Category: Death Meditation

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‘The hardest and most beautiful conversation I’ve ever had’

— how end-of-life storytelling on TikTok helps us process death

By and

In a recently viral TikTok series, creator Ali Tate Cutler spends time with her terminally ill grandma who has made the choice to end her life through euthanasia.

While sharing start-of-life stories – such as ultrasound pictures or childhood milestones – is commonplace, posting end-of-life “journeys” online has users conflicted.

Such stories raise questions of autonomy, vulnerability and privacy, but are ultimately useful in changing how we talk about preparing for death.

@alitatecutler Replying to @Matthew This was the hardest and most beautiful conversation ive ever had. Healing for both parties. I had resistance to Euthanasia before this, but after being with her and hearing her, I no longer do. ❤️ #euthanasia #finalfarewell #ondying ♬ multiverse – Maya Manuela

Dying, virally

In Cutler’s series of videos, they show off their outfits before their “last lunch” together. Cutler’s grandma “Bubbie” gives life advice, and they talk through their thoughts and feelings about the euthanasia process.

Cutler’s videos are divisive. Many commenters criticise the attention gained through this subject, commenting, “Why would you publicise this? So wrong.”

However, some recognise it as an important story to tell and reply with their own stories about loved ones, showing kindness to Cutler’s family. Some recent comments have said:

This needs to be regular practice. Thank you for sharing your story.

It’s a blessing to be privy to conversations like this.

Sending her love on her next adventure. Safe travels to a beautiful soul.

It’s telling that many commenters thank Cutler and mention being “privy” to a usually private moment; we hear far fewer end-of-life stories than start-of-life stories.

Talking about death and dying

As scholars who research health, death and grief, we know there can be stigma and silence around end-of-life stories, despite an underlying obsession with death which pervades our media and social circles.

Experts in the field, such as those working in palliative care, call for more open conversations and stories about dying. They argue that not doing so is hindering happier deaths.

Mentioning death and happiness in the same breath may seem like an oxymoron. It’s natural that death and dying bring feelings of worry, fear, grief and regret. Those who talk about death and dying publicly (as we can attest as researchers in these fields) are often labelled grim, maudlin and even “clout-chasing”.

These reactions are understandable – we are biologically and socially conditioned to fear death. Our brains “shield” us from the reality of death, leading us to imagine it as something which happens to others rather than ourselves.

The “other people” we often imagine dying are elderly people. They can face infantilisation and assumptions that they are forgetful or incapable of making choices and speaking for themselves. Maturity of age, experience, autonomy and storytelling capabilities are overlooked.

Commenters assume Cutler is milking her grandma’s death for “clout” rather than enabling her grandma to tell stories which are important.

Cause to be cautious

Concerns of safety and vulnerability are legitimate and, of course, not all those at the end of their lives can tell their own stories. As life narrative theorist Paul John Eakin states, the breakdown of adult life and memory brings us “face to face with the end of an identity’s story”.

However, assuming that all elderly or dying people are beyond constructing stories of their identities or lives is folly. We must share end-of-life stories – safely, collaboratively – or risk oversimplifying the complexity of dying and denying the autonomy of dying people to share their feelings.

Out of pages and into our screens

End-of-life storytelling isn’t new, autothanatography – writing about one’s own imminent death – is an established literary genre.

This unique genre not only helps us process death (our own or a loved one’s), but also normalises anticipatory grief (grieving before the fact). Australian authors such as Cory Taylor and Georgia Blain have penned their own deaths.

In Dying: a memoir, Taylor writes:

I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly. And I’m making dying bearable for myself.

Similarly, at the end of Blain’s memoir, The Museum of Words: a memoir of language, writing and mortality, Blain acknowledges the power of having written her own life and death, stating,

This miniature is my life in words, and I have been so grateful for every minute of it.

As writers and creators like Cutler demonstrate, the end-of-life stage can be difficult and heartbreaking, but is also a time to reflect. Autothanatological stories, whether written or digital, are a chance to “shape” death and to contemplate the past and the future at once.

The platform is the message

Backlash aimed at Cutler may be due to her platform of choice. TikTok can be denounced as an app for young, vain people creating dance videos and “thirst traps”.

But content about dying is in demand, as evidenced by popular sub-categories “DeathTok” and “GriefTok”. The juxtaposition between lighthearted posts and stories about dying on the “video dance app” can be an adjustment.

Cutler, a Victoria Secret model, posts both kinds of content concurrently. Some users may find this jarring but it demonstrates that loss is an integrated part of life, not something separate. TikTok and similar sites are ripe for developing such nuanced conversations and even cultural practices around death.

Sites like TikTok create a unique space for end-of-life narratives to reach vast audiences through visual, auditory and algorithmic timelines, suggesting content, and encouraging engagement. Users interact with one another, and explore the complexity and inherent contradictions in reflecting on a life while preparing to lose the person who lived it.

As Cutler responds to a commentor, “This was the hardest and most beautiful conversation I’ve ever had”.

These narratives are moving rapidly from the pages of memoir to the instant accessibility of our mobile phones and we must make conscious efforts to be open to diverse stories about dying.

If we interrogate how we feel when we encounter challenging or surprising end-of-life stories, we can broaden the ways we think and talk about dying, and, indeed, even celebrate happy moments among the sad.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why was it so hard to bear witness to my father’s final days?

— A former ICU nurse and no stranger to death, I didn’t realize that the most meaningful way to ‘do something’ for my dad was to be present at his bedside, ‘doing’ nothing at all.

Bronze lovers adorn a tomb in Milan’s Monumental Cemetery.

By Sherrie Dulworth

Over the past 20 years, I have been present with four loved ones as they died of terminal illnesses in their homes. Before their deaths, I assisted with comfort care and busied myself helping with household chores. Busyness made me feel useful. Sometimes I talked or listened; other times, there was nothing to do except to sit together in silence, which was a challenge for me.

As a former ICU nurse, I was no stranger to death, but I was a stranger to understanding that some actions are more significant than “doing.” While many of the tasks were important, some even necessary, they were not what mattered most.

Instead, it was the seemingly simple act of being present, of bearing witness in the face of impending death, that was the most meaningful — and the most difficult — thing I did.

More people now choose to die at home in this country than in any other setting. It’s likely, then, that in the future, many of us will be present with someone who is dying. If they are not at home, we might be together in a hospital or nursing home. Yet our society offers little guidance on how we can best emotionally support someone who is dying. There is also scant advice on how best to support ourselves.

Might this be a good time to reflect on what we hope for others and for ourselves in the final phase of life? How do we want to show up? What will we want and need from our loved ones? I interviewed a variety of experts versed in good endings.

BJ Miller, a palliative care physician whose Ted Talk, “What really matters at the end of life,” has been viewed more than 16 million times, told me, “There is poignancy and power in just being present with someone, but our minds get in the way. Our minds tell us to go do things or to run away. I think we need to honor the power of just being, naming what a profound offering it is, and how difficult it is, to sit with suffering that you can’t change.”

This is not stoicism. Nor is it, as Miller said, “an exercise of the intellect. You could force yourself to sit still at the bedside, but will that register with the person in the bed if you aren’t present emotionally?”

For me, being there for others means I must face the vulnerability that impending loss provokes. I must counter my own instincts to freeze or flee. As empathy and vulnerability researcher and bestselling author Brené Brown says in her documentary, “The Call to Courage,” “Vulnerability is having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.”

Like living, dying is sometimes a messy business. I hope to hold space for the dying with empathy and solidarity, showing up without judgment, regardless of what physical or emotional messiness might arise.

This may sound a bit overwhelming, but as the Rev. Paul Tesshin Silverman, a New York-based Zen Buddhist priest, told me, “Have the courage that your heart is big enough to be able to take in a whole rainbow of different feelings and emotions. It will only strengthen you and not destroy you. Allow yourself to be present, breathe, and allow whatever emotions to come out, so that you’re present.”

Silverman described being in Japan as a young monk in his 20s when a girl of about 14 in his village was dying of leukemia. “I went over every day to spend time with her. I felt like I had to get busy for her.” He learned that her dying wish was to go to a boy band concert, and he arranged for her to do that. “I was doing tons of stuff to make her last days happy,” he said. “When I think back on it, the most profound moment, which I wasn’t aware of at the time, was the last day I spent with her, sitting there and just holding her hand.”

Sometimes death comes quickly, but often it tarries, creating an emotional roller coaster for those who are present. When my father was dying from an aggressive brain tumor, he fluctuated between being semi-comatose and responsive for almost a week. In hindsight, I wish that I had allowed myself to stay mindfully present, instead of projecting into the future, engulfed by anticipatory grief.

“Sitting in the liminal space is difficult,” death doula Nicole Heidbreder told me. As a former labor and delivery nurse, Heidbreder has worked on both ends of life’s spectrum. She said, “I try to be present as a fellow mortal, watching others do what I will someday do. If I can be present with compassion, tenderness, and shared humanity, it lets them know they’re not alone.”

According to death doula Elizabeth Johnson, “It takes a kind of reverence to see what is unfolding in that space. It is a mystery to everyone including to the person who is dying. For me, the spiritual component is recognizing that there are equal parts of absolute grace and mystery as we physically unravel from our physical form.”

For his part, Miller said, “I think the sacredness comes from letting go of impulses to control or to fix. You’re not running away from the impulse; instead, you’re running toward some basic sense that life is bigger than you or me. It’s not ours to understand that there are forces at work that include us, but that are much bigger than us.”

One literal definition of the verb “bear” is to support the weight of or to sustain. In bearing witness to another person at the end of life, we support and honor them in their transition. The lesson that I’ve come to realize is that this is, in fact, doing something in the most real and important way possible.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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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.’

By

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↩!

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Paul Simon Confronts Death, Profoundly, on ‘Seven Psalms’

— The 81-year-old songwriter ruminates on mortality, faith and meaning in an album that could be a farewell.

On a new album, Paul Simon is thinking about time, love, culture, family, music, eternity and God, striving to balance skepticism and something like faith.

By Jon Pareles

What do songwriters do when they feel death approaching? As time runs out, some choose to spend it by determinedly creating music to outlive them.

“Seven Psalms” sounds like a last testament from the 81-year-old Paul Simon. It’s an album akin to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” which those songwriters made as mortality loomed; they each died days after the albums were released.

Their generation of singer-songwriters has dedicated itself to chronicling their entire lives, biographically and metaphorically, from youth through last words. “Blackstar” was turbulent and exploratory; “You Want It Darker” was stoically bleak. “Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing.

The album is constructed as a nearly unbroken 33-minute suite, nominally divided into seven songs that circle back to recurring refrains. It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.

Simon begins the album in his most casual tone. Over calmly precise and rhythmically flexible guitar picking, he sings, “I’ve been thinking about the great migration.”

Almost immediately, it becomes clear that the migration is from life to death, a transition the singer is preparing to make himself. He’s thinking about time, love, culture, family, music, eternity and God, striving to balance skepticism and something like faith. “I have my reasons to doubt/A white light eases the pain,” Simon sings in “Your Forgiveness.” “Two billion heartbeats and out/Or does it all begin again?”

Simon’s songwriting has never been particularly religious. Over the years, he has drawn on gospel music for songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which bring religious imagery to secular relationships, and his 2011 album, “So Beautiful or So What,” had touches of Christian imagery — but also imagined “The Afterlife” as one last bureaucracy, where arrivals have to “Fill out a form first/And then you wait in a line.”

“Seven Psalms” is more humble and awe-struck. Its refrains return to, and work variations on, the album’s opening song, “The Lord.” As in the psalms of the Bible — which, as Simon notes in “Sacred Harp,” were songs — Simon portrays the Lord in sweeping ways: wondrous and terrifying, both protector and destroyer, sometimes benign and sometimes wrathful. The Lord, Simon sings, is “a meal for the poorest, a welcome door to the stranger.” Then he turns to naming 21st-century perils: “The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the ocean rising.”

Much of the music sounds like solitary ruminations: Simon communing with his guitar, which has been the subtly virtuosic underpinning of most of his lifetime of songs. As his fingers sketch patterns, he latches onto melody phrases and then lets them go, teasing at pop structures but soon dissolving them. And around him, at any moment, sounds can float out of the background: additional supportive guitars, the eerie microtonal bell tones of Harry Partch’s cloud-chamber bowls, the jaunty huffing of a bass harmonica and, in the album’s final moments, the voice of his wife, Edie Brickell.

In the course of the album, Simon sings about personal distress and societal tensions. In “Love Is Like a Braid,” a song of gratitude and vulnerability, he sings, “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came/Broke me like a twig in a winter gale.” In “Trail of Volcanoes,” he juxtaposes youthful exploits with adult realities: “The pity is the damage that’s done/Leaves so little for amends”

Meanwhile, Simon’s tartly aphoristic side reappears in “My Professional Opinion,” a swipe at social media context collapse set to a country-blues shuffle. “All rise to the occasion/Or all sink into despair,” he sings. “In my professional opinion/We’re better off not going there.”

He ends the album — possibly his last — with a song called “Wait.” He protests, “My hand’s steady/My mind is still clear.” Brickell’s voice arrives to tell him, “Life is a meteor” and “Heaven is beautiful/It’s almost like home.” At the end, he harmonizes with her on one word, extended into five musical syllables: “Amen.” It sounds like he’s accepting the inevitable.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘I have my life in my own hands’

— A filmmaker spent three years with Paralympian and triathlete Marieke Vervoort to explore her wish to die by euthanasia

By Amy Woodyatt

Throughout her storied career, triathlete and Paralympian Marieke Vervoort captured the imagination of her native Belgium and the wider world.

But it wasn’t just her stack of sporting achievements that drew attention.

Vervoort lived with a degenerative spinal and muscle condition and had long been vocal about how one day she wanted to – and would – end her life by euthanasia.

Euthanasia involves a physician administering a drug to end the life of a patient who is suffering, usually with a debilitating or life-limiting condition.

“Everyone is pushing me and asking me, ‘When are you going to die? Do you know already the date that you’re going to die?’” she told documentary maker Pola Rapaport, who last year directed the film “Addicted to Life” about Vervoort.

“I said, ‘F**k you.’ … You don’t know when you want to die. When the time comes, when I feel it’s enough, then I will decide.”

She was a Paralympic gold medalist at London 2012, winner of silver medals at Rio and holder of a European record for the T52 100 meters, but Vervoort’s condition caused her near-constant pain and made sleeping very difficult.

She received euthanasia approval in her native Belgium in 2008, but far from signaling the end of her life, Vervoort was very vocal about how the ability to control her own destiny empowered her to continue to compete at the highest level and make the most of her remaining days.

Documentary maker Rapaport, who encountered Vervoort’s story after reading a news report about her, says she was instantly captivated by the athlete and how the “paradoxical” permission to die “had given her a kind of liberation of spirit.”

“Her knowing that she could choose her date of dying and the conditions under which she would die, and whom she would have with her. … The fact that that had given her so much mental liberation and spiritual liberation, I thought, was a fantastic story,” Rapaport told CNN Sport.

Vervoort had been living with her illness, which caused paraplegia, since her teens, and as she got older, she became involved in wheelchair basketball, swimming and triathlons. By the time she applied for euthanasia, she had already considered and planned to die by suicide.

“I no longer have a fear of death,” she explained. “I see it as an operation, where you go to sleep and never wake up. For me, it’s something peaceful. I don’t want to suffer when I’m dying … When it becomes too much for me to handle then I have my life in my own hands.”

Rapaport added: “She told us on day one, ‘The time is not here for me to call my doctor and tell him that I want to go now. But when the bad days outweigh the good days, that’s when I will do it.’”

Ultimately, that moment ended up coming over a decade after she was granted the approval for the procedure.

A love for life

Vervoort won gold in the T52 100m wheelchair race and silver in the 200m race at the London 2012 Paralympics, then claimed two further medals at Rio 2016.

Apart from her athletic endeavors and achievements, Vervoort made sure to live to the fullest toward the end of her life, making time for wheelchair bungee jumps, Lamborghini racing with driver Niels Lagrange, trips abroad and time with her close friends.

Vervoort’s continued enthusiasm for living in spite of her suffering was the result of being granted the choice to do what she wanted with her life, Rapaport said.

“The most important central theme of the film is that when a person has control over their personal body, mind, spirit, that it gives them freedom to live. And in this case, having control over decision-making about the end of your life,” Rapaport explained.

“She had incredible highs and really amazing successes that still astonish me and I think astonished her fans and the Belgian public and the royal family. And she also had horrendous lows,” Rapaport said.

Vervoort was named a Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown by Belgium’s King Philippe, whom she met in a ceremony in 2013, along with Queen Mathilde.

By the end of her life, seizures and excruciating pain had become almost daily for Vervoort, which also understandably contributed to a decline in her athletic ability.

The day Rapaport and her husband, Wolfgang Held, who is also a filmmaker, met Vervoort, the athlete experienced a seizure, which at the time led them to believe she was dying in front of them.

“It was grueling to watch. It was very upsetting to watch when Marieke would go into the seizures, and over the three years that we shot with her on and off, it happened more and more frequently,” Rapaport added.

“I didn’t want it to be a film only about this marvelous Paralympic athlete who triumphs in the face of incredible odds. I really wanted the audience to get the sense of what this young woman goes through on a regular basis,” she explained.

An ongoing conversation

In 2019, after a small party with friends and family, Vervoort died through euthanasia at her home in Diest, Belgium, at the age of 40 – and although it has now been some four years since her passing, conversations around euthanasia are still as relevant now as they were then.

Although a few European countries including Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and, recently, Portugal allow euthanasia under certain conditions, euthanasia and assisted suicide are not legal in most countries, and assisting a suicide, or providing a means to die by suicide, is punishable with jail time in many places.

The Vatican condemned euthanasia in its strongest language yet in 2020, calling it an “act of homicide” that can never be justified.

Meanwhile, debates resurface in Belgium over patients who have died by euthanasia on the grounds of psychiatric reasons.

Last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Belgium didn’t violate the rights of a person with depression when it accepted her decision to go ahead with a euthanasia procedure after her son, with support from Christian advocacy organization ADF International, mounted a court case that was highly publicized in the country.

In Belgium, 2,966 people died by euthanasia in 2022, comprising 2.5% of all deaths in the country that year, according to the country’s Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia.

Of euthanasia performed in 2022, nearly 90% of patients were over the age of 60, with almost 60% of the 2,966 who died having cancer, about 20% affected by multiple diseases and about 9% affected by nervous system diseases.

Rapaport told CNN Sport she wanted Vervoort’s experience – shown through shots of the athlete grimacing and crying out in pain, as well as footage of her seizures – to help people to understand why people would decide to die by euthanasia.

“It’s not an advocacy film. It doesn’t have any statistics. There’s no politicking in it. I felt that the more you can enter into this young woman’s experience, the more you will understand the arguments for assisted dying, no matter what country you’re in,” Rapaport added.

“Her story does expand the conversation, and you see what a person goes through and her case: how [the right to die as she wanted] improved her life immeasurably.

“That’s what I thought was so beautiful about her story, that this permission made her life so much better in the meantime, and it really allowed her to live to the maximum. And that was just unbelievably inspiring,” she added.

Rapaport hopes the film will keep conversations around death ongoing.

“It’s something generally people don’t want to talk about until they absolutely have to; even then, they don’t want to talk about it. But having control over that really can transform the rest of a person’s life and that is all we have.

“That’s all we have because we’re all going there,” Rapaport added. “It’s just a matter of when, how and how it will be handled.”

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Stripping People of Their Agency Robs Their Dignity

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Dehumanization is all too easy and extremely destructive.

I believe that a majority of the world’s problems could be solved if we all truly and consistently acknowledged the fact that every person is a person just as valuable as any other.

People are people. It’s simple, but it’s not easy to practice day in and day out.

If dehumanization is the root of so many of our problems, what can we do about it? What does humanization – or, as is sometimes necessary, rehumanization – look like? How do we get past the tendency to treat others as “less than” and truly see them for the people they are?

I don’t have a perfect, comprehensive response, but I do have some ideas for ways that we can practice humanization in our daily lives based on lessons from my own experience.

The concept of agency is a complex one, but at its root, it refers to a person’s ability to act and make decisions for themselves. Their capacity to have an effect on the world around them. Their potential to exert influence over their life and circumstances.

A person’s agency is the trait that makes them an active agent in their own life and in the world as a whole. It’s a fundamental part of being human.

Far too often, we treat other people as objects rather than subjects. We act like they are passive props or, at the very best, supporting characters in the story of our lives. We, of course, are the heroes in this scenario.

What we fail to recognize is that each and every person is the subject of their own experience, the main character in their own story, the active agent in their own life. And when we live without this recognition, we deprive others of their agency.

This has happened in gruesomely blatant ways throughout history. Though we’ve become subtler about it, we still chip away at people’s agency today.

Racism and sexism remain rampant in the policies and rhetoric of the U.S. The experiences of sexual abuse survivors are denied and downplayed in public discourse.

Children go to school in fear of violence. Homeless people are dying in our streets. Mass incarceration has swallowed up countless individuals (predominantly people of color) who could and should be contributing to greater society, but instead, they’ve had that option taken away.

They’ve had their agency stripped from them, and they’re treated as less than human.

These are mostly systemic issues, but we do it on a personal level too. Every time we make someone feel like they aren’t good enough, like they’re “less than.” Or, we evaluate someone without taking the time to get to know them, or bring someone down in our quest to get ahead.

When we do these things, we are holding people back from being their best selves. We’re taking away their agency.

If we are to be compassionate people and to have a net positive influence on this world, we must become agents of agency.

We must affirm the agency of our fellow human beings and help those who have had their agency taken away from them to find it once again.

That means giving people room to thrive. For someone to have fully agency, they must exist in an environment that does not limit them based on any pre-existing characteristic.

We don’t know what it’s like to live in a world like that, but I do believe that we can create one by destroying any system, entity or idea that perpetuates discrimination and bias.

That won’t be easy, but if we truly want to support the agency of others, we must try.

It also means respecting the choices that people make. The world is far too full of prescriptive voices telling people what they should do, who they should be, how they should look and act. What if we let people decide these things for themselves?

Agency means respecting someone enough to accept the choices they make.

And it means lifting people up as they exercise their agency.

How different would the world be if, instead of pretending that life is a zero-sum game that we must win, we saw it as a cooperative effort toward common goals?

What if we supported one another as we each pursued our own good and the good of the world? Wouldn’t that be nice?

We can start creating that reality right here, right now, by empowering one another and affirming the uniqueness, wholeness and sufficiency of every single person around us.

There are a lot of elements that go into treating each other as human beings, but I think that agency is an important starting point. We are each agents, subjects, humans. And we each deserve to be treated as such.

May it be so in our lives today and every day.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

— 6 Steps to Guide You in the Process

By Jan Mostrom

I was sick this past week and ended up binging the new Amy Pohler show The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. I wasn’t sure what to expect and I was so touched by this Swedish tradition. The show is based on a book of the same name and shows how to navigate this beautiful process. This type of home organization is not sad, although it has big emotional components. It’s really more about the physical and emotional “cleaning out” we all should be doing while on the path of our lives.

This practice encourages speaking openly about the inevitability of death. It also about clearing away things, physical and emotional, to make room to live in the present right now. There are different approaches to this process, but here are six basic principles to help you get started:

  1. It’s not sad.
  2. Be gentle.
  3. No need to rush.
  4. Think about your legacy.
  5. Leave the hardest for last.
  6. Tell your family and friends about this process.

Here’s a bit more about this tradition that can be truly transformative:

  • “It’s not sad” means dealing with our mortality before we actually need to. The Swedes don’t think of this as morbid or sad. Rather, it’s a chance to talk openly about what bring us joy, and usually that’s not an abundance of “things.” Clearing out physical space often makes us appreciate and see the things we really love, and live in a more simple present state.
  • “Be gentle” during this process. So many of our physical things are attached to memories. Going through things that might have been set aside or hidden for years can be emotional and bring up memories for us. Being gentle to ourselves is so important to move forward during this process.
  • “No need to rush” this process. Giving yourself the time to take on one area at a time in a steady but not forced pace helps us do the work. It takes us years to accumulate our things, giving yourself permission to take time to gently go through it is just fine. Progress not perfection is a great mantra!
  • “Think about your legacy” and what you really want to leave behind. One of the main reasons Swedes utilize this process is so that our loved ones don’t have to deal with it when we are gone. It gives us control over what physical things we want to pass down and what we donate and let someone else use now. (A mere 1 percent of Swedish garbage actually ends up in a landfill. Repurposing and donating is a fantastic way to bless others.)
  • “Leave the best for last” can also be said leave the hardest for last. Start with things that aren’t that meaningful to you like a kitchens. Letting duplicate plates or utensils go can be a lot easier than letting go of grandma’s dresser or quilt. If we get some practice with less emotional things, when we get to the harder (best) things, it’s a bit easier to let some of them go.
  • “Tell your family and friends.” One of the things that is emphasized in this process is naturally talking about death with our family and friends. It’s inevitable for all of us, so if we normalize talking about it, things are much simpler when the actual time comes. Sharing memories, your things and your life with others during this simplifying process can make you closer to those you love.

So if you hear the term “death cleaning,” remember it’s more about living whatever days you have left in the best way possible.

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