My days feel extra struggle-full, lately. Every way I try to move — physically, cognitively, emotionally — I seem to encounter more resistance than I’m used to. Some of the resistance is externally imposed. It is objectively difficult to move in this hot, wet air. In this information-dense zeitgeist. In the polarization and pain of fear-based ideology and counterintuitive —because digitally hyperconnected — isolation that seems to be the sea we are swimming in.
But any time I encounter resistance, I know I have to own some of it as mine. And I’ve learned that it’s often useful to explore the places I’m resisting. That stubborn, mulish, “nuh-uh” feeling is also, often, a finger pointing at something that would benefit from my scrutiny.
So why don’t I want to write, lately? And why do I, in particular, not want to write here? About death?
What I find when I poke into these stuck places is, aha!, my old frenemy, Ego. Showing up again to remind me how much I love to hate her, and how much I hate to love her.
And how ubiquitous and at-home she is, in a place like this.
Let me disambiguate: Ya’ll, there is SO MUCH EGO in deathwork.
It’s never not been true. When I first began doing this work, in hospice and in my spiritual communities, Death was NOT a sexy topic. We were, most of us, careful about who we talked to, who we told about what we did, and how we felt about it. We were all well-acquainted with the power of that information to shut down conversation. People often took a literal step back, away from us. We all noticed. We talked about this, amongst ourselves.
We didn’t talk about the ego component, though. That was everyone’s own private struggle.
Here’s something I wrote, back then:
It feels good to be good at something. It feels good to flex skilled muscles. And when what you’re good at is also something that can serve other people’s real needs, you can so easily be seduced out of humility. You can confuse your skills with your importance. Every one of us will fall into that trap from time to time. But stay in that place of inflation too long, and it will slowly kill your excellence. It will starve the intention that lies at the heart of all truly excellent work.
Excellence arises from the confluence of honed skills and pure intention. Excellence arises when you want something to BE, in the world, more than you want to be the agent of its becoming.
Not everyone is actively trying to effect an amicable separation from Ego. That might not be, at all, your thing, but I’ll admit that I it is mine. That I have spiritual and philosophical and, frankly, aesthetic reasons for making it a priority in my life. But even if I didn’t, here’s what I’ve learned about Ego’s coexistence with service: It gets in the way.
In those days, I was aiming lower. What I wanted to exist, in the world, was specific to this room, and these people: the one who is dying, the ones who are grieving. What I wanted to exist, in the world, was ease, for them. Comfort. A sense of support. And authentic, reverent witness to the significance of the death that all but one of them were living through.
Not only did I want ease, and comfort, and meaning to be, for these people, I wanted to be the person who brought it. But sometimes (and of course) my presence was not needed. Sometimes there was someone else who could provide the comfort and connection I could not. And sometimes what the people in that room needed most was something to push against — a way to express their anger at their fear.
Sometimes the target of that anger was me.
I took it personally in the beginning. Because I was taking everything personally. Because Ego. But I didn’t think I had an Ego problem. How could I? Look at what kind, selfless, hard work I was doing!
Ego is sneaky.
Just as treacherous, but much less upsetting, were the times when the people in that room loved me. Talked to me about the light that I brought, thanked me for advice, praised my insight. That felt so good. And suddenly I was right in the center of the experience, again. Me and Ego.
My partner sometimes refers to me, and to people who do the work that I do, as vultures. He’s a little bit kidding, but also not. He’s speaking from his own lived experience — from a place of feeling that the dying and death of someone he loved, and the grief surrounding it, were picked over for ego-sustenance by the people ostensibly sent to help.
I wish I didn’t understand what he’s pointing at, with that word: vultures. I wish I hadn’t seen it myself. Seen it, even and occasionally, in myself.
I am, actually, a big fan of vultures. The exquisite design of them, the utterly necessary piece of the puzzle of the ecosystem that they are. And, to turn the critique on its head a bit, what vultures do, for the dead and for the living, is perfect. It is perfectly clean. They can eat a carcass felled by any disease, and pass that flesh through their system and what they release is clean. Bioavailable. They purify what they eat, and return it as food for the earth.
I wish we were as clean as vultures, we deathworkers.
Instead, and all too often, I have walked into a room, or into a conversation, or up to a podium, thinking that I have something special and unique to offer to my fellow mortal beings who all live in the exact same proximity to Death as I do. And if feels good to feel that special.
The sustenance I take from those encounters, when Ego is riding shotgun, is not nutritious, for me, nor is it something I use and return, a clear channel, to the service of the world. It’s just empty calories swelling my own sense of self-importance.
Here’s what’s true: When I stand next to a deathbed, I have the least knowledge of anyone in the room. I have some experience and some skills. I have some techniques and some confidence. That's all. The person in the bed, the people who are journeying... they know things I will never know. They know everything. When I do my work perfectly, all that I do is open a door. They are the celebrity arriving at the awards show, and I am the anonymous person who respectfully opens the car door and then steps back into the shadows. That red carpet isn't my path. It's theirs.
Now, though, Death IS sexy. It’s been a business for a long time, but now it’s a business in a whole different way. Now there’s the Death Positivity Movement. Now there are death doulas who are paid to provide the basic service of being with the dying and their families that used to just be part of being a human in community. Now there are books and TED talks and workshops and seminars and experiential events. Now there are people vying for inclusion on the “A” List of Deathstyle Influencers, competing with each other to ‘splain to you the one experience that is, literally, universal.
I’m doing it too. I’m a death doula. I facilitate death rehearsal workshops. I write this Substack. That’s not what I tell myself I am doing. (I tell myself I am using this Substack to provide some self-imposed pressure to finally write the damn book about my relationship with Death that I’ve been promising to write forever.) One of the reasons I haven’t monetized this thing is that I don’t want it to be financially important to me that you find me wise, or helpful, or uniquely insightful about this topic.
Because in this new space, where people seem to want to tell us we’re cool, for doing this work, where people seem to want to hear what we have to say… In this space where the stories we told each other, casually but compulsively (because we didn’t have anyone else to tell them to) are now met by audiences with oohs and aahs… In this space, Ego is like, well, pick your metaphor. A kid in a candy store. A hog in shit?
A bull in a china shop?
I want to tell the stories I’ve always wanted to tell, from the time I began doing this work. And it is so exciting to finally feel that people want to hear them. But it is dangerous, too. Because I can forget that the stories I have to tell aren’t really mine. And that of the people who were in the rooms where I collected these stories, I am the one who walked away largely untouched.
I have spent twenty years privileged to be granted proximity — physical and emotional — to people in the very hardest parts of their lives. I need to be careful that I don’t take that privilege, that I don’t take what I learned from their pain, and turn it into the Me Show.
That feels like a tricky tightrope to balance on. Every word that I write, here, is a sliding step along that wire. The further out I get, the more internal resistance I meet. And that makes sense. I’m afraid of falling. All around me I see people who, from my perspective at least, look like they’re falling off this tightrope. Some of them look like they dove.
So. This resistance is about Ego. About not wanting to dance with her, again. About realizing, again, that I’ve never stopped. This resistance is about the hopelessness of wanting to be pure, which is a want that drives me and I hope it doesn’t drive you because not only is it impossible it’s also a really uncomfortable way to be.
The process I’ve been taught is to name the resistance, thank it (because it was only and always trying to keep me safe), and release it.
Thank you, Ego, for the warning. For knocking to let me know you’re just outside the door.
Thank you, Ego, for the challenge to keep doing the work and to do so in a way that serves my community more than it serves You.
Thank you, Ego, for reminding me that you’re always here.
I wish I could release You.
I think I will one day.
I think I will finally and completely release you along with my very last breath.