Dying with the Dead
a Zoom workshop on Saturday, February 21
[art: Death and the Maiden by Marianne Stokes]
If death is the end—whether that ending is an abyss of nothingness or an eternity of something static—it feels like such a terrible and devasting verdict. That’s it. This was life. Mercy and meaning can often feel in short supply. But if instead of living within linearities of domination and conclusion, we can recover the generous circles and cycles of the soul where we all return to each other—then life is merely a chapter, or even just a sentence or a word, in a story that is long and deep and mysterious.
How would we approach our own mortality, and the deathbeds of those we love, if we knew that not only do we all come back, but we all come back to each other. What prayers would we say for our next lives? What actions would we take if we knew they mattered, really mattered, for our future selves? What questions would we ask the dying and ourselves if there was always another day, another life, another possibility of the soul?
To know the dead intimately is to know that no one dies alone and everyone is welcomed across the veil by mothers without end. What happens when we really know that the living are the dead to whom we are praying, that the dead will live again, that we are all the living and dead, always changing places, always dancing with each other, always finding a way back to each other’s hearts?
To experience this, to know this in our bones and in our souls, is to transform how we approach our own deaths and the deaths of those close to us. What if death is not the end? How then do we prepare for this mysterious beginning that awaits each of us? How do we help others to access their own long story through deep time? What happens to our relationships when we do?
We will explore specific practices for thinking about our own deaths that will expand and inform our capacities to be with the dying. We will summon all of our mothers to offer us the guidance we need to embrace our inevitable transformations and transform our understanding of what we have to offer those confronting their own mortality. We will step into the big considerations of our own mortality for none of us know the time of the end.
What if we had more than one life to get it all right?
This day-long workshop is appropriate for young and old, for those with a terminal diagnosis and those working as caregivers. Everyone dies—and few of us know the moment of that departure. This is work we can all begin to do together.
Dying with the Dead
Saturday, February 21 on ZOOM
session one: 1-2:30 est
session two: 3:30-5 est
Find out more and register here.
All sessions are on Zoom and recordings of each session are sent to all participants.
Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors. With her husband Clark Strand she is the co-founder of The Way of the Rose and the author of the book of the same name. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains. Her wisest teachers have been the dead themselves.
