We have the power to reimagine how we die and how we mourn

— We live queer lives—and we can die queer deaths too

By Zena Sharman

At the funeral for Jamie Lee Hamilton, a trans Two-Spirit and Métis Cree activist and sex worker advocate, her community sang and danced to “Respect” and “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves” during the church service and ate cupcakes decorated with rainbows and red umbrellas. When disabled queer Korean activist and organizer Stacey Park Milbern died, her community organized and livestreamed a 150-car caravan in Oakland and shared tributes under the hashtag #StaceyTaughtUs. Shatzi Weisberger, a Jewish dyke, death educator and activist known to many as the People’s Bubbie, died in 2022 at age 92. She got a head start on her funeral four years earlier by hosting her own FUN-eral, a death-themed party where her friends decorated a biodegradable coffin with glitter and got temporary tattoos while being serenaded by the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus.

What would you picture if I invited you to imagine your own gloriously queer funeral? Maybe it wouldn’t be a funeral at all, but a celebration of life, or a drag show, a brunch, a protest or a rave. Maybe it would be all of these things and more. Would there be sequins and glitter? Dapper suits and splendid hats? Leather and denim? Cozy onesies? No clothes at all? My ideal scenario is a cross between a potluck, a magic ritual and a dance party; I like to imagine my beloved people dressed in whatever they feel most comfortable in. I hope they sing, dance, eat, laugh and cry together, resplendent in their many expressions of queerness as they gather in remembrance and celebration.

Instead of a single event, you might want several gatherings reflecting different facets of your life: a religious service by day, followed by a raucous night at a dungeon, or an intimate ceremony for only your polycule, before a larger memorial open to all of the people who knew and loved you. For some, it might feel good for your chosen and families of origin to mourn together; for others, it will be important to create protected spaces that intentionally keep out your estranged parents or your transphobic aunt. You might choose rituals, traditions or ceremonies that are part of your cultural, spiritual or ancestral practices, or want something completely secular. Maybe you’ll want a virtual memorial so your friends and loved ones from all over can remember you together, or invite people to mourn you privately in whatever ways feel right to them. What we imagine can be as unique as we are.

Our wildest imaginings likely differ from stereotypical depictions of funerals as formal, sombre events where black-clad mourners stand sadly around a heavy wooden coffin. Queerness offers us ways of perceiving and being in the world around us while making and remaking it through a distinctly queer lens. While the conditions of LGBTQ2S+ people’s lives often push us into unwanted proximity with death, we have the power to reimagine how we die and how we mourn. This includes active resistance to the violence and oppression that cuts short too many LGBTQ2S+ people’s lives and an invitation to subvert the beliefs and practices getting in the way of dying queerly, on our own terms. When we queer death, dying and mourning, they become sites of creativity, self-determination, collective care and resisting oppression, creating opportunities to challenge dominant ideas, practices and narratives that limit our ability to express who we are at every stage of our lives, including when we die.

As a death doula and self-identified death nerd, I talk about death a lot, and I’ve noticed that people tend to have one of two instinctive reactions when I bring it up: they recoil, regarding me strangely—or they lean in, wanting to know more. These leaning-in moments feel intimate to me. They often come with stories about a beloved person who died, questions about grief and death and the kinship of knowing it’s safe to talk about something that can feel unsayable. I’ve had these tender exchanges with friends, co-workers and strangers, which shows me how hungry many of us are for spaces where we can talk openly about death. There’s something about these interactions that feels inherently queer to me: holding space for each other while we share a raw or vulnerable truth, or reveal parts of ourselves that we’ve learned to keep hidden away.

Many of us have internalized a tendency to avoid talking about death, an instinct that can be accompanied by feelings of fear, anxiety or denial. When we do think about it, we may keep our thoughts to ourselves because we don’t feel ready to start a conversation about death with the people around us, or because we’ve consistently received messages that talking candidly about death or grief is risky or off-limits. For some of us—especially racialized, Mad and disabled people—talking openly about death or freely expressing grief can lead to pathologization or criminalization.

It can feel overwhelming to confront our mortality or that of the people we love, and many of us haven’t been taught the basics of what the dying process looks like, or what to do when someone dies. Before my oldest child was born, we went to a prenatal class to learn what happens during and after a birth. I wish I’d had a similar opportunity to learn about death a decade ago when I was caring for my mom at the end of her life. “We’re hungry to understand our own death and our own mortality and the death that surrounds us all the time, in a more real way,” Santa Fe, New Mexico-based death educator and host of the Death Curious podcast, Alexandra “Aries” Jo, tells me. They attribute this hunger to the stripping away of death from our everyday, mundane lives.

It hasn’t always been this way. It used to be more common in North America to experience death as a collective, community event. Deaths were more likely to happen at home, where family and community members—often women—cared for their own dead. Some communities have kept these traditions alive as part of their faith or cultural practices, and a growing number of people are accessing home hospice care. But for many of us, the past century has brought with it the increasing medicalization and professionalization of death and death care, transforming it into something that happens behind closed doors in settings such as hospitals or funeral homes. As a result, historian Katherine Arnup explains in a Vanier Institute report on death and dying in Canada, the experience of death has become “very foreign and frightening” for many people.

Yet it feels like an oversimplification to speak about death avoidance or the place of death in our everyday lives without acknowledging that many people and communities live and die in contexts saturated with death and grief, experiences that are tied to systemic oppression. “Loss is a part of life. Bereavement is natural. Grief is natural,” Oakland, California-based author and media justice activist Malkia Devich-Cyril tells me, “but mechanized loss, racialized loss, loss that comes as a result of inequality—that’s not natural. It is unnatural and it is the direct result of groups of people [in power] refusing to lose.” Devich-Cyril, author of a forthcoming book on Black grief and radical loss, points to how these forms of loss produce “an undue burden on those of us who have less power in the world. Grief becomes not only a consequence of disadvantage, but a cause of disadvantage and of disproportionate experiences of grief.”

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, a Providence, Rhode Island-based disability justice educator and organizer, challenges the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many people to confront death for the first time. When faced with this sentiment, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu tells me, “So many disabled folks I’m in community with are like, ‘Okay yeah, maybe for you, but not for us.’” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu’s own relationship with death and dying is shaped by being a younger disabled person who has experienced shifts in their body’s capacity and access needs while grappling with medical ableism. It’s also been influenced by their experiences of navigating chronic suicidality. When reckoning with their own mortality, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu draws on the “lessons in impermanence” that come with the “dynamics of living and dying on crip time.”


While I’ve read lots of books and taken several courses to learn more about death, dying and grief, the first people to teach me important lessons about collective care for dying people and how to come together in mourning were leatherdykes a generation older than me who’d lived through the AIDS crisis. It was they who showed me how to organize end-of-life care outside of inadequate and inaccessible state-run systems. They showed me it was possible to stop traffic to sing our beloved dead through the street into their memorial celebration. In these ways, they were part of a lineage of LGBTQ2S+ people who cared for their own dying and dead community members as part of a wider response to the state abandonment and systemic discrimination characteristic of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Our lineages include experiences of immense loss and collective grief and trauma; they also include organized resistance, collective care and a refusal to abandon each other during and after death.

Today, in my own circles as a queer person, more than one friend has expressed surprise to me at having lived into their thirties or forties, ages they were convinced they’d never live to see. With waves of anti-trans legislation and fascist violence currently sweeping North America, many trans people are fearful of increased violence and risk of harm, prompting some to hold protest signs with the message: “The trans agenda is an average life expectancy.” While supportive of the larger death positive movement, Los Angeles, California-based end-of-life doula, writer and educator Vanessa Carlisle, who is queer and non-binary, tells me they prefer to think of themself as “death accepting” because “I don’t need to be death positive about how much death is happening in my community.” Carlisle, who has deep roots in LGBTQ2S+ and sex worker communities, emphasizes their commitment to fighting for community survival as part of their work in end-of-life care. They want the communities they’re part of “to survive and be happy and well in a world that seems hell bent on destroying us.”

Sarah Chavez, the Los Angeles, California-based executive director of the death education and advocacy non-profit The Order of the Good Death and a founding member of The Collective for Radical Death Studies, affirms that this spirit of resistance and solidarity is integral to death positivity. Chavez, who co-founded the modern death positive movement in 2011, tells me that death positivity is fundamentally “about engaging and talking about death in an honest and open way, without shame.” She emphasizes that we cannot do this “without engaging with the systems and conditions that lead to unacceptable or bad deaths that result from violence, a lack of care, and all forms of systemic oppression.” 

“Queering death is also an opportunity to challenge narrow and limiting understandings of what constitutes a good death.”

How we die is intimately interwoven with how we live, Chavez points out, and “the exact same experiences and barriers that individuals encounter in life typically follow them right into death,” shaping our end-of-life experiences and what happens to our bodies after we die. She cites the example of the added stressors a dying person who is undocumented and their loved ones might face at end of life, like fear of deportation, family separation, language barriers, lack of access to cultural practices and the added costs associated with repatriation of someone’s body to their home or ancestral country. These barriers are systemic: a third of U.S. hospice programs limit access or outright refuse to care for undocumented people at end of life. This is why, for me, queering death demands the transformation of our health and end-of-life care systems and is wholly aligned with an abolitionist politic that includes border abolition.

Queering death is also an opportunity to challenge narrow and limiting understandings of what constitutes a good death. As researchers Cindy L. Cain and Sara McLesky write in an academic article on expanding definitions of the “good death,” qualities often associated with a “good” death—like not being a burden to others or mending familial relationships—“de-individualize the experience of death and disregard diversity within definitions of what is good.” These mainstream understandings, which shape the design of everything from our end-of-life care systems to the laws and policies governing death and dying to the training of hospice and palliative care providers, prioritize “a vision of dying that may not be achievable” or desirable to all patients and function as “a form of social control that seeks to discipline patients and their family members.”

An example of this is the ableism often inherent in stereotypical ideas of a good death. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu tells me they’ve often heard people describe a good death as “someone who’s died silently in their sleep at night, who’s a burden on no one and nothing.” They connect this to the “tremendous amount of fear” many of us internalize about “losing capacity, becoming more interdependent or more reliant on other people, or entering into new kinds of relationship dynamics where power might be shifting.” This is a very real fear for the disabled Canadians being systemically denied the supports they need to live while the government expands their access to medical aid in dying. At the same time, the ability to maintain our independence shouldn’t be the foundation on which we build our ideas of a good death. As in all facets of our lives, death is an opportunity to embrace interdependence as a foundational principle of disability justice. That’s why Kaufman-Mthimkhulu’s idea of a good death is “somebody who is able to move through the process of dying in a way that adheres to their values and beliefs and is met with compassionate, competent, self-determined care.”

In a blog post on what the death positive movement isn’t, Caitlin Doughty, the mortician and advocate who founded The Order of the Good Death, writes that it’s imperative to support communities to define “what a ‘good death’ means to them” and to work alongside each other to dismantle the barriers that get in the way of such deaths. When I think of how I might define what a good death means to me, I’m reminded of the consent practices I’ve learned from being part of sex-positive queer communities for the past twenty years. What feels good in the context of my embodied experiences, my identities, my relationships and my history might not feel good to you, and vice versa. When I contemplate this more broadly in relation to queering death and dying, I return to the themes of creativity, self-determination, collective care and resisting oppression.

To me, queering death is part of a larger liberatory project encompassing our efforts to fight for the survival and thriving of all communities experiencing systemic oppression. As a longtime LGBTQ2S+ health advocate, the more I look at death, the more I think about how we live our lives, what enables our individual and collective flourishing, and what gets in the way, at every stage of our lives. Queering death is about when, where and how we die, the care, support and options we have access to during this process, and what happens to us and our loved ones after our deaths. It’s also about actively working for a world where all LGBTQ2S+ people—especially those who experience the most significant and harmful impacts of systemic oppression, like people who are trans, racialized, Indigenous, disabled, Mad, poor, incarcerated, unhoused and/or undocumented—have what they need to live long, full, joyful lives free from violence and harm. Queering death is not about hastening the inevitable; it’s about fighting for us all to live and die in ways that respect, honour and celebrate every aspect of who we are.

Complete Article HERE!

The parting gift from my dying friend was an extraordinary act of selfless compassion

— In the hospital room I lost it. I stood there awkwardly with wet eyes. And then something incredible happened

We are raised to be stoic in the presence of the dying, when our instinct is the opposite.’

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The word that our old friend was about to die travelled as quickly as a Mallee scrub fire. He’d been medically evacuated home from overseas a week or so earlier. He was now in hospital with his family about him, not very responsive and unable to talk.

“You should get there quickly. He might only have a day or two.”

There was disbelief and shock. I’d last seen him across a cafe table in Glebe three months earlier where he was characteristically ebullient. He enthused about his plans overseas for the years ahead, and spoke of his love for his children and grandchildren.

He gave me four boxes of antique books.

“I don’t need stuff where I’m going,’’ he said. He meant overseas. His words now seem unintentionally prescient.

The sadness I felt when I heard of his terminal decline was largely about his now unrealised – and cruelly thwarted – plans. Also, I just couldn’t – still can’t – foresee a world without this man, one of the bravest, most forthright, irreverent, passionate and generous people I’ve known.

Last year in this space I wrote about the importance – and occasional fickleness – of “mateship’’ and male friendship. I wrote how “two of my most important friendships have been with men who are both 20 years older than me’’.

“Both are intensely creative and passionate, have done amazing things while continuing, as their 80s approach, to live compelling lives that have been marked by courage and iconoclasm, sensitivity, tragedy, devastating loss, success, disappointment and, not least, a desire to do good. They’ve gently guided me and been there (each with a sixth sense, almost, that told them I was troubled) when life has cut up rough.’’

This was one of the men I had referred to. He’d long been around for me as a mentor – on how to be genuine, how to be true to your beliefs and art, and especially on how to learn to not give a damn about the critics and the knockers. He’d been there to counsel me through the grief associated with my parents’ deaths. He’s the type of bloke who texts when your team wins – or loses – big. Who always asks after – even offers to mind – your dogs.

When serious illness struck my family a few years ago, never a week passed without him checking in. Urging me to hope. For hope and optimism were always his propellants. Publicly at least.

And so I drove out of Sydney on one of those glorious, crisp autumn mornings under a crystalline sky of the gentle blue you might find on a bolt of shirt cotton in the tailor’s window. It was an air-punch morning. One on which to celebrate life. And I was driving to a regional hospital to say goodbye to a dear friend who, although 77, was Peter Pan incarnate to me and so many others. I was counselling myself as I drove to keep it together. For him. For how much do the dying fear what’s next and become even more afraid when their anguish is reflected in our eyes and responses? We are raised to be stoic in their presence, when our instinct is the opposite.

It was on a day like this, 25 years earlier, we’d first met over a long lunch in Sydney where I’d come, as a newspaper reporter, to write a profile about him. We’d been true mates ever since. Although I do wonder at the equality of our friendship; he always seemed more there for me than I for him. Yes, we talked often about the tragic death of his adult son. But I could offer him nothing, then, because I had never experienced any such loss. I could not reciprocate the hope he’d always urged in me. For it was already hopeless. I could only lend a caring, passive ear to his pain. I don’t know how he survived that. Testimony to an old soldier’s resilience, perhaps.

And in the hospital, now, there he was in bed, diminutive now for such a robust man and wearing the pallor of imminent death. His beautiful children were about him, the room brimming with love. His eyes and his smile sparkled as they always had. He grinned as we held hands. There was time alone. I thanked him for it all. And yes, I lost it. I could do nothing but stand there awkwardly, with wet eyes, when his kids re-entered the room. I felt like an intruder.

And then something extraordinary happened.

Helped by his son, he stood on unsteady legs upon a mobility device to visit the bathroom. I gave him a stoic two-handed thumbs-up. He smiled and gestured for me to come forward. As we hugged in silence he patted me on the back as if to sooth my earlier evident distress.

It was an extraordinary act of selfless compassion, a perpetual gift if you like, from a mate who had already imparted so much to me about life and humanity. He was making sure I was OK.

He died a week later.

Complete Article HERE!

‘I miss the sex’

— Why are the sexual needs of the bereaved still a taboo?

A woman mourning the loss of her husband was advised to take up gardening, another was told to get a dog… But intimacy and desire among grieving people is something we all need to know about

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Pauline and I first met at a book event last year; a small gathering in a London arts club that marked the paperback release of the memoir I’d written, chronicling my young widowhood in my 30s. Pauline sat inconspicuously at the back of the darkened room and, when the Q&A was over, she quietly introduced herself, quickly drawing attention to the section she’d most connected with, the chapters where I explored self-pleasure and sex in the early months of my grief.

Younger people like me “got it more”, she told me, referring to her thirst for physical intimacy as a newly widowed 72-year-old. More often than not, people didn’t get it: “They don’t imagine that you’ve had a sex life.” But why, she asked? And what did that signify for others her age? A few days later, she sent me a Spotify link to an early 90s Bruce Springsteen song – Human Touch – describing how his melodious yearnings for “somethin’ to hold on to” summed up her recent frustrations as a more mature widow, a year after her husband’s death. The electrical wires were humming again, but she was increasingly feeling as if she had been put on mute by everyone around her.

“In the first few weeks, people recognised that I was bereaved, they came at me with all sorts of platitudes,” Pauline tells me, months after our first meeting, over the clatter and din in a central London café. “But I soon realised nobody recognised that what I was missing was the physicality of Peter as well as the psychic and emotional sharing that we had. The feeling of him, and his solid body, was what I craved.” We’re meeting again, in a noisy coffee shop, because Pauline feels like her sexuality, in her early 70s, is being silenced in ways she’s unhappy with. And if Pauline is feeling this way, then perhaps others are, too.

When Peter, her husband of 31 years, died of leiomyosarcoma – a rare type of soft tissue sarcoma – after a short illness in 2021, Pauline was left grieving for many intimate things. A dog-eared Sunday supplement left out for her on the kitchen table was one. But the physicality they shared was undeniably another – and not something she felt encouraged to share. “We enjoyed an active and happy sex life throughout our marriage, which was only cut short in the weeks prior to his decline,” she recalls. And yet when he died: “I couldn’t say, ‘Oh God, I wish I was in bed with him, entwined together, with his arms around me, kissing, and doing the things we used to do.’”

One friend recommended she take up gardening more frequently, wholly unaware that what Pauline was most in need of wasn’t a pair of secateurs. “Some of them seemed quite shocked when I said I wanted to buy a vibrator,” Pauline smiles as she talks. Masturbation soon began bookmarking Pauline’s days, morning and night; a welcome respite that briefly lassoed her out of her grief. “I looked forward to it. I found I could be quite noisy and I’d never been noisy before. I would liken it to that feeling of being transported somewhere.” She was owning her desires in a way she had never experienced before.

“There’s still something ‘funny’ about people having sex in older age, it’s like a joke,” neuropsychologist Alice Radosh says, on a Zoom call from her home in New York, as we discuss these intersecting lines in widowhood, and the ways in which they can convince older women like Pauline that their desires should be suppressed. “You’re up against a real brick wall in terms of making people feel comfortable,” she says, delving deeper into the taboo-ness, “because we’re not often given the message that we are able to talk about this, not only following the death of a partner, but just generally, as women and men age.”

Radosh speaks from experience. When her husband of 40 years died of multiple myeloma in 2013, she was perfectly capable of handling the bills and repairs, but what she really struggled with was the loss of sexual intimacy after decades of physicality with her longterm partner. To add insult to injury, the literature she sought for guidance totally missed the mark. One study suggested she get a dog. Another, to hug her grandchild. But the one that pushed her over the line was the sage advice that she should visit her hairdresser. “Anyone who thinks Bart was anything like my hairdresser really doesn’t know what he was like in bed,” she laughs.

In this void of research, Radosh did what any researcher in her predicament would: she decided to co-author her own study in 2016. Surveying more than 100 older women (55 years and above), her findings showed that she wasn’t alone in what she called her “sexual bereavement”. Not only did the majority say they’d definitely miss sex if their partner died, an equal number revealed they’d want to talk about it when the time came. And yet, in spite of this, 57% of participants admitted it would not occur to them to initiate a discussion with a widowed friend. “Before I did my survey, I spoke to friends and a number of them said, ‘Well that doesn’t matter any more.’ The feeling was that that’s in the past.” What Radosh’s survey proved beyond all possible doubt was that this was a myth and a damaging one at that: sex wasn’t a past tense activity – and it did matter.

“We had such a spicy and satisfying relationship that I thought, why is this a secret?” Joan Price, an author and advocate for ageless sexuality, says of her and her late husband’s marriage, on a Zoom call from California, echoing Radosh’s findings. “I never heard that people at our age could be so much in love and have so much exhilarating sex. Why was this under the covers?”

Determined to shake up this ageist narrative, Price started writing about senior sex at the age of 61. Head to her Twitter and she’ll introduce herself to you with an equally spicy: “Glad to meet you. I’m Joan Price, and I talk out loud about senior sex.”

She’s been doing it for more than 18 years now: writing books (The Ultimate Guide to Sex After 50 and Naked at Our Age are just two), reviewing sex toys and giving webinars with the help of gynaecological props, such as the 3D clitoris she’s holding in front of her webcam right now. She uses this silicone aid to help her illustrate the vast intricacies of the female anatomy to seniors who come to her seeking advice. If knowledge is power, then there are many women out there who remain disenfranchised through a lack of basic anatomical understanding of how their own bodies work. Price is on a mission to change that.

When her husband died in 2008, Price was faced with yet another taboo that no one was talking about: sex after grief. “Men and women are being told they’re ‘doing grief wrong’ if they try to come back to partnered sex too soon,” she says. “We don’t stop being a sexual being when we lose someone. It may take a break. The break may be days, years or decades – but we can always come back to it when we’re ready. And dammit, people need to stop telling us we shouldn’t.”

Price’s tireless advocacy doesn’t come without its trolls and dismissals. “When I was starting out, I got a lot of what I call ‘the ick factor’,” she says. Which goes something along the lines of: “Ewww! Seniors having sex? Disgusting!” It’s raw and unpleasant – and she still gets this kind of feedback. Just recently, for instance, a journalist told her that despite respecting her work, he couldn’t imagine his own mother having sex at her age. To which she replied, “At what age do you plan to retire your genitals?”

Why do we still treat seniors as if they’re some kind of alien species, asks Price: “We’re expected to be under a rock about our sexuality. We’re expected to keep it quiet if we’re feeling it. I say no. No, we don’t have to be done with it.” Like both Radosh and Price across the pond, Pauline isn’t done with it either. She’s having sex again. Not only that, it’s the best she’s ever had. Granted, it hasn’t always been “plain sailing” (her varicose veins, for instance, were initially “an area of embarrassment to be negotiated”), but she talks openly with her new partner and, as a result, the experience has turned out to be a life-affirming one.

The clock is ticking, she says – and she wants to live in the moment. “I never thought anyone would look at me without my clothes on again,” Pauline says – but she was wrong. “I’m on the crest of a wave and it’s no holds barred. I’ve always been very inhibited, but now I feel I can do anything I want…” she looks up at me with a smile. “I can even walk around naked if I want.”

Complete Article HERE!

I got married at 19 and was widowed at 42.

— It took me 4 years to rediscover sexual pleasure after my husband died.

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  • When I felt ready to move on with my sex life after my husband died, I faced feelings of betrayal.
  • Coping with sexual bereavement as a young widow was an immensely challenging experience.
  • I learned that experiencing intimacy after loss is possible with the right support.

Losing a life partner is an unimaginable experience that can leave you feeling lost and invisible. And that’s exactly how I felt when I became a widow at 42. Tony and I married when I was just 19, and losing my partner — who had been with me for more than half my life — felt like losing a part of myself.

Grief was a lonely road. But sexual bereavement was a whole new kind of struggle. Sexual bereavement — the term used to describe the grief I felt because I missed sexual intimacy with Tony — is often associated with older adults.

Yet, for four years after Tony’s death, unaddressed sexual bereavement kept me from moving on. As a young widow, I felt like a stranger to myself.

Sexual bereavement impacts people of all ages

Many people believe that sexual bereavement only affects older adults. After all, older adults tend to experience the loss of their long-term partners more often than younger individuals.

But this is a common misconception. And this realization hit me hard.

After Tony died, well-meaning friends and family members encouraged me to start a new chapter in my life. But I resisted the pressure to do so until I was confident in my own healing process.

When I finally felt ready to engage in intimacy, I was unprepared for the overwhelming wave of guilt and shame that consumed me.

Sex felt like a betrayal to Tony, and I grappled with my conflicted emotions. Feelings of grief and loss made it difficult to be present in the moment. I struggled to feel a sense of normalcy in something as simple as physical touch.

Rediscovering sexual pleasure after loss

In grieving the loss of a loved one, sex can easily take a backseat. But eventually, the desire for intimacy may resurface. And there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to dealing with sexual bereavement.

Sometimes it can feel like experiencing sexual pleasure after such a profound loss is disrespectful or taboo. “Give yourself permission and time to adjust to many different stressors that happen as a result of the death,” Beatty Cohan, a psychotherapist and sex therapist, told Insider.

Cohan notes that it’s important to communicate your feelings and concerns with potential partners. Going from a long-term relationship to a brand-new one takes some getting used to. “It’s not like you turn on a light switch, and you’re sexually in tune. Hopefully, you have chosen a partner who is empathetic, supportive, and understanding,” Cohan said.

Still, some people may choose not to have sex after their partner dies, and it’s important not to judge them or assume they have sexual dysfunction or that something is ‘wrong’ with them, says Cohan.

“If someone is interested in sex with themselves or a partner(s), and they can’t understand what’s getting in the way of their interest or desire, that’s the time to reach out and ask for help and figure out what’s going on and what to do,” Cohan said.

Not only that, but Cohan cautions it’s important to consider the impact of mental health, hormone imbalances, the side effects of medications, and physical issues on our sexual desires.

Young widows, you’re not alone

For me, sexual bereavement lasted for years. I didn’t know what it was, felt isolated, and didn’t seek help soon enough.

Rediscovering sexual pleasure after the loss of a spouse can be intimidating. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re ready for intimacy. Allow yourself ample time and space to heal and show yourself kindness and understanding along the way.

Complete Article HERE!

Dance Me to the End of Time

— South African film on death is a powerful celebration of life

Activist and theatre director Nancy Diuguid, left, with partner and film-maker Melanie Chait.

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In her 2021 documentary Dance Me to the End of Time, South African film-maker and educator Melanie Chait has produced a truly great film. Not only for the breadth of themes it broaches – from cancer to green activism, from lesbian love to arts therapy – but also for the intensity with which she deals with these themes.

One of the hallmarks of a great film is its ability to transport audiences; to hold their undivided attention and evoke deep emotions in them. The documentary does this, as it pieces together four years of home movie footage filmed by Chait.

This very personal, award-winning film chronicles the final years and death of Chait’s life partner, London theatre director Nancy Diuguid. Diuguid died from breast cancer. The film is, of course, more than just about the death of Diuguid. It is also about the triumph of lesbian love in the face of death as well as the ecological and feminist politics of Chait and Diuguid.

In the process it elevates itself above death and disease to become a veritable celebration of life and love. Powerfully original, it is also likely to change the way people think about the food they eat and how it is produced. This is particularly important given the ever increasing prevalence of cancers.

The art of death

Dance Me to the End of Time has been enjoying a successful festival run after premiering at the Encounters documentary festival in South Africa and has won several international awards.

The documentary fits into a genre of film-making which focuses on disease, dying and death. This genre was popularised in the early 1990s by films which documented the death of people living with AIDS. These are films such as Silverlake Life by US director Tom Joslin and Modesty and Shame by French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert. I argue in an article on this genre that there is something more to such films than just the representation of diseased bodies and slow deaths.

Dance Me to the End of Time shows how two women face the presence and reality of death. Diuguid thinks through how, although she was losing control of her body, she still wanted to be “present in the process of dying”. Chait contends with the idea of losing her loved one. She expresses her helplessness in offering the comfort that her dying lover required:

It felt like I was playing God: deciding what to do, when. Nancy was so unlike the Nancy I had known. I only wished I could do better with the process of knowing how to comfort and help ease her anguish.

Despite the difficult conversations they have about death and the meaning of loneliness, it’s fascinating how the film eloquently demonstrates that even in the face of death, the couple was able to experience happiness. In many instances, Diuguid is filmed swimming in the ocean or dancing with their adopted son, Desmond. This film is a beautiful ode to lesbian love, an elegy of two women loving one another through sickness and health.

Ecological and feminist politics

Chait also weaves into this personal story the important feminist and ecological work that the couple did to expose the health dangers of pesticides. When diagnosed with cancer, Diuguid decided to adopt a holistic, integrated medical approach combining traditional medicine and natural methods.

The story of US scientist and ecologist Rachel Carson is woven into that of Chait and Diuguid. From as far back as the early 1960s, Carson had exposed the health hazards of pesticides, especially DDT, used to spray farm crops. Diuguid grew up on a farm in Kentucky and experienced how small wildlife would be killed days after the spraying of their farm.

A black and white photo of a woman in a collared shirt, smiling.
Rachel Carson.

Diuguid and Carson both died of cancer. By drawing parallels between their lives, the film highlights the politics of what and who is responsible for causing cancer. In its focus on the gruesomeness of the effects on cancer, Dance Me to the End of Time is itself political in dealing with ecological questions and the impact of pesticides.

The film also shows how, when Diuguid was diagnosed, she was able to use the creative arts and her lesbian identity as tools to campaign for justice and to heal others. Through an initiative called VOICES, she used expressive arts to help women and children deal with trauma in the townships of Johannesburg. In addition to the historical trauma of apartheid, townships in South Africa have had to do contend with high levels of intimate forms of violence.

Vulnerability and dignity

A film poster featuring two women, one lying in bed.

Even in chronicling Diuguid’s dying, the film does not rob her of her dignity and humanity.

In fact, the film celebrates her life and her important work in expressive arts therapy.

In its personal and deeply emotional texture, Dance Me to The End of Time offers a sincere depiction of how to face death and more importantly how to live life to its fullest.

Complete Article HERE!

Why, when and how to talk with grieving clients about sex

By Kailey Bradley and Victoria Kress

Grief is an experience that everyone navigates at different points in their lives. For the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted peoples’ lives in myriad ways and left many experiencing significant grief.

Loss can also deeply affect one’s sexuality, a concept referred to as sexual bereavement. Any form of loss, not just the loss of a sexual partner, can alter one’s sexual desire. As noted in Alice Radosh and Linda Simkin’s 2016 article published in Reproductive Health Matters, both sexuality and grief are stigmatized, which creates a double-barreled taboo. This double stigma can result in someone not feeling comfortable or confident addressing the topic.

When working with clients who have experienced loss, counselors must consider the interplay between grief and sexuality. There are few spaces where clients can address their grief and even fewer safe spaces where they can discuss their sexuality, so it is important that counselors consider how they can approach this subject with clients. This article discusses why this topic is important and when and how counselors can address the intersection of grief and sexuality with clients.

Why is this topic important?

Radosh and Simkin noted that some bereaved clients want to discuss how their sexuality has changed as a result of grief, yet they are often hesitant to do so. Clients may perceive that sexuality and grief cannot coexist. If this is the case, then they may feel shame if they have sexual feelings while grieving. Clients may also believe it is inappropriate to admit that they miss intimacy or that their sexual desire has changed. Other clients may perceive sexuality as distant and remote — something that may never again feel accessible.

The complexities of this topic, combined with counselors’ and clients’ personal discomfort, may cause counselors to avoid addressing it. This discomfort can arise because counselors are uncertain about how to broach the topic, counselors are uncomfortable with the topic of sexuality in general or the client is hesitant to bring the topic up. Although we do not know a lot about how various aspects of sexuality are affected after a loss, it is clear this is an issue that people experience as part of their normal development and growth, so counselors must be prepared to address this topic.

When to address this topic?

Although there is no right time to address this topic, counselors can introduce conversations related to the topic early in the counseling process. They could include questions about how grief has impacted the client’s sexuality on the intake form and then use the information the client provided to gently broach the topic during the first session. Counselors may also need to go slow and consider if it makes sense to bring up the topic during one of the initial sessions. For example, it may not be a good idea to discuss it in the first session if the client has a lot of shame around the topic of sexuality. In this situation, clinicians need to establish therapeutic trust and rapport before mentioning the topic. This approach will help clients feel safe enough to share their experiences.

Counselors can also ask clients to describe the various realms in their lives that have been affected by loss and grief, and they can mention sexuality as one possible area. And throughout the counseling process, clinicians can validate and normalize their clients’ experiences regarding grief and sexuality.

Because clients will move at their own pace and some may want to revisit the topic throughout counseling, regular check-ins with clients can be helpful. Counselors can encourage clients to engage in these difficult conversations by asking them to create “permission slips” to attend to forgotten or challenging dimensions of grief. Clinicians can give clients a scrap piece of paper and ask them to write out an area in their lives that is affected by grief that they find difficult to discuss. Another option is for counselors to write down overlooked topics related to grief and sexuality — such as dating, desire and arousal, physical changes, ways to talk about grief with a partner — on a sheet of paper and then ask clients to choose a topic from the list they want to discuss.

How can counselors help clients?

There is limited research on how to support clients’ sexuality in the context of grief. Formal interventions, however, may not be as important as the compassionate environment and empathic presence a counselor provides. Empathic presence can help clients introduce difficult conversations at their own pace and on their own terms.

Psychoeducation can also play an important role in counseling this population. For example, counselors can share that for some clients, sexual desire and arousal increase after a loss while others have the opposite experience. Providing education around the different reactions people have to grief can validate clients’ experiences and help them connect with the ways they may be experiencing grief. Counselors can also teach clients that grief is not just relegated to the cognitive or emotional domain; our bodies carry and process grief as well, and in this way, our bodies grieve. Providing this education to clients may allow them to feel relief that their somatic reactions surrounding sexuality after a loss are valid.

Another area of psychoeducation that could be valuable to clients is the identification of their grieving styles. The Grief Pattern Inventory is a tool that can help clients gain insight into how they are approaching the grief process. (For more, see Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin’s Men Don’t Cry, Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief.) Understanding how a person is grieving can help the client and counselor gain valuable insight into the client’s grief process. Intuitive grief is an emotional style of grief in which emotional expression is valued, whereas instrumental grief is a cognitive style of grief in which problem-solving is valued. According to Doka and Martin, a client who identifies as having an intuitive style of grief will prefer a space to emotionally express the wide range of feelings that emerge when considering the intersection of sexuality and grief. In contrast, a client who identifies with an instrumental style of grief may prefer using specific techniques to reengage with their sexuality because they may view the changes in their sexuality after a loss as a problem to be solved. Counselors can introduce this concept to clients and invite them to consider how their grieving style may be affecting how they approach their sexuality after loss.

Finally, creative interventions can be a powerful way to help clients navigate these issues. Counselors can invite clients to write themselves a permission slip to engage with their sexuality in whatever way feels appropriate to them. For example, they might write, “I give myself permission to lean into the feelings that arise when I consider how my sexuality has changed in the following ways.” Clinicians can also encourage clients to create a grief playlist in which they share songs that help describe or capture the feelings surrounding the areas of their life that are affected by grief (including sexuality). Clients could share their grief playlists with their partners and identify how their grief experience is similar or different. Overall, outward expression of loss can help validate the complexity of feelings that arise when navigating this double-barreled taboo.

Addressing personal biases

When working with this population, it is important to be mindful of biases that both the client and counselor may have about grief and sexuality. Some common biases include the assumption that sexual desire disappears after a loss, sexuality is not appropriate to discuss after a loss or having sexual desire after a loss is wrong. To address these biases, counselors can use reflective questions and journaling prompts that ask individuals to reflect on what they have been taught culturally about grief etiquette, sexuality and scripts surrounding what is normal after grief. Again, some might feel judgmental of a griever whose sexual desire and/or arousal has increased after a death. However, addressing our own biases will help create a hospitable environment where a client is met with nonjudgment.

Conclusion

Counselors play an important role in empowering clients who are grieving. Even though we live in a grief-avoidant culture where we shy away from pain, counselors can create a refuge of hospitality where we can openly acknowledge what is uncomfortable. It is in our power and our scope of practice to gently remind clients that it is OK to talk about the intersection of grief and sexuality and to meet our clients with compassionate curiosity and encourage them to grant themselves permission and space to grieve and embrace their sexuality after loss in whatever way makes sense to them.

Complete Article HERE!

My partner and I are both grieving.

— Sex might help us cope – but he has lost interest

We have had seven happy, loving years together. But I’m feeling the need for physical comfort

By Pamela Stephenson Connolly

My partner and I have been in a loving and happy relationship for seven years. During the past two years three of our parents have either died or been diagnosed with a terminal illness. We remain close but physical contact has become less frequent and meaningful. I find sex a cathartic way to deal with the stresses we have faced, and a way to demonstrate our closeness, but he has understandably become reluctant to be intimate. I feel our need for sex has a different purpose and miss our shared understanding of what closeness means for us.

Grief certainly can negatively affect a person’s sexual response and many people find that recovery can take quite some time. Occasionally, bereavement develops into depression, which in itself can shut down sexual interest or functioning. It is unfortunate that you and your partner are having different sexual reactions as you work through loss and try to heal, but recognise that you are simply experiencing different sexual responses to grief and, if possible, share those feelings with each other to feel more heard. Grief counselling could be very helpful. Your bereavement is relatively new, but if healing does not appear to be progressing it will be essential to seek help. At any point in a relationship it is extremely common for sex to hold different meanings for each partner. Take heart – it is reasonable to maintain hope that there will eventually be healing and a resolution of your current sexual issues.

Complete Article HERE!