" .....how to live with our dead."

A  baffled squirrel.....

but he did find something else to eat... clutching it to his chest...so cute...even though I know he's a rodent and he steals the food meant for the birds....he's still adorable. Or she.

Today, as I've been cleaning, and cleaning out - the cupboard under the sink( a horrible mess) and weeding - pulling up strands of choking convolvulus ( although I love its delicate mauve flowers) I've been thinking about an interview I read on The Daily Good website with Stephen Jenkinson who is a death doola.

He believes that 'what modern people suffer from most is 

culture failure:

 amnesia of ancestry and deep family story,

 phantom or sham rites of passage,

no instruction on how to live with each other,

the world around us,

or with our dead,

or with our history'.

I would have liked some instruction on how to live with Robin in his dying, how to have accompanied him gently, authentically instead of trying to keep him alive with banana smoothies.

Stephen Jenkinson doesn't like to use the language of loss ...

"When you say " I lost someone", you are describing an immense degree of neglect of emotional and psychic duty, the consequence of which is that you are cast adrift - not because of what you did, but because of what someone else did - he or she died....

There is nothing wrong with the word 'dying'. Someone I cared about died and as a consequence of that I'm lost.

Yes, Robin died and now it's me who is lost without his physical presence to tether me to myself and my world.

And I do feel it  - this lack of instruction, of ritual, of" how to live with our dead.".... somehow to contain  it, expose it ...how to live without him but with him in another form...an unrecognisable relationship for me.

 Stephen Jenkinson - 

 "The reality is that the death of someone else has completely dislodged you from your life.

So it is a mystery obviously.

Underneath all the observations we can make about it, death is very mysterious.

It seems to me the death of other people can be much more profound for us than our own death tends to be, 

and maybe there is something deeply proper about that because the presence of other people

 has more consequence for us, it seems, than our own presence does.

It's the same with loving myself...why do I find that so much harder than loving someone else?

I find it almost impossible to imagine my own death anyway...so the best I can do is to imagine how to live well ....and that could include how to die well too.

From his experiences of being exposed to so much dying and human suffering Stephen Jenkinson says, 

...."I experienced it as an invitation to inhabit the days that are granted to me with a kind of depth and precision and faithfulness that may never have been available to me had I not seen the kind of dying that I did".

Depth. Precision. Faithfulness.

The way I want to inhabit my days, having lived with Robin through his dying and death,

is with,

Compassion. Tenderness. Gratitude.