We Need to Talk About Death

Join host and Yoga to Cope founder and president Kala MacDonald live weekly on Tuesday evenings @7PM EST for a virtually based group dedicated to processing grief and grief psychoeducation. Does the body really keep the score? How does grief work in the brain? What the hell can we do to process and actually begin to heal after a loss? Join to dive in to all this and more, with care. Email hello@yogatocope.org to RSVP.

Join host Mel Fielding (they/she) live weekly on Thursday evenings @7:30PM EST for this virtually-based club dedicated to chats and learning about everything from existential dread to death anxiety, from advanced directives to living funeral meditations. You don’t want to miss this one! Screening is required to join.

man with hat on standing at grave with flowers looking down in cemetery

This article is written by Mel Fielding (they/she), Yoga to Cope Board Member. Mel is a queer, non-binary, poly, MDD-girlie (non-gendered, cries a lot) in the process of obtaining their Master's in Mental Health Counseling & Wellness. They are super passionate about working with queer, poly, and gender non-conforming individuals to process and heal from trauma (both personal and systemic) and develop new ways of relating in the world.

Grief lives in us, always. Sometimes we call it by another name, like anger, fear, or existential dread. But as a rose,by any other name, still smells as sweet, calling grief by a pseudonym won’t change how you feel. It will change how you approach it, tend to it, and integrate it, though. and what about when it’s grief+ [insert additional complicated emotion here]?

So many of our fears, questions, and curiosities about death are rooted in this place of grief, yet we only acknowledge the scary parts. We tack a label to it, call it death anxiety or existential dread or morbid fascination, and call it a day. But what if we started to acknowledge the anticipatory, and often ambiguous, grief in the soil that our feelings around death sprout from?

We need to feel our grief…

for those we have lost, for those we have yet to lose, for ourselves, for the collective good, for the Earth and its creatures, for the futures we expected, for the pasts we have endured. There’s grief in everything, both a blessing and a curse. And to feel our grief, we need to talk about death. But there’s so much uncertainty we need to start by learning how to tolerate that first:

  • What do we know that we know? 

  • What do we know that we don’t know?

  • What do we not know that we know?

  • What do we not know that we don’t know?

  • What if we never know what happens when we die?

Did your heart rate rise a little? Good. Sit in it and see how it feels in your body. Personally, I can feel it in the tightness of my thighs, the sudden sharp pain over my left eyebrow. I can feel my breath quicken as I begin to think of my powerlessness when it comes to death, particularly when I am in a group of people I cherish, I crumble internally.

This is my grief. I am grieving my loss of control, my naive hope I could outwit, outplay, outlast death (hello, Survivor fans). I grieve the fact that one day I will not exist, that I will never truly know what happens to me or to anyone I've ever loved.

But see, this is why grief needs adaptation and integration. And, if we talk about death, we invite it to our table. We let it sit among us instead of lording over us and dictating our actions before we have time to think.

No, it’s not easy. We need to build up this muscle. Distress tolerance is a fancy way of saying, “Sit through the shit. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but the longer I do it, the wider my window of tolerance gets.”

And when you begin to tolerate uncertainty, fear, anger, and sadness better, well, death and grief show us how to live in the here and now, in our values (and not our trauma). It helps us open ourselves to finding (or rediscovering) meaning: what and who matters to you. 

I'm a death doula….

and still my lungs restrict when I think of the grief that awaits me when death comes, beyond just tangible loss of life; all the little deaths that come along the way to the Big D.

The term for orgasm in French is “la petite mort,” which translates to “a little death.” The death card in tarot represents transformation: letting go in endings coupled with starting anew, a fresh journey. The phoenix erupts into flames, only to be reborn out of its ashes. Now isn’t that something?

When we’re able to stay here, now, we can get curious. We can see different thoughts emerging, generating new frames of reference. The old frames (e.g., death anxiety and existential dread) are still there, and may sometimes emerge as a hostile takeover. But we can gently course correct if we build tolerance and patience. And if we—you guessed it—talk about it.

Death doesn’t have to be terrible (though it may be). Death doesn’t have to be scary (though it may be). Death doesn’t have to be final (though it may be). 

Death can be spoken of and spoken to. We can talk about the things people often don't talk about: fears, logistics, what it means to have a good death, what you want your death to be like, how to plan, specific anxieties and triggers, how to cope, existential dread and concerns, and so much more. We can learn from one another, ask the unasked, and say all the things unsaid for anyone curious about death.

Our grief will be invited to the table. We just have to start talking. 



Jordan Smith