You're listening to Amma mea podcast. Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. No fancy words today, no jokes, no flowery metaphors and tricky punctuation, no alliteration, strategic repetition, no rightly tricks. Grief has no time for my bullshit. Loss isn't interested in how clever your sentences might be, or how they
sound read out loud. Midwomen know that there isn't a damned thing that can step in and tap dance away the empty middle of losing someone you love, that it rearranges you inside and out, opens up a space and floods it with missing and with resentment or anger maybe and with longing. Grief comes to everyone, some sooner than others,
with brutal speed or an agonizing crawl. The most extraordinary of ordinary in ever pains the one that can knock you of course and leave you breathless and reeling, aching and empty. For years, I've had the outrageous good fortune of still being able to touch a screen and hear my mother complaining about something my brother isn't doing, or to see my father's face all too close as he tries to work out why the image on the iPad
has tipped on its side. I know how precious that is for as long as I get it, because I have sat with my beloved and held him as his excellent mother left us. I have missed an old friend's slow smile, knowing I'll never hear him laugh again. I've seen the terrible gap left by my teenage boyfriend. I've watched a wonderful man's daughter grow up without him. I've mourned the loss of babies I never got to hold. We've all felt just a little of it, or much
too much. But I know my outrageous good fortune today. My children are safe on their damn screens, and my brother his means, my friend, family, and my partner in life are all still going about their ordinary days. There I go, trying to pretty up these words about the worst thing that can happen to us. Midwomen lie in
bed and count their people, silently tallying their luck. We don't want to talk about it, but if it hasn't already visited, grief is looming, and so we care, and we nurture and soothe, and we hope we can keep it at bay if we just don't mention it. Today we're mentioning it because silence is lonely and grief is the price we pay for love, as a wise woman said, and a life without loss is a life without love,
and mid women know that isn't worth the trade. There's the solace in sharing always, and mid women know that too.
Hello.
I'm Holly Wainwright and I am mid midlife, mid family, mid identity crisis. And today we're talking about the thing we're not allowed to talk about. And I don't mean because someone will wag a finger at us if we do. I mean because it goes to the core of everything we're afraid of. Even if many of the women listening to this today are living there. Right now, we're talking about grief. If you're thinking that this episode sounds too much,
then for you right now, perhaps you're right. But if you're thinking it sounds heavy and difficult and depressing, then you should stay because it's actually anything but thanks to our extraordinary guest, doctor Jackie Bailey is a death walker. She walks with the dying, and she brings comfort and ritual to their people. She's an interfaith minister and a
funeral celebrant, and she's a writer. I met her at a regional book event last year, and after she'd stood up and discussed her book The Eulogy, in front of an audience on the panel, we were both on Her book line snaked around the block with people wanting to buy it. Why because of her own experience of grief, having lived, as she's about to tell you, in close proximity to death since she was seven, and that's given her a particularly beautiful, simple, comforting but no bullshit perspective
on it. In this conversation, we talk about that, and we talk about what to do if someone you love is dying, and we talk about what to do if that person is you, And we talk about the kind of spiritual practices that actually soothe, and we talk about how there are no shortcuts to getting over it. And we talk about how to write a eulogy for someone you love but maybe didn't even like very much. It's a serious, important, sometimes funny conversation about something that none
of us want to talk about apart from Jackie. Jackie, you are an interfaith minister, a funeral celebrant. Is that what we call this funeral celebrant?
Yeah?
But I've also seen you described as a death walker. What is a death walker?
It's not a character from the game of Striones coming in today's unfortunately. I mean, anyway, it depends on which I tell. Yeah, that's what Senath Farrago, who's like a you know, guiding light in the deathy kind of movement in Australia and in the world.
I have to just stop you there because I've heard you on another podcast talk about Deathy's. You were like talking about your work and you know your research, and you said this one's for the other Deathy's And I was like, okay, step back, what's a deathy.
Or the people like me who are kind of obsessed with that part of life.
Yeah, so we.
Did research it.
Yeah, yeah, you sort of your death He's That's where I'm most comfortable. So yeah, I'm far more comfortable officiating a funeral than a wedding, for example. Yeah, it's just my comfortable space. It's really intimate, meaningful, authentic, or a lot of stuff is stripped away. Maybe also because I'm from a big family, so I'm really used to negotiating the or the issue that come up in that context.
It's just my I wouldn't.
Say it's my happy place. It's not my happy place. It's not happy, but it's my most comfortable.
You sort of study to be an inter faith minister, don't you. Yeah, it's like and you're ordained and everything, but it's a non religious role, that's right. Yeah, And I've seen you say that other people who you went through that with they might do things like be prison chaplains or like non religious pastors kind.
Of Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right.
But that you For you, it was always about death, that's what I read you say, Why do you think that? Is?
Basically because since I was seven, about seven years old, my sister was dying and it took her thirty one years to die, which is a long time to live with that possibility. So I was obsessed with it from a very young age, thinking about the meaning of life and what happens after we die.
Can you give a little bit of context to that, because I've read your beautiful eulogy, which is a fictionalized version of this story. But for the people listening, when you say your sister was dying from the age of seven, what do you mean what happened?
So she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor when she was ten and I was seven, and they thought she would only live for about a year. But she lived for another thirty odd years, gradually deteriorating though, so you know, physical and intellectual handicaps. And when she did eventually die, by then she was in a group home and she couldn't swallow or speak anymore.
So it was a long time.
It was a long time of watching her die, obviously not thinking the whole time about Like I didn't think in those terms when I was with her, But there's always part of you waiting for the phone call in the middle of the night. So nowadays my sisters died and both my parents have died, I don't really have to have that feeling anymore.
I can turn my phone off.
That must be a strange shift, because for almost your whole life you.
Have I mean, I don't think you switch from one to the other immediately either. It's sort of like any kind of I guess trauma that you're always attuned to it.
So do you think from seven year old you And don't worry, I'm not going to try and be an amateur psychologist. He's very far from my area of expertise, But do you think that your need to like understand get your hands around death almost is that where it comes from. This is sort of thinking or being told this is going to happen to your sisters.
Yeah, definitely, definitely, because when you're that young as well. I mean she and I were very close. I felt like she was me and I was her. You know, there's that boundary is pretty blurry with siblings who are quite close to you.
Because you're from a big family seven and you're the youngest.
Yeah, I'm the younger, so you had a.
Lot of like looking forward and up and trying to understand what the hell's going on in this big, chaotic family.
Yeah. I mean, it's just what you're used to. It's just what you grow up with. But Allison was mine. Allison was mine and I was hers. She kind of looked out for me in that big, complicated, messy Catholic family household. Yeah, so when she got sick, it was
really devastating for everybody. Which is kind of funny too because this may sound sort of weird, but when you've got that many kids, you kind of think, well, maybe the parents won't be so like they won't care as much because they've got so many, which.
Is not the case at all, control these backups.
And I've got an only child, and I now know that the more you have, the more it grows, the more the concern grows. So Allison's illness really transformed our whole family. It brought them back, brought them, brought some of my sisters back to the family who had kind of tried to leave. I think it brought out a better side of both of my parents, who were pretty troubled people and were you know, throughout our lives. But you know, Dad stopped drinking for a long time until
sort of the end of his life. And Mum, I mean, Mum kept gambling. But she she was just much nicer to Alison and I than she was to my older sisters. I mean, it's that's a relative term, but yeah, she genuinely was because she really cared about Alison so and I could see that, whereas I don't know if my older sisters got to see that that's part of her the way that I did up close.
So when you say that, you know you're comfortable around death and the rituals around death and a good death a good goodbye. That's exactly what most people are very uncomfortable about, right, I mean for a lot of people, they will do almost anything to avoid talking about death, talking to someone who's experienced loss knowing how to behave around it. And you must, I guess, through your work
come up against that a lot. And is there any kind of pattern that you see in people that you work with around death who are whether they're comfortable or not with it? I guess does it make a difference.
So I'm going to have a think about that in terms of the people who themselves are dying versus the people around them. Yeah, and before death then obviously after death.
And so that's if you have a terminal illness or you know, and it's like this.
Is yeah, you know care, paliative care, that's right, end of life care.
You're in that phase of your life.
So you're switching from a medical intervention to try and make you better to medical intervention to just try and lessen your pain, make you comfortable. So those people they want to get their house in order, they want to make generally, I mean it's not always at all, but generally, once they've made that transition to going Okay, I'm not fighting the cancer so much anymore as trying to make sure I have good quality of life for this last bit of my life. They're pretty prepared to tell you
what they want. You know, I've met some people in that context because they want to meet the person who might be their funeral celebrant.
Yeah, in the shame way you would meet a wedding self. Yeah.
And I really do like being able to meet the person beforehand, because you don't want to get up and be like, oh this person was and you've never even met them before. I always make the point at a funeral to say, like, I didn't know this person that well, So I'm going to leave all the deep, meaty.
Stories to you guys.
But my job's just to facilitate, and generally what I say at a funeral is It's kind of what I've learned is that it's sort of my job to let you know that you have permission to say and feel all the things that you're feeling all of them, and do what you need to do. That's what I've realized over the years. But anyway, we were talking about people and their attitudes and their ability to talk about death.
So people who know that they're dying are fairly practical in my experience, Like my mother in law died a few years ago, and she was very clear about what she wanted. When we put together the slide show for her funeral. My husband had put it together and he had recorded her telling him what to put in it, and he put that in over the top of the music, which was so it was great. She was like, you know, I don't want it to be too sad, so do
this and do that. We're just you know, laugh, crying and all that sort of thing the people around them. Some people, it varies, but some people don't want you to talk about it. They don't want their person to be talking about it, and that can be hard because if that person wants to talk about it and nobody around them will talk to them about it. You know, the last thing that they want in life is to be heard and seeing. This last thing with any of us. It's the first and last thing we want is to
be seen and heard. And if the people who love you keep telling you that you're going to be all right, you know, and they're doing it because they can't face the pain. So it's all understandable.
There'll be people listening to this who have suffered loss or are at the moment maybe caring for a parent who you know, may not have a lot of time, or you know, there's a sort of slow process. Does it make any I don't know quite what I'm asking here, But does it make any difference to the shock of the loss when it happens for the people around them? Well, if you know that it's been coming a long time.
No, unfortunately, Sorry, I'm not not at all.
I was just sort of thinking.
I mean, you know, yes and no, like you do know it's coming, so maybe it does.
I don't know.
I've had both. So that's the other reason I do this work. I've had a lot of deaths. My dad died suddenly when I was twenty.
Three, and you found him.
Yeah, yeah, it was Christmas Eve and you had a heart attack in his sleep. So that was sudden, and that probably took me ten years to get over, I reckon. But there were other things that I had to deal with, you know, which I kind of talked about in theology
with Alison and my mum who died just few months ago. Now, like Allison was sick, so probably took me six to twelve months physically, because grief is a physical process as well, for the cells of my body to kind of imbibe the knowledge that this person was no longer around.
Tell me a little bit about that, because that's what I mean. Obviously it's not my air of expertise, but it's yours. Grief isn't an emotion, right, It's something much more.
It's a found in all consumed, whole of body, whole of spirit experience.
Yeah, because often people they want to know, like, they give themselves a hard time about I'm not over it. I can why aren't I over it? I'm looking around and I'm seeing other people who've lost a parent or a sibling or something, and they're walking around looking normal, and I'm not. Like there is some reassurance or validation in understanding that grief is a whole process as you.
Yeah, we're very like, you know, we're kind of scientific culture, so we like to think, oh, there's science behind this, So if well there is, that's that's the comfort that I can offer that it is a physiological process. You know, when you lose someone, it's like a shock. It's a body shock, and you go through shock. So if you just had a massive car accident. Your body would go into shock. Same kind of thing. When you lose a person,
you know, there's neurological changes. That's why you get the fuzzy brain, and you know you cannot concentrate for very long periods of time when someone's just died. Someone asked you a question, You're like, oh, I don't know. Lots of fatigue, but insomnia just you might be getting sick.
When there is research that shows that people you know have lost a lifelong partner, there is a higher rate of death amongst that cohort in the year following the loss of their partner, which is why you hear these beautiful stories of someone dying, you know, a month after their wife or their husband or a partner has died.
And people will say they died of a broken heart.
And essentially they did.
Yeah that's amazing. Yeah, So, is there anything you can do to help someone who's grieving. We know you can't get a shortcut, you can't solve anything. What are the practical things you can do that might actually help people
in their darkest moment? I mean, I know we're jumping around a bit here, but I did want to ask you about partners, because a conversation that people I know have had for who have been who have lost parents perhaps is that if a parent is part of a couple and the other person is still there, they are sort of the primary griever, if you like. Sometimes the child, the adult child is stepping in to try and look after that person, encourage them to process their grief in
a certain way. But there might be like a generation or divide there that means that the parent, the remaining pair parent doesn't want to deal with it in the way that you're trying to pushing them to deal with it. You must see these kind of family dynamics in your work around a lot. Is there anything that works in like trying to respect how other people's grief needs to play out?
Well, I think you just answered your own question, Holly, just yet respecting the process and just trying to take care of when you're trying to take care of someone. So if that happens, say so, after my dad died,
there was my mum. You know that generally parents don't die at the same time, and if they're still together, so one is the widow or the widower, Like what's playing out is again your thing with your mum, it's always the same, like that dynamic will just play out in whatever context and whatever the thing is going on in life, and this is the loss of you know, your dad, her husband, the same thing will play out. So with me and my mum, it was I shifted.
I was all about trying to make her and my sister Allison, who she was caring for, better in all aspects of the word, better quality of life, you know, being more social, gamble less, you know, get Alison out and doing things whatever. And I drew them up a budget and I was like called all these like associations or whatever, and just classic that's just what I've always done with both of those people. And she ignored all of it, all of it, and obviously that may me mad.
So you know that the same thing like kind of understanding that you, you know, the adult child, you're not suddenly wiser than your parent. You're just trying to do the same thing that you've probably always tried to do or have tried to do for a.
Long time, which is a certainself and make and make them know that you know better than them.
That is so true. I'm sure there are lots of people listening to this. There are lots of people around me who are going but Dad just won't move into a home or whatever it might be like, or won't sell the house, or won't go out and join the bingo group or well, you know whatever, like, and I know that he needs to do that. You can't just sit home and be sad about mom. Yeah, can you just sit home?
Yeah, of course, I mean as long as he's still eating and you know, getting enough water and ideally enough exercise. Like that's I guess what my default is and what my advice and adverted commas is is just to address yourself to the physical needs of a person, because you know, all the social stuff and like, you just can't make someone even when they're like top of their game. You can't make them let alone when they're at the bottom
of their game, you know. So you know, like go around and mow the lawn, come in and check that there's food and that it's being eaten, organized meals on wheels.
If you think it's necessary.
Just the physical stuff, you can do that sort of level of bossy, bossy daughter stuff of like you know, you're coming with me to the cardiologist on extent you just show up and you take them. You can do that sort of stuff absolutely, and you should and they'll they will feel loved if it's I'm thinking now of dads. Dads feel loved when you do things for them. Moms feel loved when you do things for them, but when
you tell them and when you give them things. Gifts are also really a good thing to do if you've got a grieving friend or someone like that in your life. Yeah, like food, dropping off the food, you know, you know, all the.
Stuff that you do culturally anyone.
Yeah, the lasagna, the chocolate. I've got friends who every time I lose someone, they send me like a huge crate of Cadbury dairy milk.
Yeah.
I'm like, okay, yeah, I've been grievy for six months. You can see it right here.
But you feel loved when the dairy milk I do.
It turns up, And like, if it didn't turn up, I'd be kind of sad.
I wonder if because we're back to the feeling of how everybody not everybody because there's Deathy's, but how very many people are very uncomfortable with this. It's like people are looking for a short cut to get through it and all the chocolate and the lazanis are useful because people need to feel loved and not forgotten. But there isn't a shortcut, right.
Oh no, there's no shortcut again. It's like recovering from an illness. You know, people want a shortcut there too. Generally, you know, people who are suffering from long COVID and all that sort of thing, they can tell you how there's no shortcuts.
You just have to persist.
You have to make sure that you are getting more sleep, and just acknowledge that you your body is not what it was the day before your parent or whoever it was died. It's different, so you have to kind of like menopause or something, you have to behave differently. You know, all this stuff, eat well, blah blah blah. I do think you know how there's health ratings on foods. I feel like there should be a mental health rating on like chocolate should definitely have a five star health rating.
In my view, it is literally the only thing for me anyway that can change my mood from one moment to another. I mean, obviously, yeah, I don't dream can take drugs. I'm a forty seven year old mother.
Very responsible, but chocolate can.
So just make sure you've got a stash because if you're really low and you just need a bit.
Of a shift, get up and move to a different room.
I'm not saying you have to go out for a run, because no, my knees wouldn't appreciate that. Literally, just move from the one seat to another, and that moves yourselves. That changes your physical kind of being and shifts things in your body because it's all happening in your body. It's like any kind of PTSD. You've got to know that it's happening and do something physical to.
Shift the mood.
I was interested that you use the language when you talked about your father's lost. Then it took me ten years to get over it. I don't know if you did say get over it.
Probably did.
But I've also heard you say that your relationship with somebody doesn't end because they're gone, which i'd love to hear you talk about a bit. But also, what does get over it look like?
Do you think, yes, thank you for picking me up on that, because you don't get over someone. You never get over losing someone. But it's more like the Eastern European approach of you know, the grief or the loss just becomes part of you and you just know how to live with it. So when I when I'm thinking of my dad, I didn't get over it so much
as integrated. You integrate the knowledge and the fallout from it. So, you know, with my dad was complicated because we had, you know, stuff that we hadn't dealt with while he was alive. And that's that was hard losing when you lose someone when you're still fairly immature. Because that was twenty three, but I still wasn't very mature, So we hadn't got to that place where we could just kind of chat and respect each other. I don't know. Maybe
you never maybe we never would have. I don't know, but I feel like as I got older, we would have turned a corner, but we hadn't. So I kind of in my relationship with my dad, even though he had died, I still I kind of had to work through all of that still, which is so annoying because you think, if they've died, like, surely can we.
Draw a line under that? You know? Yeah, in that relationship, No.
I'm sure there are people who one of the in a way. Often when we lose someone, they have to then be considered to be an angel and a perfect person. Right, Yeah, that's many people, if they're losing, will have lost family members, whether it's a parent or anyone who was not a perfect angel, who their relationship may have been. I don't know. It's such an overused euphemism, but complicated that can make things even more complicated in grief, right, because there's guilt
that comes along with that. Why do you think we need to sort of venerate people who are gone? Like, is it okay to speak ill of the dead?
Of course, of course it is. Of course it's okay to speak ill of the dead.
But I guess it's like it's a one sided conversation though, so they don't have a right of reply anymore. So, I don't know, I feel like there's part of us that a sense of fairness kicks in. It's like, well, I can't really, you know, say that anymore.
It's also you can't resolve it with them anymore.
So saying it is just feels like leaving the like opening like you've got an open wound, which is your grief, and now you're just sticking fingers in it rather than putting like covering it with savlon.
And making it feel better.
So yeah, that tendency to turn someone into a saint, definitely. I've seen it at funeral after funeral, and I've also seen people get annoyed at that funeral after funeral It's like, well, you know, he wasn't a saint, so why are we all talking about him like he was a saint? So people appreciate a little like some truth bombs as well,
to mix it up. At my mum's funeral a few months ago, my brother and I delivered the eulogies, and yeah, we both acknowledged how hard things had been, how complicated it had been, and how she had been an angry mother, but we also talked about the times where we realized
that she maybe did love us. I was lucky with my mom because she was eighty eight when she died, and she had dementia, but she was still at a good point in the dementia journey, where journey where she could still swallow and eat and talk and walk around, and she still knew who we all were, and she
was really happy. To the point where I went to see her before she died a couple months before she died, and I was like, I could actually come back and see her more often, because normally it was such a chore to go and see my mother.
It's like that was actually quite nice, you know.
And then she died. But it was good because it was like there was a part of her that could say the things that she'd never allowed herself to say for whatever read her own trauma reasons, probably, so I was lucky that I got that with her, and it meant that I could say that honestly at her funeral. And there is like this, there's this Hawaiian practice which is where they say four things to their person. I add one or two, so I love you, I'm sorry,
I forgive you, thank you, and goodbye. That's what I always recommend saying, only if you can mean it genuinely, and you can say it at any point before they die after they die. I said it to my mum's body because I didn't make it there in time, and I said it to her casket as well. That is a good thing about a funeral. So having my mum's funeral was kind of good because it reminded me of
why I do this work. I mean, thanks, Mom, but you know, having the casket there and watching it leave in the hearse the physical again, because loss has to be known in the body. So because you can physically touch someone or their casket or their ashes or their pluck or whatever, but physically touch something, the body starts to know what's happened. There's that trauma go. He wrote the book The Body Keeps the Score, Yes, about trauma.
I can't remember his name, but.
Bessel Vandercock, you know, well, he's like The Body keeps the Score is the name of his book about trauma.
It's the same for healing.
The body holds them to the trauma, but it also can physically it holds onto the healing too.
I think so a bit of both.
I want to talk about funerals quickly. I want to talk about a million things. But because obviously funerals is something that you that's your job. To a point, I've read that you said that one of the reasons you wanted to do it is that you wanted to give others what my sister's funeral had given me, a clean wound ready for healing. Now he used this metaphor before. It's really I've never heard a ceremony of death described like that, and yet it's so perfect that description. What
do you mean by that? A clean wound?
So this occurred to me.
So when my dad died, we had his funeral, and the wound didn't feel clean to me. It was you know, there was a lot of shock around his sudden heart atime, that kind of thing. So we were all like running around.
You know, headless chooks.
And it was perfectly respectable funeral, but it took me a long time to deal with all of the fallout from his life and death. Then with Alison, we knew she was going to die eventually, you know, she'd been sick for so long so and we had warning she was impalliative care for a few days before she actually died. We all came together and put together this beautiful ceremony that I think she would have really liked.
We saw it through.
We did this beautiful thing for her, and for me that felt clean. I'm sad, but I'm not infected by her death by the grief virus or something.
So that's what it felt like for me.
And it was it was her funeral that made me want to start doing funerals.
And now that you do, and as I understand it. You as an interfaith minister, you do all kinds of funerals for people of different cultural backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, all the things. Is there something that makes the funeral good as opposed to because funerals can also be very stressful. There can be arguments about where it should be and where the weight should be, and like families can in the same way that families can find all kinds of
things to argue about. What makes a good funeral just honesty.
Normally just honesty, and.
That includes like the good and the bad, finding a way to talk about the bad site that still feels honoring, like you're honoring your person. Yeah, I mean, your families do fight. It's kind of inevitable. Tender Funerals which is the not for profit funeral home, there was one time when they had to do two funerals for someone because and I'm not sure if they've had to do that more than once, but probably because that people can be very fractured and death.
Brings it all out. Yeah.
So that was the other good thing about my sister Allison. There was nothing to fight about. Everyone loved her, so she made it easier for us.
Obviously you wrote your The eulogy is an auto fiction book, right, so it's your family story but fictionalized. It's called the eulogy because your framework for it is like, the main character has to write a eulogy for her sister, and so like you must be an absolute expert in how to write eulogy. And the thing is is that for a lot of people you know who may be suffering the loss of it becomes an extra stress, Like how do I say the perfect thing? I don't like public speaking.
I'm really afraid. And what if I you know, they've been asked to do it. My brother's making me do it. What does make a good eulogy? What makes a good eulogy?
So I do have it's pretty basic advice, but five minutes short makes it a good eulogy? Step one, Step two. I do think it's good to give a bit of a chronology of a life. It's interesting when you meet with a family to discuss the funeral, you're one of the first people they've spoken to about their person in the past tense, so there's starting to narrate their person. They're starting to take their memories and their thoughts about that person and they're not like in live play anymore.
They're changing the verbs as they speak, you know, and that's happening in their brains and you know, in their hearts as well, which is why it's really important to talk about the person having died, not having passed or anything. When for me, as a funeral person, going in and saying, you know, tell me about their death, how that happened anyway.
So the eulogy, the chronology, some personal stories that you might want to share, and the very end I would always recommend addressing the person you speaking to them the last lines.
So that's it. That's a good eulogy in a nutshell, that's.
Very useful working with all different cultures, I suppose in saying goodbye? Are there cultures that do death better than others?
Like every other culture?
That's kind of what I was going apart from uptight Western culture.
Yeah, that we're doing We're getting better.
We're definitely getting better here with all the sort of the deathy movement, you know, the grassroots making demands. I think it's also this generation Gen X and maybe the boomers as well, more prepared to say, well that's not how I want to do things. Is how I want to do things, you know, and doing things which are more suited to their personality, so you know, not going to a church if you weren't religious, and going outdoors if you love the outdoors, and just.
All that sort of stuff.
But what other cultures do, like for example, that Hindu rights. I did an interfaith process with a Hindu family once. So the dad had died, but he you don't into the details. But what that culture and what other cultures do is they give it time. We moved his body back to the house, for example, back home and had the body for a period of time, and you know, every people spent time with the body. That what we tend to do in the West is rush, you know.
And when I say rush, I don't just mean oh, let's have the funeral next week, although there is that it'd be nice to push that out a little, give people a better time, but also just being with the body. We don't get much time with the body in the West, and that I think really does affect how well you can and how long it takes you to absorb the information. So I do think it's like a cellular transfer of knowledge.
So if you get the chance and you're okay with sitting with the person's body for even just for like half an hour rou an hour. I do think it makes a big difference. But yeah, other cultures let you and not just let you, but they kind of require you to do that, and to do sort of physical things like wash the body, wrap the body. In the Hindu tradition, you know, you walk around the body, you gal and the body in certain ways, all of those things.
It's so sensible.
To turn that process of letting go or letting that person move on on their path, and it's a physical letting go. Yeah, we just tend to think if I say the words and that's it.
But it's yeah, why are we so verbal?
I know, it's interesting, Yeah, because back to the idea of if you are nursing somebody or spending time with somebody who is dying, there's often a lot of pressure to say the things. I mean, you put that so beautifully before when you were talking about that Hawaiian tradition of saying the four things. But sometimes people put an enormous amount of pressure and we've got to have this conversation that we've been wanting to.
Have before they die, before we die.
We have to have this conversation. Do you have to have that conversation?
Well for them, I'm trying to think if I've ever managed to have that conversation with anyone before they've done it. Even when you think you have had that conversation, you still feel like you haven't. You know that there's things missing.
I think that that's partly something to do with not so much like we must have this conversation, and clearly it's because of American movies that we think that, but it's also like I'm going to like have the relationship with you that I've wanted to have my whole life, at least for these five minutes or something. That's so true, and it's like they're still the same person. You know, you have this conversation with them, They're still going to respond the way that they would have five minutes ago
or something. Dying doesn't change people that much. I'm afraid that is something that you know when you grieve, and I'm not you know, I'm no grief and trauma expert. This is just from what I've seen and what I've experienced, Like you grieve what you didn't have as much as
what you did have. With that person. And I do think that you are still in a relationship with that person after they died, and you do have to work through that whether or not they've died, and you do have to accept that you're never going to get what you wanted from that person.
Just like no relationships, you always get exactly what you want.
Do you know that's right?
And sometimes you're like that's okay, But it's harder when they're people that you can't choose, you know, like your own parents or siblings.
Yeah, your expression of how of this cellular change and needing to almost lay hands on it? Does that explain why? I mean, it seems to me we've talked a bit about deaths that you can see coming, but when things are very sudden, that can be a particular shocking process of grief when somebody just vanishes almost Is that? Why? Is it because there is no sort of transition almost?
I mean, I'm just thinking about a loss that we had in our family, death by suicide, and that's I mean, there's all the stuff about suicide to complicate it. But and I've officiated funerals for people like that too. Yeah, I think you're right that the shock is part of it. It just exacerbates what's already a physical shock, just losing
someone from your like cellular inheritance or something. It's also because we narrate everything in our heads and we just unconsciously feel like we know roughly where the story is going to go, and then it doesn't bang. And that sort of dissonance can be really effective in fiction, but only up to a point.
You don't want.
The protagonist to die on page thirty, and that's the same in life. It's just interrupts that what we feel in our bodies to be the natural flow of things, especially when a child. You know, when a child dies, that's probably the hardest.
Do you as a funeral celebrant, as somebody who's around death. There's some funerals harder than others. Do you do you connect emotionally.
To absolutely do.
And my teacher who does the death Walker trainings and at Virago, she taught us when you're officiating a funeral, you know, you might be standing, you know, straight on like this, like we are sitting at the table, but on the inside you're on an angle and you're letting all that grief and everything flow past you to its rightful recipient, which is you know, the person in the casket not you, Otherwise you will absorb it all and take it on and it's not yours.
So constantly reminding yourself, this is not my grief.
This is their grief and their story, and I'm just here to steward it, to witness it. I'm not even I don't even think of myself as holding the space because that's too heavy. People create their own space. I just walk with them. I think that's why the term death walker really works. It resonates with me.
Next. We all know it's coming, So why are we so bad at preparing for death, either our own or that of our loved ones? And what can we do to get better at it? Is there? And this may not be able to may well be know, of course, But is there anything can do to prepare? You were just saying how you particularly as you get older, the inevitability of loss is ever more likely every day. Is there any practical way to prepare for that?
I mean, yeah, there's a bunch of things you can do, depends on how.
Close you are to it. But if so, some really practical things. Do an advanced care directive and have it on top of the fridge.
So and right, like get a sign.
You can get this stuff from Palleat of Care Australia, I think online a sign that this is maybe more for our parents people are parents' age. But you stick that sign to the door saying my advanced care directive is on the fridge. Because if you're in your own home, it's going to be an ambo who comes to pick you up and take you to palliative care or whatever, and you want them to have that because you might have a do not resuscitate or like no medical intervention
kind of request and they're going to need that. So that's a very practical thing you can also get going to get I think it's on palliad of Care Australia's website. There's like a little you can put in your wallet with the details, with similar kind of details because if you're not in care or in a hospital, you want people to be able to access that advanced care directive. Tell people what you want for your funeral, don't just
put it in your will. So like have a folder, have like a plastic folder or like a recycled impossible folder whatever. But yeah, yeah, in the event of my day, yeah, I put it on top of the fridge or somewhere where you know, and put a sign as to where
it is. And having that which is have your Advanced Care Directive, which is an actual document, you know, you get your GP to sign it and stuff, and then put what you want for your funeral if there is anything, particularly music, and then put you know how you want to be treated in a few days that you might no longer be responsive. I've got like a little flyer thing on my website with some questions that you can just ask yourself, but they're kind of obvious questions. Do
I want to be touched? Do I want to see a minister of any faith or no faith? But do I want to see someone? Do I want the window open, I want music playing? And if so, what do I want? Oils or massages? Just because they're generally if you're in a palliative care unit, there will be some time when you can't tell people what you want, so tell them beforehand. It's interesting to me that that is a little gap. It's not in the Events Care directive, and you know, and funeral wishes are a bit later.
It's also really even if that's you're thinking about, you know how you were saying before that sometimes people who are dying or know they're going to die, they might want to talk about it, but no one wants to hear it because they the thought of losing you is too awful for them. So that's also a good way of expressing your wishes without having to you know, that's right, and it is a good upset everybody.
Yeah, and it can get people talking about it.
And like you, if you've got a parent who stubbornly won't talk about the fact that they are inevitably going to die in the next ten years, then maybe break it open with well, do you want to see a priest?
You know, if you know that they're really not.
Religious, So that'll get them talking tell them what they don't want. Also, music is a real icebreaker on that conversation what music do you want at your funeral? And then again provoke them if they really don't want to talk about, well, I'm going to play you know they hate just Also, like a couple of things that you personally can do to prepare yourself for other people's deaths.
You can do those things, make yourself an event's care directive and write you know what you would want in that event, because not to be morbid, but yeah, I mean, you could die at any moment. But more to the point, it makes you understand what they have to do and what they're going through. There are Buddhist practices as well for contemplating death, meditation practices of imagining everybody dead super fun.
And a friend of mine had this thing of get an exercise book and on each page like a small exercise book, right a year, so twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five, like a year from now, and you'll find that you've only probably got thirty pages. And oh my god, right, you've confronted me. It's real though, it's real, and this is how I think. This is how I roll. So I'm like, Okay, I'm forty seven. I've probably got, if i'm lucky, twenty at the outer good years of
work working life to take me to sixty seven. If I'm lucky, I think that's probably like the retirement age. Whatever it is, twenty good years. How many books might I get to write in that time? Takes me a few years to write one, you know, like break it down.
Be real with it. Wow, you know, treat your years like a budget.
That's great advice. You know, you spread you don't know if this happened to you when you had your daughter. When I had my first child, who's fourteen. Now, I suddenly see actually the only time when I suddenly became a bit obsessed with the fact that I was going to die because I look at her and now my son, and I'm just like, I don't want to leave them. Like it's made me much more. You know, which I think very common is that somehow sometimes parenthood can really
confront you with your mortality. You've been so close to this life. Yeah, so it's yeah, wow, Okay, that.
Was my first I feel like, like, yeah, death, death, I'm so familiar with death. But when I was pregnant with my daughter, that was the first time I really felt it in my body, my own mortality, that sense of passing on the flame or something. It's like, yeah, I'm that's how the species works.
You're very interested in spirituality that isn't connected to religion. You grew up religious, though, right, and you're lapsed, yes, proudly. Perhaps I've seen it be very helpful in grief. I've seen it when we were sitting around saying goodbye to my mother in law, which was that my sister in law, who is a very spiritual person, was calm like a lake in that room, and all of us faithless people were a mess, raging against it, like wanting her to
hold on right. So faith plays a very important role, doesn't it. In some ways. I've seen it also in more traditional funerals that if you do genuinely believe it's not the end, it seems easier. Do you see that it helps?
Yeah, I imagine it would make it easier. I imagine that's why those doctrines are really successful. Have you read the book I think it's called Mortals. It's by couple of Australian researchers. They're actually father and daughter and they're both academic psychologists anyway, and it's all about how the fear of death has shaped human society and how Christianity.
Their argument is Christianity.
Was such a successful religion because it gave people life after death, it gave them that promise. I mean, I don't know if that's true or not, but I can see it. Yeah. I mean it's an interesting question because faith can go either way. People can really take comfort in it. Other people in the family might feel excluded by that. Other people might get really angry that it is or isn't being done properly. So faith can. Yeah, it's not always a perfect good. That's not an absolute good.
I think if the person had a belief, and that's a question always to ask somebody if you can before they die. But if not, then I will ask their family afterwards, is what did they think happens after they die? Because ultimately that's what you respect in that period of time before death. You don't try and impose your beliefs suddenly. But you know your mother in law did think that, so it's great that your sister in law was there
to kind of feel that with her. Yeah, we all know that our bodies return to the earth, and I think that there's just based on the facts that we do you have to hand, that's fairly kind of That gives me comfort. Child when she was little, she said to me she couldn't wait to be She doesn't think this anymore, but she couldn't wait to be dead so she could know what it was like to be the grass.
And I was like, yeah, when I said that, I don't know if we still have consciousness starting so like, don't jump off this.
People. Often after somebody's death there it brings up so much as disgusted and we're not talking about getting over things, but it's I wasn't there for them enough. I wasn't around enough. She just wanted me to call her every Saturday and I didn't. Or there's a bit of me that's relieved because it was very difficult to care for her in her last years, or you know, I said that thing to her once and I never got to apologize. Or it's just an enormous cloud that seems to be
part of grief. Have you or in your practices, found any paths through that?
I mean, I am a lapsed Catholic, so I do understand guilt. Yes, it's guilt is like every emotion. I feel like it's evolved for a reason. So guilt is just the flip side of making sure that you do right by your people and your community and if but it's kind of like modern anxiety. It's not useful if a tiger's not about to pounce on you, you know. So that kind of guilt after someone's died, who is it helping?
So I feel like it's appropriate to kind of go yeah, I should have called them more often, you know, just own it, just accept it. I wasn't the best person. I should have done more. I could have done more. I'll do differently. Hopefully next time I'll be more aware, because one thing people don't always realize is that their parents are going to die.
Sooner or later.
Everyone is going to die, which is, you know, it's a great way to live knowing well, but it kind of is. It forces you to think about how you're behaving towards that person. I mean, it shouldn't shape everything, but if you know your parents are getting older, they are going to probably die sometime in the next ten years. If you're our age, hopefully they'll die sometimes in the
next ten years. Because beyond that, it's not going to be pleasant for them or anybody probably, So just kind of behave accordingly if you can, like and manage it.
So you know, maybe it's like.
I really should go and see them, Oh my god, just schedule it in.
You know.
It doesn't mean you have to go every week or call them every week, but if you know, I should really call them every week, maybe call them every couple of weeks. Just do what you can, but still do it even if you don't want to do it, because we do get into this kind of I feel like you get into you just stay in this adolescent kind of mindset towards your parents sometimes, especially if you've moved
away from them when you were young. You know, like a lot of people move countries or whatever and move states and like, yeah, I left as soon as I could. Kind of think, so your relationship can sometimes founder a little bit and you sort of stay in that dynamic when you're thinking about what you should be doing for
your person. So maybe just yeah, take a step out of that and think, well, what would forty seven year old Jackie think is appropriate to do this person as opposed to what would seventeen year old Jackie, Because that's like the automatic.
You know, we were talking about how there's no such thing as getting over it, right, But I there are people who maybe are so knocked by a close death to theirs that there years and years and they feel like they're not moving through it, and they're still stuck there. And they're very not stuck there. That's really negative language. They're still feeling it every day and sort of asking themselves, why aren't I getting past it? Do you think there's is that just therapy time?
I mean, if it was really sudden, it was a shock that like I said my dad, it took me like ten years. I reckon to not have that the heat around it. I don't know how the inflammation of the wound, it took me a long time. And therapy, lots of therapy and medication.
Things, all the things.
Is there like any approgate time, Yeah, I feel like so physiologically, at least a year is pretty normal. If it's a partner or someone pretty close to you. Sometimes it takes another death to unseat the previous death, if you know what I mean. So it's weird, but you might be thinking about a person who's died every day, and then someone else dies and they kind of get shuffled along in the spectrum, and you have all your ghosts coming to visit you. You can ask your ghosts
to leave you alone. I don't know if it's real, you know, I don't know if people are actually coming back to haunt you or anything. But maybe there's something in the ritual of saying you know, that's enough, thank you. Our relationship has moved on from this, and I need you to not be around every day, but just on these particular days, your anniversary, on the Day of the Dead Christmas, like that'll do, like being clear with your
person who's died as you would with someone who's alive. Again, I don't know if you're really communicating with someone who's dead, but at least you're in a way being clear with yourself in terms of what you're willing to keep giving to that relationship. And you might be the one who needs to put those boundaries around it. I mean, in my experience, some people can be stickier than others, and
I don't know if that's me or them. Doesn't really matter that what's happening is the same, So you just have to be pretty clear. And the other thing I always do when I'm doing a funeral or I'm visiting a dead body, I always ask my noble ancestors to me. I always say, please, noble ancestors, please protect me, close the door.
Behind you, something along those lines.
Yeah.
Again, I don't know if it's magic or real or but what it does is it sets the.
Boundaries, like in any relationship.
You started this conversation by saying that you've been thinking about death since you were seven fascinated by it, and you just said that it's not a bad way to live your life to know that it's finite and to know that people around you are going to die. Do you think that has really helped you live the kind of life that you wanted to live.
Yeah.
Yeah, for a long time, because I'm a pretty anxious person. But what I realized, I don't know when, at some point in those forty seven years, was that I'm also pretty brave. I think as a result, and I don't feel brave, but I always I always do what I'm scared of because I think it's the right thing to do. And I think it was people. It was my sister.
It's because of my sister. She was a woman of faith and I wasn't so that you know, had all of its dramas, inherent dramas, but so she had so much love and that protected me from a lot of stuff that my sisters probably didn't have the same level of protection from.
So I needed to.
Really focus on what I valued and do that and live with integrity. I think I learned that from her and the constant idea that she might die. I do think about death all the time, every day, and I do know that the people in my life are going to die. That knowledge is it's always there for me. I don't know if it makes me a better person, but it makes me a more, probably annoyingly determined person.
Yeah.
And you know, also, when you turn forty, you just don't take as much crap anymore. I think I've kind of been like that for like since I was thirty.
That's great. Thank you, Thank you for sharing your wisdom about this with us. That's been amazing.
No worries.
Well, I hope you found that conversation as nourishing as I did. I have to tell you that after we finished it, we walked out into the busy Mamma Mere kitchen and Jackie, our producer, Telyissa, and I did a little like cleansing ceremony of our own. We held hands and we breathed out all the heaviness of some of that conversation. And if you're finding that that was very heavy for you too, I'm going to urge you to
do that. I don't know if I'm brave enough to get an exercise book out and write down all the years I have left, but I'm going to think about it. I don't know if I'm brave enough to face what I know. I'm already facing the inevitable loss still to come my way when my parents do die. But I know that this conversation, far from being depressing, was energizing and beautiful and profound. They're the kind of conversations I really want to have. They're the ones that really matter.
If you're suffering in grief, if us is looming for you, is already there, please reach out for help. We'll put some links into the show notes to organizations who might be able to help you do that, and we're also going to put some links in the show notes to way you and learn more about what Jackie does, find the resources she was talking about, and buy her beautiful, surprisingly funny book. Please be kind to yourself. It's an
overused phrase, but I really really mean it. And thank you to my brilliant producer, to Elisabethzaz for sitting through these emotional records with me, and to our entire podcast an editorial team for their support of MID. And if you like MID, tell your friends, like, Share, leave us a review, and come back next week