsteps as I follow the path deeper into the woods. A brown bear is eating berries. She looks at me, knows that I am one of her own, and goes back to the berries, letting me pass unmolested.

As I approach the village it is unusually quiet. I come to a woman and ask her where I can find the Great Midwife. She looks at me and says, ”YOU are the Great Midwife now. It is YOU who are to help women give birth, care for the sick and help the dying on their journey to the other side.”

I am shocked. What can she mean? I follow her to a hut and stoop to enter the short doorway. A woman elder is lying on her sleeping mat, covered with a mound of blankets and furs. Her face is luminous, though her physical skin is darkened.
“Great Midwife, I am here to ask you about love.”

She slowly shakes her head, silently saying, “No”.
Then she gathers her strength to reply. “You must speak of death now. It is time. The seed of death is born when we begin to live in our mother’s womb. Mine has grown slowly and is now bearing fruit, like the bushes full of choke cherries.”
She pauses to breathe for awhile, tired by the efforts of her words.
“You must eat of my berries now so that you will be strong with what I have grown to become. You must care for my people. You are the one that can hear what to do.”

She nods at the woman attending to her and the woman reaches over to her, removes the bear claw necklace from around her neck and places it over my head, to hang now on my chest. Its heaviness would bear down on me, if not for the uplifting of my heart by the honor of receiving this sacred gift.

I kneel down beside her. “Grandmother, I am not ready. I cannot take your place.”

“You must. It is time.” She closes her eyes, her irregular breathing now the only sound.

When I reach into my bag for my gift to her, a thorn from the sprig of rose pricks my finger. I place the sprig on her chest, the one last blood red bloom from my garden. “May the spirit of the rose assist with this blessing.”

I quietly slip out of the hut to pray for her Spirit to have a swift and peaceful journey to the Eternal Summer; to ponder letting go and what this all means to me. As I walk away, I hear the keening begin.

Terra Rafael

(Although I intended to find out about love on this journey, the stars had a different purpose for me. This was the astrology of 15 September 2009 when it was written-
"Today is the final pass of the Saturn/Uranus opposition. It began last Sept. 08, then again in Feb. 09, and today it is completed.
At 6:50 AM (MDT), and all day, we are working with letting go of the old and receiving the new. Look at old patterns of thinking and behaving. Be really willing to let those ways dissolve and flow out of you, keeping your base of what works.
Then be open to the new and innovative ways of being that are ready to serve you and bring you into a more authentic way of being. "
From astrologer and writer Jyoti Wind, http://www.starshine-galaxy.com/)

Poem - Random Wings

The colony of Death
sleeps, well hidden and upside down,
in the cavern during the daylight of daily life.
The hordes of flying forms usually spiral up and swarm out at twilight.
Yet, random wings might emerge
anytime
to tune in to the fluttering of our lives,
eating the juicy moth of our existence.
The balance of nature,
recycling our bodies into
the sweet smell of guano,
strong flapping of amazingly articulated wings,
body merging back into the world
within which
we too once ate and shat.
does the spirit thus set free
soar more easily
when we see death coming straight at us?
or shall we hope for annihilation from behind our backs, in the bliss of ignorance?

by Terra Rafael

Aggie's Smile

In the Reserve, the memory unit where I work part-time, people with advanced stages of dementia are placed. It’s the end of the road for them. People die, about two per month on average. It’s usually a slow process, due to Alzheimers. The brain takes its time in clogging up with the particular detritus of this disease. The malfunctioning of different parts of the brain often follows a pattern of unwinding backwards, through the stages of development. First the cognitive thinking & memories of the forebrain goes. Then it moves slowly deeper and deeper. Impulses lose control. Words disconnect from meaning and finally are often lost altogether. At the end they often do not wish to eat or drink. Finally the swallowing reflex or breathing reflex goes, bringing the end. Others die of concurrent diseases or the influenza.

One of my favorite women, Aggie, was quite feisty, though almost deaf, when she first came to us a couple of months ago. She was stocky, with beautiful, soft, white hair down to her shoulders. It reminds me of angel hair. She loved playing kick ball—yelling –“KICK IT!” when another demented elder lagged in her duty to the game. She puzzled over puzzles, relished eating snacks, and dabbled with watercolors. When I rouse her from her inner world and she sees my face, she breaks into a smile that encompasses her whole face.

But about a week ago she began to decline. Now she declines activities and declines food. Or, if she eats food, she pockets it in her cheeks and later spits it into tissues, if she has them at hand. Otherwise it’s headed for the floor. I see her skin hanging looser on her bones. Each day, I wonder if I will get to see her smile again, whether lost because she dies or because her brain loses even that small blessing of social interaction by the time I am there to see her again.

Past Death Experience

Sometimes I wonder if I will die soon and that’s why I feel so compelled to write about my life. When my daughter, Alana, was about four years old, she would often ask me if she could have certain of my possessions when I died. This happened often enough that I became suspicious that she had a psychic knowledge that I was soon to die. But 15 years later I’m still here.

When Alana was a baby I wondered if she would die soon. She seemed too perfect, too angelic, to live in this world. These fears came up for me even more strongly after I attended a stillbirth.

Part of my healing from that experience was to go to someone who did past life regressions. She led me into a past life where Alana had been my daughter. It was centuries ago in England, in a small village along the coast. We had settled recently in my husband’s ancestral place and then he had to go away for several long months in his job as a trader. The minister of the town church tried to seduce me. When I rebuffed him, he countered by accusing me of being a witch. Because I loved plants and intimately knew their ways, and also was a newcomer, some of the villagers believed him. Shortly thereafter he died unexpectedly and some of the villagers accused me of poisoning him. It was talked up until, one night they stormed our house. Alana and I fled to the upstairs loft where we were trapped as they set fire to our home with torches. Our spirits flew away together into the night, with the smoke rising from our burning house.

This is why both of use anticipated each others death at times of insecurity – me, after a stillbirth and her, beginning preschool.

Reunion With Mother Nature

I’ve reached an age where my own death looms as a real possibility. The Hospice volunteer training that I did had something to do with it. We talked about how helpful and useful it is to the family if you make your end-of-life plans ahead of time. And write them down.

For me, death is when that part of me which is nature returns to the Mother and that part which is spirit returns to the Father. Each deserves consideration. I spend time daily meditating, praying, and serving to prepare for my union with the Father. Yet how would the Mother most like to receive me? How do I prepare for physical reunion with Mother Nature? How might my body be of service to the ecosystem?

Definitely not embalmed and in a sealed metal box. This was designed to keep the body from Her – to avoid that final dissolution of the “me” with which we each have so long identified.—to deter decay, which is, in fact, the process of becoming one again with the Mother Earth.

For some time I’ve thought cremation might be my way, burning it all up. I envisioned my ashes later being sent up into the night sky with fireworks and exploding into one final exciting orgasm of light. Sent off with the “oohs” and “ahhs”. But now that seems a great waste of my nutrients—just burning them. Spectacular, yes. But why not pass on what I have in the form of physical nourishment to other living beings instead of wasting it?

Once I read a novel which told of necrophagia as a spiritual practice. They would respectfully eat the dead, to take their beloved’s physical self into their continuing bodies, to literally carry them with them in their very own cells. This might not go over with my dear ones. And I’m not sure how I could arrange it. Could I find a butcher willing to be prepaid to quickly skin and chop my flesh into eatable cuts? I think I’d like to be stewed with lots of vegetables and spices.

The Native American tradition of placing the body on an open, wooden platform, out in nature, leaving the dead to the elements and scavenging birds appeals to my airy nature. But this probably wouldn’t fit in with the health codes. And I’m sure that there would be objections from some of the neighbors, if not my husband, with the public display of my bones being pecked clean.

Maybe the waters could claim me, with a burial at sea. I love the ocean and the creatures swimming in that world. Snorkeling has been a great pleasure for me. So maybe I could be dropped off the side of a boat, wrapped in a simple silk cloth and go under to feed the fishies. But I’m living in landlocked Colorado.

So going back to Mother Earth may be about feeding bacteria in the earth to enrich the land Herself, putting my bare body into the ground and covering it with dirt. Would this be too brutal for my beloveds? I’d like a tree planted on my grave—maybe a peach tree. That would bring me into full juiciness and sweetness in their memories and their mouths.

Death is so full of questions.