Words Carve Out Riverbeds Where Our Thoughts Can Flow
and sometimes we become doulas for new channels of thought.
This week I’m traveling in Scotland, where I’ve been invited to speak at a conference. I’m here, in St. Andrews and Edinburgh, with friends and colleagues who I don’t often get to see. In the midst of jet lag, new sights, and pub conversations that last long past my bedtime, my thoughts will be abbreviated this week!
I wanted to share with you what I wrote for an event that I was invited to participate in last week, at my favorite bookstore in Louisville, where I live. Carmichael’s Bookstore organized an event that featured both my book and a collection of stories about those lost to pandemic, edited by the poet Martha Greenwald.
After we spoke, one of the audience members asked Martha and I how we feel, now that we’ve become doulas of a sort for conversations about grief, and death, in the wake of pandemic. This was the first time that I’d really thought of myself as participating in that kind of work, death doula work, which is a labor of care that I appreciate but which often feels distant from the thinking and writing I do. And yet I do think that this was, in essence, the kind of work we were doing for the event. We were helping to foster conversations about grief and mourning that there isn’t always space for. It’s also what I often find myself doing in the classroom, at least since 2020. Especially when I teach about death and the afterlife. If you’d told me, before the pandemic, that I would openly cry in front of my students, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve always cultivated a tough exterior in my academic life. But I have cried in the classroom, over the past several years. Sometimes our conversations just prompted, even demanded it.
I answered the question by reflecting that I’ve learned, in new ways, since the pandemic began how deeply we rely on words to carve out riverbeds where our thoughts can flow. If I’ve been a “doula” for anything, it’s only been for new ways of thinking about old and familiar things. It’s only been to offer new word patterns, so that thoughts can flow through challenging new shapes of life in different ways.
I wrote Sister Death during the pandemic, for the most part. I began the book officially in 2019. But the bulk of the book was written during the pandemic. The writing gave me a protected space where I could find new words and language to use, where I could try to choose new words that might also help to create new rivers of thought through (or about) life and death. And what I have been trying to do, since then, is to share these words so that they can forge new channels and tributaries for others.
Martha was a little concerned that the “death positive” approach I take in the book would be a little too much for the contributors to her book to handle; these are all people who have recently lost someone, and their sense of death is very present and fresh. I tried to be mindful of this, as I wrote my remarks. But after the event one of the other writers approached me, to let me know that the image of life and death as sisters was a totally new idea for her, and it had been moving to think about. She wanted to let me know that she was going to be thinking about it much more. Here’s what I shared with her, and everyone else at the event:
Thank you for inviting both Martha and I here, to speak about our new books. It’s not immediately apparent, perhaps, what it is that brings them both together. Martha’s is an edited collection of stories about those lost to pandemic. My book, Sister Death, is a philosophical interrogation of how we think about death in America today. But just below the surface, there is a lot of resonance. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven many of us to think about mortality in new ways. And to think about it far more than most of us have ever wanted to. A lot has changed, when it comes to how many of us reflect on life and death. But, arguably, a lot still needs to change. One thing, at least from my perspective, is that our culture needs to get better at opening up collective spaces for mourning. And I think that’s part of what we’re doing here, today.
It’s never easy, or pleasant, to think and talk about our mortality. I can’t make big universal claims, but I can’t imagine that it’s ever been easy, for any of the people who have ever lived. So I want to recognize, before I say anything, that what I am about to talk about—death and our mortality—is going to feel heavy at first. But I also want to reassure you that it feels heavy because I want to be honest. And I want to be honest so that I can also say something that I believe will be genuinely (not falsely) uplifting. Because I think that we can lift each other up when we can see and recognize where we are, and what’s happening around us.
As I was saying, I don’t think it’s ever been easy to talk about something like death. But I think that there are some things about life on Earth right now that make it more difficult than ever, perhaps. We are dealing with a lot of death, on our planet. We are living in the memory of global wars, enabled by new and absolutely unprecedented forms of technology. Since those wars, with their bombs, have become history, we have watched smaller wars explode and we worry and fret about their escalation. We know that our technologies have the power to make things worse.
And it’s become increasingly difficult to turn away from the human world, toward the natural world, for comfort. Because, when we do, we are reminded of the many ways in which the more than human world has been made so vulnerable by the economic and technological changes that have altered the face of our planet.
And now, in the midst of all of this, a pandemic.
The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, who is one of the many scholars I am in conversation with in my new book Sister Death, described our present situation as one of “double death.” Death itself has never been easy, but it’s always been a part of life. The two have had an ecological relationship. Life depends on forms of decay, for instance, in order to sustain the living. But today, on our planet, their relationship is out of balance.
Rose argued that the way humans have always been able to reintegrate life and death—to bring them back into balance—is through our rituals. This, she argued, was the purpose of burial and mourning rituals. Through these rituals we recognize death, and the dead. We offer them our gratitude and our respect. We help them to move from the world of the living into the world of the ancestors. And we reintegrate them into our lives again, in new ways. We recognize the fact of death, but we also say to our loved ones “you are still with us.” This theory has always made a lot of sense to me . As a professor of religion and theology, I am acutely aware of the powerful influence that rituals have in our lives.
I know how overwhelming our planetary situation can feel, today. But this is why I believe that our rituals are more important than ever. And what we are doing here, today, is a kind of ritual. We are here to acknowledge that death is a fact of life. It has happened, it will happen. We can’t stop it. But we can still lift each other up, as we acknowledge that fact. We can work together, to weave life and death back together again. We can help one another to reintegrate the dead back into our lives, in new ways.
I’ve been teaching an undergraduate course on death and the afterlife for almost ten years now, seven of these years I’ve been at Hanover College, across the river in Indiana. You might find it surprising (I did, at first) that the class has always been very popular. Despite the fact that it’s not easy to talk about our mortality, many people are still interested in trying. Students come seeking answers, and they leave with questions. This is how it’s always been. Part of the work we do in the course is getting comfortable with questions. But the course has been a little different, since the pandemic began. I think that all of us—both me and my students—get something more out of it, now. Since the pandemic began we’ve all had to work harder to respond to our present situation with more life, and to help bring the dead back into our lives. It helps to have a shared space where we can try to do this work.
I wrote my book Sister Death during the first couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Funny as it might sound, writing a book about death during the pandemic actually gave me a kind of safe space—a kind of cathartic space—for thinking. Why? I suppose, on at least one level, it's because it gave me a space where I didn't have to feel like I was trying to pretend that everything was normal, that I was creating a new sense of normal in the midst of a pandemic. I was able to acknowledge what we were living through, rather than pretend that everything was normal. But, in that sheltered space where I was writing and thinking, I also started to dream a little bit (which often happens in those kinds of sheltered spaces). I began to dream that maybe, just maybe, we didn't have to live in the world that Deborah Bird Rose has described: this world of double death. And maybe, just maybe, the work that we do to try and reconnect life and death can be part of the way that we work to resist this world of double death that I think the pandemic has really revealed to us.
This is where the figure of Sister Death, the namesake of my book, comes from. It's actually a figure from a hymn by Saint Francis of Assisi, where he emphasizes that death is part of the sacred nature of creation. There's an old image of life and death as enemies, at war in a great battle. But I think Saint Francis was showing us a glimpse of something else. I wanted to explore this other vision, in my book. I wanted to think about the relationship between life and death differently. What if they were more like sisters: they might fight, and struggle for dominance, but ultimately they depend on one another to be who and what they are. Would this make it more possible, to weave life and death back together again? Would this make it easier for us, the living, to speak openly about our struggles with the powers of both life and death? Would this make it easier to develop rituals where we, the living, can listen to the dead and can assure one another that they are—in altered form—still with us? I don't know. But that was the wager of my book.
In that spirit, and with all of this in mind, I just want to say “thank you” for all of the people who are here today, to help shape and craft this ritual space with us. By remembering, celebrating, respecting, and speaking about the dead who we have lost (at least in one sense) I believe that we are helping to create exactly the sort of spaces that are so lacking in our world today, but which we are so in need of. I look forward to hearing your stories, and thank you for sharing them with us.