The latest video from Seattle singer-songwriter Noah Gundersen is a relentless attack on the tear ducts. If its visuals, directed gorgeously by Ryan Booth, don’t make you cry, Gundersen’s plaintive voice and aching lyrics might. This track, “Jealous Love,” is self-explanatory in the best ways a folk song can be. It’s got an immediate emotional accessibility reminiscent of The Swell Season — Gundersen’s credibility and sincerity are unshakable from the first note. And that’s just the song.
The video would seem manipulative in its use of heartbreaking imagery, if it didn’t also feel deeply true. Gundersen’s lyrics are perfectly embodied by the (remarkable) actors performing over them — the lead, Ted Johnson, plays a man who has, in the twilight of his life, lost exactly the kind of love Gundersen sings of wanting for himself. “Jealous Love” takes repeat viewings, if your heart can handle it, in order to appreciate how intricately bound Gundersen’s performance is to the actors’. Does the voice singing belong to the young version of the old man onscreen? Or is it perhaps the man’s adult son (played by Marc Menchaca), who knows what he hopes for because he’s seen it lived in front of him? It could be either, and it could be both. From any direction, this song and video are a (devastating) triumph.
(Does that make me a death dude? I’ll have to ask them.)
Who here is an expert in ACTUALLY dying???
Have you done it?
To achieve expert status, one usually has to be proficient in something or have done something over and over again. Hmmm… kind of tough with the death thing”, eh?. Even those who have had near death experiences are still amateurs in a way– because they’re back! They didn’t do it right the first time! 😉
This is why we LOVE the title of this book and the work that Richard Wagner, PhD has been doing for the last 30 years. Since we are all amateurs at “the death thing”, there is actually a road map for those who are dying and will be dying. Is that you?
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Richard Wagner, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist/sex therapist in private practice in Seattle, WA, 1981 to present. He has over 30 years of experience working with terminally ill, chronically ill, elder, and dying people in hospital, hospice, and home settings. He facilitates support groups for care-providers as well as healing and helping professionals. He provides grief counseling for survivors both individually and in groups settings. He is the Founder of PARADIGM/Enhancing Life Near Death, a cutting edge, health related nonprofit organization.
Dr. Wagner was awarded the prestigious University of California, San Francisco Chancellor’s Award for Public Service in 1999 for this very work.
He is also the author of Longfellow And The Deep Hidden Woods, a critically acclaimed children’s book that touches upon the topics of death and bereavement.
Dr. Wagner was born in Chicago and grew up in Niles, Illinois, a Northwest suburb. He left home to attend the seminary after high school and graduated from Oblate College in Washington, DC in 1972. He moved to Oakland, California in 1972 and studied at The Jesuit School of Theology (part of the Graduate Theological Union) in Berkeley. He was ordained as a priest in November, 1975 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1981. Dr. Wagner lived in Oakland until 1978 and moved to San Francisco until 1999. He then relocated to Seattle, Washington where he lives today.
ABOUT YOUR HOSTS +The Death Chicks show was created to shine light on the tabooed topics of death, dying, grief, and loss. We’re listening to all perspectives and having the conversations that we as human beings who live and die on this earth, need to have, without fear of judgement.
+Patty Burgess Brecht is the President of Possibility for Doing Death Differently and Teaching Transitions. She is an End-of-Life Educator and Certified Grief Recovery Specialist. She is the developer of the End of Life Specialist Training and Certification (CEOLS), and teaches individuals and organizations how to Do Death Differently by not being overwhelmed or afraid of death, but to seek and experience the joy, the passion, and the even the exhilaration inherent in the honor of BEing with the dying. Her video-based, online, inspiring course is used in hospices, hospitals, home care, colleges and universities across the country and is now open to individuals who are drawn to this work.
+Myste Lyn is an Empowerment Coach who specializes in supporting women recovering from loss. Myste is an intuitive healer who reconnects women with their inner place of peace. She specializes in reducing fears, alleviating guilt, and creating inner confidence. http://www.bittersweetblessing.com/
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As we like to say NO ONE is getting out of this gig alive! So we may as well talk about, learn about it, plan for it, lean into it, and feel comfortable with it when it is our time or the time of our loved ones.
Please share and help us get the word out!
Can you think of someone:
who is facing their own death and might be comforted by a roadmap
who is burdened by very heavy feelings, and could use some help re-entering life after a death?
If you do, please pass this invitation on (or after the fact, recording…).
You never know when a suggestion out of the blue from YOU, can give another a reason to go on. This could make a true difference for another. And there are people, only a mouse click away to with whom to connect and share.
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Sometimes when something unbelievable happens, it’s so outrageous (usually in a good way) that it seems like you’re in a dream.
Life is what you make of it. So if you dare to dream, envision what you want it to be – it becomes your reality. It goes right along with the saying “You can be anything you want to be…”
In dreams anything is possible, impossible becomes possible. In life there are limitations with unseen forces that work along with our motives to confuse us more on the path to fulfillment. Life is but a dream – nothing is so easy as to dream it and make it happen right that moment without obstacles standing in way.
Humor takes the sting away; it humanizes us; it helps us keep our perspective. Humor enriches us; it educates us; it brings us joy. Humor doesn’t dissolve the pain or make our life any less poignant, but it does help make things more bearable. That’s my philosophy, and I’m happy to share it with you on a weekly basis. I hope that if you enjoy what you see, you will take the opportunity to share it with others.
I could feel a hesitation when I sat to write about death. In our culture, it is largely taboo to discuss. A subject we don’t like to talk about if we can avoid it. But sometimes we can’t escape it, like the other evening when my daughter came up and asked what happens when you die.
Death may seem to be an inevitable part of life, yet if we look more carefully, we find that death isn’t so black and white, at least with some creatures. Bacteria, for instance, are single-celled organisms that split in half in order to reproduce. It’s a riddle, when you consider it. Which half is now the “original”? Those halves in turn will split in half, and the process continues indefinitely (unless a bacteria is eaten, wholloped by antibiotics, or otherwise killed by outside forces). In a way, these creatures are immortal, never aging. And it’s not just bacteria that never age. There is the hydra, which seems to be a creature capable of living without age, and the “immortal jellyfish”, which does age, but then can revert back to its youthful life, repeating the trick over and over again.
More philosophically, we can notice in the woods that some things that “die” become more alive in their death. Trees are a wonderful example. After they die, the party begins. Mushrooms, beetles, larvae, birds, ants and hundreds of other creatures move in, turning the tree, which was once mostly “dead” wood, into a thriving community that may or may not be properly considered to be a living being. If you are eager to discount this possibility, remember that you yourself are composed of 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells, and without those bacteria you would die. In a way, even in life we are much like a dead tree, more community than individual.
That’s one way to think of death. It may not be so much an end of life as a spreading out of life, the party over, with all the individuals moving on to other things. But the reason we humans fear death, of course, is because we feel that we possess a consciousness, and fear that the consciousness will evaporate upon dying. Some religions give us hope, promising that our consciousness continues after the body disintegrates. But other religions confront death in other ways. I remember a story my brother told me about a Buddhist garden he was walking through in Thailand. It had beautiful flowers and stone walkways, and there, along the path, was a small plaque. It had a picture of two people walking, hand in hand. It was only upon closer inspection that he noticed one of the people was a skeleton. For him, it was a reminder that death awaits us all, and can come at any moment. This can drive us into fear, but it can also be an emancipation. It can lead us to release our clinging to the future, and to begin appreciating where we are. This moment takes on a clarity when we remember that death might come in the next minute, the next hour, or the next day. There is little time to waste on being on “cruise control”, having arguments, or wishing that we were somewhere else. This newspaper in your hands has a texture that is easy to miss. The face of someone you see every day is actually changing in every moment. Every cloud is unique. Each breath is more precious than a truckload of money.
This, perhaps, is when death can transform from taboo into one’s favorite subject. It’s not about being morbid. It’s about death’s invaluable reminder that this moment, right now, is worthy of our fullest love and attention.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge the death of famed British neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks.
1993: Portrait of British-born neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks standing in the admittance driveway of Beth Abraham Hospital with his arms crossed over his chest, New York City.
In February, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times revealing that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer, after earlier melanoma in his eye spread to his liver.
“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote. “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”
Earlier this summer I read Dr Sacks’s memoir, On the Move. I love it. It’s an interesting memoir by a fascinating personality. And while reading I discovered that we had a dear friend in common, Thom Gunn. What a small world! So I decided to send him a note.
Dear Dr Sacks,
I just finished reading your memoir, On The Move. What an amazing life you’ve lived.
Of all the marvelous things you’ve done and all the fascinating people you mentioned in your book nothing surprised me more than your close friendship with Thom Gunn. I was a friend of Thom too and I lived directly across Cole Street from him. I moved to the flat at 1207 Cole Street in 1979. At the time I was working on my doctorate in clinical sexology at the Institute For The Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
I didn’t know Thom well at first. However, I would regularly see him walking both in our neighborhood and elsewhere in town. He was always in his leathers, rain or shine, and used to think to myself, “What a mensch!”
It finally dawned on me that he lived across the street from me.
Once he saw me in my roman collar. (I was ordained a catholic priest in 1975 at the age of 25 in Oakland, CA. I had come out to my local superiors; I was a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, before I was ordained. Like I said, I was working on my doctorate to become a sex therapist and prepare for an upfront gay ministry.) Thom smiled at me when he saw me; I blushed and told him what I just told you. He was fascinated, but I also believe he thought I was a twit. He probably was right.
I knew nothing about Thom other than he was my neighbor. Then one day I was in a bookstore on Haight Street and there was a photo of Thom in the window advertising a reading. That’s when I started asking around about him. Despite his cult status within the gay community, he was the most unassuming person. I was honored to have a personal connection with him.
I finished my doctorate in 1981. My dissertation, Gay Catholic Priests; A Study of Cognitive and Affective Dissonance was directed by Wardell Pomeroy. A firestorm of media attention followed. The media branded me as THE gay priest, as if. I think Thom read about me in the New York Times because next time he saw me he clapped me on the back and said, “Well done.”
No sooner did I complete my doctorate, and because of the media attention my public coming out caused, the leadership of my religious community in Rome began a process of dismissal against me. I was devastated and lost. I was even getting death threats. Thom was always so supportive and encouraging.
Thom was always so solicitous about my wellbeing. He knew how difficult life had become for me. And both of us found ourselves on the forefront of caring for friends who were dying of AIDS. One of my landlords died in 1986.
Thom introduced my housemate and I to Augie Kleinzahler and his girlfriend, Caroline Lander, who lived only a few blocks from us in Cole Valley. We all became great friends and copious amounts of strong drink were consumed. I wonder, do you know Augie?
When Thom turned sixty I surprised him with a homemade German chocolate cake. I told him he was the oldest person I knew. This made him laugh and he called me a whippersnapper.
In 1992 the surviving landlord sold the Cole Street duplex and I and my housemate moved to Oak and Ashbury. Sadly, I didn’t get to see Thom as much as before. I move up here to Seattle in 1999 because I could no longer afford to live in SF. I was deeply saddened to learn of Thom’s death in 2004. He was such a great guy, what a marvelous soul.
Again, thank you for your memoir; it was grand getting to know you on a personal level. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat when it came out in the mid-eighties and loved it. But I never guessed you and Thom knew each other or that you actually visited him when I lived across the street from him. What a small world. I wish I had known you back then.
Anyhow, thank you for the bringing me this unexpected flood of memories of Thom. I wonder what he would have made of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges). I contend that we got marriage equality only because we walked through AIDS first. I think Thom would have agreed with me.
All the best,
richard
Richard Wagner, M.Div., Ph.D., ACS
To my astonishment, Oliver wrote back; I mean that literally, a handwritten note. Apparently, he never used a computer.
Dear Dr. Wagner (can I say Richard?), 6/60/15
I am greatly interested and greatly moved, by your letter — your courage in being honest and forthright, at a time and on a subject bound, sooner or later, to cause your ejection from the priesthood. In another few years perhaps, with Pope Francis at the helm, these last bastions of Catholic bigotry may have fallen.
I like to think of you as living across the street when I visited Thom, and glad to know that he appreciated you and your works. I still miss him deeply — there were not too many people with whim I could be entirely open — and I like to think that his ghost is pleased that my title came from his poem. (I find it a huge relief being open now to all and sundry {Oliver came out earlier this year} — I am so glad I completed my book before I became ill).
And what a liberation, an affirmation for us all that the Supreme Court voted as it did. I suspect that Ruth Bader Ginsberg, quite ill now, stayed on to ensure the 5/4 decision.
