- Hi, I'm Kirk Swenson here at Ideas Fest in Asheville, North Carolina.

In this next program, we talk about alternative end of life scenarios and what death can teach us about living.

Hear from care specialists in this panel discussion.

- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[funky music continues] - The first thing I'd like to do is congratulate all of you brave souls for being here, because what we're talking about "A Graceful Exit: What Death Has To Teach Us About Living" can be a pretty uncomfortable and gnarly topic for many of us.

So I'd like to just get a sense of the room, if I may.

First let me get rid of this.

How many of you in this room, show of hands please, are completely, totally relaxed, comfortable, and at ease with thinking about your own demise.

[Gail chuckles] Okay, good number of you.

Thank you.

And how many of you would rather talk about pretty much anything else?

Just don't wanna think about it, don't wanna talk about it.

You know, yes, people keep haranguing you about having your will and all of this stuff, but no, no, really, I'd really rather not.

Well, one of the things that we're going to be doing over the next hour is giving you, I hope, a different perspective on some of those issues.

So the object is to have you leaving here feeling uplifted and enlightened and better about it.

And we have an amazing group of people who are going to help us with all of that.

So I'm gonna sit down and let them introduce themselves because they have such rich, interesting backgrounds.

And I do not wanna get this wrong.

So let me start with you, Greg.

I also asked them, by the way, I began my career in journalism as a newspaper reporter, so I believe in headlines, so I asked them if they would please come up with one sentence, one headline that they would like for you to take away from this discussion.

Greg, you're up.

- We start with the sentence or we have the sentence now?

- Well, why don't you do the introduction first and then give me the sentence, please.

- So, my name is Greg Lathrop.

And I sit on the Elder Council for the Center for Conscious Living and Dying here in Asheville, North Carolina.

- And your sentence is.

- My sentence is, don't be afraid, it'll be all right.

[audience laughing] - Thank you, Greg.

Kat?

- Hello everybody.

My name is Kat Houghton.

I also volunteer with the Center for Conscious Living and Dying.

I'm part of the fire tending team and the grief tending team.

I'm a psychologist by training.

I'm also a rites of passage guide.

And I think the biggest thing that death has taught me is that death is not the end of our consciousness.

- [Gail] Hmm, indeed.

Wilka?

- Hi everyone.

I'm Wilka Roig.

I am born and raised in the island of Puerto Rico.

I live and work in Mexico.

And I am a death activist, which means that I do everything I can to open spaces such as this one and evolve our death culture for better dying and better living.

And I am a transpersonal psychologist, a grief worker, death doula.

And I guess that's all I'll say for now.

And what I offer all of you is that in this, we live in a culture of death denial.

And the result of this is that in avoiding death, we are avoiding living a full life.

So when we engage dying, we also engage our full living.

- [Gail] Scott?

- Hi there.

I'm Scott Kirschenbaum.

I'm a documentary filmmaker.

And I recently made this film "The Last Ecstatic Days," which we'll be showing in the afternoon workshop.

I'm also an adjunct professor at Warren Wilson College.

And I think my headline is that if we're gonna talk about health and wellness, we need to also talk about death literacy, because this is such an important subject.

- Lots to talk about.

[audience laughing] So, Greg, let me start with you.

I love your line about don't be afraid, it'll be all right.

And I've also heard you say that death is the ultimate truth serum.

- Yeah, it is.

- Yes, another important note.

Maybe start there and explain that one a little bit, or, and or tell us a little bit about the personal experience that you've had that brought you to this work.

- Okay.

I found that in my life of 40 years working with every imaginable age of people in the hundreds and hundreds that are in this season that we call our dying season, that the things that we hide, the things that we pretend in our life, we put in our pocket, don't look at it.

When we enter into a time of our life where we have this awareness that yes, impermanence is real, and this body is not going to beat forever, it's not going to live forever, that in that season of dying, this is when I've noticed that the truth starts to show itself.

This is when we're definitely more vulnerable and we're more willing to share from what I would say is I think our heart begins to open up more.

We're more open.

And we address things that perhaps we thought we would never, we would never try to figure out or fix, but it becomes very important, is what I've noticed.

It relates to a lot of forgiveness.

"Forgive me."

"I forgive you."

A lot of opportunity to express gratitude or thanksgiving.

An opportunity to express love.

Many people would say, it's amazing to me that, for instance, as an example, that my father said, "I love you."

My father has never said "I love you" in my life.

And it's a time to acknowledge goodbye.

So this would be fundamental to what I think that means, that it's our truth serum.

I came to this work, it started actually when I was 15 and I was on a tractor on a rural highway.

And long story short, tractor versus semi-truck, I'm on the tractor.

And the experience that I had with the awareness that I'm going to die now.

And I did not die, you see?

[audience laughing] I wasn't even touched.

But it created a transcendent consciousness that I had never experienced before.

It created a state of being that I couldn't explain, so I didn't talk about it for a long, long time.

But what I have come, we missed each other somehow, miraculously.

But what I experienced became a fundamental or a foundational cornerstone of a state of being that I've been cultivating ever since.

And it's a timeless, loving, peaceful awareness.

There was no fear in that moment.

And what language I've used for it as I've grown older, the language, and I'm making it up, because the language is not enough, but the language that I use is that... Well, I can't remember it now.

[audience laughing] See, that's how language goes.

[audience laughing] - You're a human.

- Yes, I am, I'm human.

But this experience, you know, this experience of this, egoic death is what I experienced.

I realized a significant part of me died.

I experienced a full absolute ego death.

And that is what I know that I experienced, that propelled me to where I am now, so.

- [Gail] Part of your journey also has to do with your work around traditional indigenous medicine.

- Right.

- Can you tell us about that a little bit?

- Yeah, so I worked in healthcare, worked in all the areas because of that experience, around places where people would be in a transitional state, critical care, emergency care, air-medical transport, hospice, and integrative healthcare.

But the traditional indigenous medicine was a way to broaden...

It showed itself for me in a very synchronous way.

And I found myself on the path with a dear elder by the name of Will Rocking Bear.

And he allowed me the opportunity to walk with him for a number of years, many years actually, until his crossing in 2013.

And so what he was teaching me was beyond the realm of physical science.

And I would say essentially what he was showing me was how to be aware of something else that's called native science, in my language, in my understanding of it.

And I'll paraphrase that that native science is the pan-dimensional interrelatedness of everything.

He never said that, "This is native science, Greg."

He just said, [chuckles] he said, "This is the way I do it."

And that's all, that was his biggest teaching to me.

"This is the way I do it."

And if I asked him a question, I say, "Well, what about this or that?"

He would say, "Why are you asking me?"

And he would say, "Go to source."

So he gave me permission to listen and to follow that listening, is what I would say.

And that for me is the traditional indigenous healing that I hold for myself and for others.

- How important is that listening, especially at the end of someone's life journey?

- Well, it's important.

I don't know if important is the right word.

It's...

It absolutely happens, whether we think we're listening or not.

It is not listening, of course, with our physical ears.

The listening I'm talking about is a deep intuitive knowing, and that willingness to...

I often, despite me, whether I'm willing or not, I feel it.

And what I use for myself is, I feel it in my bones.

And it's not something that I'm trying to rationalize or analyze with my mental body.

I don't use that part of it.

My mental body, I'm grateful for my memory and my mental body.

But that place of that intuitive knowing is more heart feeling.

It's more here.

We know it, and that's the listening.

So not listening here, listening here.

And then learning through the life experience to be brave enough to follow it.

'Cause we can listen and we can even feel it in our bones, but we may still not have the confidence to follow what it is we think we know.

But if we will, we get to experience a lot of lovely things.

- One of the lovely things that you do at the CCLD, Center for Conscious Living and Dying, right here in Asheville, is fire tending.

Would you tell everyone what that is and the traditions around it and what you've seen as you have done that?

- Oh, what I've seen.

[chuckles] Yes.

So this is where our language is, my language is gonna falter some.

Keeping a fire is a way of, and I take responsibility for my words as they relate to myself, and that's the best I can do.

And I would say anything that I say today that you don't want, throw it in the trash can on the way out the door, because this is how it works.

We just simply reflect and share with each other and hold what is for us.

To keep a fire is part of that, a fire for me is medicine.

It's not dogma, it's certainly not religion.

It is a way that I would relate to medicine.

That it's a way of cultivating, walking through this world in a beautiful way.

We could say it's a, the way I work with the fire could be called a prayerful vigilance.

It could be called a contemplative practice, but it's even much, much more than that.

It's presence.

It's, as a good dear friend of mine, Scott Sherin said one time, and I hold it because he said it and wrote it and I love it.

He says, "It's thinking with less mind and feeling with more heart."

It's heart medicine.

If for nothing else, it gives me presence to be this timeless, loving, peaceful awareness, if I'm coming into this medicine with this intention.

And my doing this at a fire for someone who is in their end of days, someone who is, who is in that place.

And often with us at CCLD, we're looking at timeframes that's, we're not looking in months generally, we're looking in days to a couple of weeks.

Very, very focused time, very intimate time.

And so what I'm doing at the fire, for those who want that medicine, if they want that medicine in those end of days, then I'm holding the fire.

We are holding the fire night and day, 24/7 to hold that vigilance.

And if I can find that timeless, loving, peaceful awareness in me, and it takes the fire for me to do that, then that's what I'm doing.

Because there's a part of me that knows if I can do that for myself, then somehow it's helpful for the field beyond me.

That's how I understand it.

The interrelatedness of everything.

And so this is what I hold in that role of keeping a fire.

And I think I should just stop there.

- Well, I have just one more question on that point because it's such an important piece of-- - Okay, then.

All right.

- One of the things that happens in that time.

You're not the only fire keeper.

There are volunteers who are coming night and day to be there.

- Yes, there's one sitting right next to me here, Kat.

- Yes.

- And so, yes.

Is that the question?

- That was the question.

- Oh.

- And that was the last.

- There are many.

And there we come together, it's unified.

We're learning how to dance in a unified purpose.

We're learning how to do this together.

And actually the, what is important in this is this, in my understanding for myself, it takes a laser focus for me to be able to do for someone else what I might not do for myself.

And that is the medicine.

Because that is, that's the beauty.

Because we are coming to hold this loving, timeless, peaceful awareness.

And if I can't do it for myself, I can do it for someone else.

And that gives me permission to do that.

This is the beauty of what's happening when we're trying to dance in unified purpose.

What we're learning is it takes that focus of service, it takes a focus of service beyond the idea of how much am I gonna make doing this, beyond the idea of what it looks like financially.

This is all volunteerism.

And so we're really taking a deep dive in and saying, "I will do this for you."

And what happens is we both experience, we all experience the beauty of the healing release that is available to us by being willing to do that.

That's the glue.

If it was called the Center for Self-Love and Care, [audience laughing] and there was no service involved, especially in this very defined way of serving the dying.

Because it becomes a reflective mirror for us.

If I am you and you are me, [speaking in Mayan] and in the Mayan language, I am another you, you are another me, okay?

If we're not in service and we just are coming to the center for self-love and care, I think we would all get bored pretty quick.

And so it is in service to one another.

- And it certainly does seem that there is increased interest now in changing the conversation, in coming to realize more about who we really are and why we're here, and how we can be in service to one another as we get ready to depart.

Last time I saw you in person, Kat, was at the fire.

And you are a scientist, which I find very interesting because it seems on some level that science may be catching up with spirituality.

How do you reconcile the science piece with some of the almost mystic, well, not even almost mystical things, that Greg was just talking about?

- Yeah, that has been a question that's been bugging me for, oh, over six years now.

And it was grief that initiated me into that journey.

The grief of losing my partner at the time, Tyler, to a motorcycle accident.

So just like that, he was gone.

And I was left swimming in this ocean of feelings that I didn't understand and couldn't make sense of and had no control over.

It would just put me on, literally put me on my knees in the grocery store.

Like just something, some inhuman instinct to grieve a loss that I had no idea even existed inside of me.

But it does, and it's in all of us.

And through that process starting to understand, starting to sense that Tyler was still there in some way.

His body was gone, I knew that.

My brain sort of finally grasped that his body was gone and that he didn't exist in this reality that we are here now.

But I started to be able to feel him and sense him and feel that I could...

He was telling me he was okay, and that's really all I wanted to know.

I just wanted to know he was okay, and I got that.

And then my science mind, 'cause I was trained in psychology, which is still, it's starting to change, but is still very much rooted in materialism, the idea that only what exists is matter and energy, the things that we can measure.

And all this rest of this consciousness stuff and our dreams and our hopes and our fears that, they don't know what to do with that really.

So I was trained in that worldview and in that mindset, but I knew he was still there and I could feel him.

And so there was a, there still is, it's still an ongoing journey for me of reconciliation, was the word I think you used, like trying to make those two things fit together inside my being.

And for a long time it was a struggle.

You know, I had one part of my mind telling me, "Oh, you're just making it up.

It's just wishful thinking.

It's just your imagination.

He's dead.

You just gotta accept it and get on with it."

So it was a lot of that.

I also grew up in Britain, which I won't go down that rabbit hole.

[audience laughing] That's a whole other thing.

So there's that, that was strong in me, that, oh, it's just your imagination.

Stop it, stop it.

People will think you're crazy.

Don't say it out loud, you know?

A lot of that.

And then this really strong feeling, knowing.

Like as Greg was saying, this knowing this intuition that he was telling me things, he was telling me somewhat of what he's experiencing, and it was, it was foggy.

It wasn't like sitting down and like we're talking, it was foggy, I couldn't quite grasp it.

And ultimately I went to a couple of different mediums who were much more practiced at that kind of communication than I was, who helped me immensely to be able to understand what he was trying to tell me and for me to develop that capacity for me to be in touch with him.

So through that, I started looking a lot more at the, basically the parapsychology literature, which is almost 150 years now that parapsychologists have been documenting these paranormal phenomena.

A lot of after death communication, near death experiences, reincarnation cases that suggest reincarnation within that sort of parapsychology field.

There's lots of other things, but those are the three sort of strands of data that relate directly to death and the survival of human consciousness after death.

So I started digging around in all of that and finding incredibly rigorously controlled experiments that have been replicated in many different sites, many different researchers, all statistically significant saying yes, a medium, some mediums can get verifiable information from somebody who's dead.

And similarly with some of the near death work, a lot of it, it's hard to verify if someone has an experience.

And there, there's a huge amount of overlap.

You can start to see these characteristics of what happens for people as they go into a near death.

But some of them will come back with verifiable facts that they saw something while they were floating above their body.

They saw something and then someone can go and check on that.

And so there's these cases building and reincarnation also is fascinating.

There's data that you, there's no other way you can explain it.

You know, the materialists just say, oh, it must be, it's either fake or it's a fraud, or it just doesn't matter, don't think about it.

But there's such a mounting now amount of evidence that it's really hard to ignore that there's something there.

There's much more than what we've been, I was certainly trained to understand.

- As you look at the continuum of new ideas, I find it fascinating that a new idea comes along.

Everybody is, "Oh no, that couldn't possibly be correct.

No, no, no, that's ridiculous."

And then it's, "Well, maybe that might be correct."

And then finally it becomes, "Well of course, everybody knows that."

You know?

So it's so interesting to see how those things can develop.

When I started doing body and soul and talking about meditation and things like drinking water and, and the, the physical, oh, no, no, no.

Anyway, you got the point.

Wilka, I wanna turn to you.

Well, actually I have one more for you, Kat, before we go to Wilka.

And that is this whole notion, you alluded to it about, well, you know, you lose somebody who's important to you, well you'll get over it.

You know?

What are we missing in that kind of dismissive piece?

- Yeah, there's so much we're missing, we're missing, we're missing, there's something about grief.

To me, it feels like this.

It was this force outside of me somehow.

It didn't feel like it was me.

It just sort of came in and it took me over and it took me to a place that I'd never been before.

It took me to a depth of sorrow that I'd never felt before, but it also took me to this really expansive place of connection and joy and love.

You know, as I went through the grief and the sobbing and the wailing and the banging on the floor, I mean, like I was deep in it.

I also found a place where I knew that that was because of love and I couldn't separate the two.

And I'd never felt that, even before Tyler died, I never felt the depth of love that I can feel now.

And so there's a, it's a huge teacher.

And then as we hold each other in this, and this is what Greg is talking about, is we do this in community, and I was held by others who'd been down that path of grief before me.

And I now am able to do that for people that we, somehow that gets transmitted, it gets amplified.

I don't know what the words are for it, but it opened me to a way of sharing myself.

Again, I was raised in the UK.

We don't talk about ourselves very much.

We don't talk about emotions.

Certainly my family didn't.

And so to be able to like it just express all of that, the authenticity of my own experience and to share that with others was cracked open for me by grief.

There's many more, those are the two biggest things.

- And for those of us who have friends who are grieving a loss, and we don't wanna say the wrong thing, what should we say?

What would be an appropriate heartful mindful thing to ask someone who's grieving.

- Yeah, I don't know I can tell you what to say, but Greg said it at presence.

It's being there present with someone and allowing whatever their experience is to allow it.

That's okay.

There's rage and sorrow and regret and sometimes relief and like all this stuff that we're feeling.

And if we can just be with someone and, and let them know it's okay, just feel it.

Just feel it.

And I'm here with you and I can feel some, I can feel my version of it and we can do this together.

You're not alone, I think is kind of the biggest thing.

- Which is very different from dropping the casserole and running, because you don't wanna have the conversation, or crossing the street because you, you really, you know, it, it can be paralyzing.

- Right.

- Not knowing that even something as simple as, you know, I'm with you.

- I'm here.

- I'm here.

- Yeah.

- Thank you.

Wilka.

Let's talk about, you are the founder and executive director of the Elizabeth Kubler Ross Foundation in Mexico.

Let's talk about some of the ways in which your work came to be and what you've learned about it.

And I know it's a huge question.

Pick whichever part of that you wanna dive into.

- Well, I think where it came from was observing how the way we are dealing with our dying and our grieving is not serving us, right.

This story that we should not be talking about.

Our dying and our grieving, or our own relationship to our mortality, is keeping us in the solution that we are separate and alone in our experience.

And so one of the things that we're here for is to open up this conversation so that we can begin to realize we're not alone.

And the more we talk about these experiences, then we can validate, not because we're trying to, but other people will feel validated in their own experience.

And this is how we build community around these very essential processes that are very human, not medical.

That, you know, we're gonna go through losses, we are going to be going through grief and we're all going to die.

And so understanding that we were lacking this conversation and therefore lacking spaces that are compassionate, that bring humanity and dignity to these very essential processes in life is what led me to, you know, we just need to do something about this, right?

So today we can say, wow, we have these opportunities to invite everyone to begin to think about their own process and to dare to share it with at least one person.

And then maybe from there, you know, more people join in and then we realize we're all going through the same.

We may be very different, but we are all going through losses, life transitions.

We're all grieving something, whether it's a big thing or a small thing, and we are all going to die.

And from that ground point, we're all equal, right?

So we can connect more deeply as humans regardless of our life trajectories.

So, yeah.

- [Gail] And why is it important to be able to do this in community, as you said, to view it not as a medical event, but something that can be a shared experience.

- Yes, so going back to the fact that we are in a current culture of death denial, where we're all supposed to pretend that we're not gonna die, pretend that we're not sad about anything and all of that, we are totally disconnected with ourselves, totally disconnected with each other.

And we are missing out on a whole, at least a third of what the whole human experience is and what we are here to learn, right?

So we are very engaged in the early stages of the human development and maybe up until a certain point in the life trajectory, and then all of a sudden we're alone and in a vacuum and nobody wants to talk about it.

And we're invisible all of a sudden, all of these things.

But we're missing out on sort of the climax of life, which is that we will all be dying and that our dying is of service to humanity, right?

There is something very important that we're all going to do is to offer up our way of dying and that everybody else around us can learn from that process, right?

So we're missing out on a third of the life curriculum, which is why we're here to say, "Hey, maybe we wanna start to think about this and share it."

So I lost my general thought.

But it has to do with this last part, right?

That we are missing out on a big part of it.

The end of life is that time when we are thinking what is the meaning of my life?

Why am I here?

What is being human, but what is being myself as a human in a community and what am I leaving behind?

What have I gained from being part of and belonging to something?

And we're missing out that whole summary and you know, not just graceful but magnanimous exit.

- Well, and you often hear from palliative care physicians that folks who are at peace are, it's just, it's a more graceful, gentler, more loving, more kind experience than the idea that no, no, no, this is something we have to fight to the absolute last end and the last people touching you are gonna have latex gloves and you're gonna hear beeping hospital monitors, as opposed to a very different model.

- Yeah, there's two things that come up.

One is, I always say that whatever keeps us up at night is what's gonna keep us from having an easeful dying.

So we also have the opportunity to deal with these things as they show up every night when you're not able to sleep, or wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something or questioning something about yourself or your life.

If we do that work on a regular basis, we are already more ready for an easeful dying.

But the other element of that is that it has been seen and proven that when we take the time to talk about what comes up, when we're thinking about our mortality or life transitions, it actually eases our physical discomfort.

So when we are, you know, whether it's any time in your life or if it's at the end of life to actually talk about our regrets and our guilts and our unfinished business and what we would rather have done differently or what we need to do before we can go, it not only allows us to be more peaceful in our dying, but also relieves physical symptoms.

- And also I would think a piece of that is, it makes a difference in terms of the children in our lives as opposed to grandpa disappears one day and nobody ever talks about him again.

Or if they do, they just look sad and, and we don't talk about that.

This is something that needs to be shared from an early age, I would think.

- Absolutely.

And children are our greatest teachers as are the dying, right?

So the fact that we've been keeping our children out of this is doing everybody a disservice.

Children bring so much pure wisdom, because they've not been burdened by all of the fears we've learned over, you know, our lives.

So yes, to bring them back in is healthy for everyone.

And of course if we can start early, then we can have hope for a better future for the the next generations in terms of our relationship to our grieving and our dying.

- Thank you.

Still so much to be said about all of this, but Scott, I wanna bring you into the conversation.

So here you are, the filmmaker, you're out in San Francisco and one day the phone rings and... - I ended up speaking to a young man with brain cancer.

And very quickly, very soon he asked me if I would film his death.

And I had not only no experience with the dying, but I also had a tremendous, profound fear of death, debilitating fear of death.

And I couldn't say anything but yes to it.

I had to say yes.

And I had prior experience doing a birth film.

So I knew about the threshold experience of one woman and one location being surrounded by her care team.

And what I realized is that the choice and the autonomy and the need to provide the safe space for a person to give birth also applies in the death space that Ethan was asking to have a choice and to have his volition respected and honored, which was not really being provided to him where he was being treated and cared for.

So it was just this opportunity to be with my fear to go to this growth edge place.

- And what did it feel like being in the midst of all of that?

I mean, I assume there were times when your heart was pounding and you probably thought, what am I doing here?

- Well, I realize that you don't need to be called a death doula or a nurse or a hospice provider in order to feel love for someone in that time.

You just need to look them in the eye and receive them and listen to them.

And it was a remarkable filmmaking experience because I had very little, there was very little need to kind of direct the team, or to move the lights or whatever.

It was just about sitting there with this young man through his process and being patient with him.

And I learned so much from the people who were there with him and the fact that more and more people wanted to show up.

You know, in my experience, you'd never wanna enter the room when someone was dying.

That would be so scary.

That would be crazy.

I never would do that.

Which is why it's ironic to be on a panel around being graceful.

[everyone laughs] And then having the opportunity to be with Ethan to see one person after another in Asheville show up and say, Hey, as Greg put it, I'm a part of your extended family.

That's remarkable.

That's unheard of in my experience when talking about community.

- [Gail And as you look back on that, and by the way folks, if you haven't already noticed this in your programs, the film will be shown this afternoon.

So if you would like to see more about this remarkable young man, Ethan, that the film is about, you'll have that opportunity.

And truly this was an ad hoc group.

I mean, Ethan didn't know any of you.

You all just kind of showed up and were there for him.

- Yeah, and I think, I mean obviously the film will show this, but I think what's really exciting, 'cause I've never had this experience before with any film, is that the model of showing up and becoming a community, what we're now referring to as community death care is happening pretty much on a daily basis in Asheville.

And it just happened so organically that this center for conscious living and dying formed and now pretty much whenever there's a resident there, there is someone, you know, during their last days, they're having a fire provided for them.

There's a grief team.

And also one aspect of this that I had no clue about is that after someone passed, you don't need to rush them off after they die.

There's an opportunity to have aftercare provided and to have a family welcomed and friends welcome in this home funeral that can be celebratory.

To think that that experience could be celebratory, that everyone can have that spirit play music, lay flowers on the body.

It's just all new.

And it's really, for me, speaks to a new kind of beauty.

'Cause we, in our society, you know, sometimes I'll speak to this about this film with people in LA, or in the film world, and they'll be like, "Death, we don't wanna touch this."

And as Greg has mentioned time and again, this is not a film about death.

This work is not actually really about death.

It's about living.

It's about feeling more alive.

- So here we are in our little bubble in Asheville.

Very nice for us.

Thank you.

What happens now?

You've been on the road.

What reaction to the film are you getting from Montana and Idaho and all these other places you've been?

- Sure.

Yeah, I actually just came back from Montana and Idaho as Gail mentioned.

And one of the reviews that we read, which we both appreciated is, death like birth is a solo journey, but it need not be fearful or lonely.

And in particular, we had one screening in Missoula.

They had never really had a community gathering where everyone's talking about this, and one person after another in the Q&A is just providing resources, saying, let's talk afterwards, let's become, and is this like desire to just have this conversation.

We were in Sun Valley, Idaho and the Sun Valley Wellness Festival, which is the oldest in the world.

They, for the first time ever had a group conversation around conscious dying in an opera house of all places.

[audience laughing] And it's just exciting.

It's this zeitgeist moment is here, we're seeing it every week with articles about death doulas, and we're seeing it here in Asheville in our community.

So I'm just grateful, you know, to get to witness this and to see the effect of the film in particular, if someone is on their death journey, or finds out that they have a terminal diagnosis, or you know, they have a loved one who is passing, just that they can watch this film, that it can help them, that it can be a resource that they know Ethan went to the place of his fear and moved through it.

And other people can too.

You know, we all can deal with this.

- And in terms of why we're all talking about it more and more, I would guess that it probably has something to do with the fact that there are 76 million baby boomers, Of which I am one and we're gonna be moving on sometime in the next 40 years or so, 30, 40 years, whatever that might be.

So it's kind of in our best interest to consider how we might change that.

I wanna ask kind of an uncomfortable question because we're talking about this in terms of all the wonderful things that can come, in terms of grief and loss.

Kat, I turn to you on this one because that's part of your bailiwick.

Sometimes someone passes from our life and instead of mourning them, we're relieved, because maybe this person was abusive, maybe this person was just not somebody that you feel any reason to mourn their loss, or to mourn their passing.

What do you do with that?

Because that can be also something that needs to be healed.

Even though that may not seem immediately obvious.

- Yeah, it's the same thing.

It's presence.

Right, it's bringing a sense of it's all okay, whatever you're feeling, let's talk about it, get it out there.

Let's acknowledge all of it.

'Cause nobody, nobody has a simple relationship with anybody they're close to, right?

There's all, we have all sorts of, especially if they're family members, it's never simple.

And it can be very complex for some people.

And grief for me is this whole sort of package of things and it's got these tendrils that are attached to all sorts of other feelings and other experiences.

What I like to do with people is create a space where all of that is welcome, all of it, and none of it is sh-sh, or put it away, or we shouldn't say that.

Let's put it out on the table and let's talk about it and let's move it.

So they can find what is the true essence of that relationship that they had.

What was the guiding principle of that relationship?

What was the lessons of it and how did they move on from it?

However the relationship was in physical reality.

And my understanding is that when we pass into the spirit world and we leave the baggage of this world that souls seem to, they change, they got the other support on the other side, right?

And they're learning too.

And they're growing and they become different and there can be a lot of healing that happens there.

And there are a number of mediums who do that kind of healing, like post death with families.

And there's lots of other methodologies for doing that.

But often it can be that their relationship improves dramatically after death.

And because they up there can see what they couldn't see down here.

But in order for the person who's left behind, in order to be able to take that in, then obviously they have to move through whatever resentment or anger, or whatever it is they're holding onto and work with a therapist or somebody to move that through so they can be open to what's happening now for the loved one on the other side.

- Certainly in the world of what death has to teach the living.

Yeah, that's an important lesson.

Greg, I wanna ask you a practical question.

You have been a hospice nurse for many, many years, and I keep getting asked, "Okay, so this community support model that CCLD is doing in other, a few places around the country, isn't that the same thing that hospice does?

You know, why do they, why should there be this community-based model at all?

- Well, what comes into mind right now about that is we serve hospice families, patients, the residents, the people who come to the center, the sanctuary must be eligible to receive hospice care.

This is how we can become a family instead of a facility.

Hospice is caring for them in the medical way.

They're providing the medical plan of care.

We're providing the extended family.

And what I would say about that is it seems to me that the golden standard, if we ask and said, where do you want to die?

Most people would say, I would like to die at home.

Is that true?

Would you say that?

- That's true.

- Yes.

- I would like to die at home.

And that's understandable.

What I've seen in doing home care hospice is yes, that can happen.

And yet what is not happened in the family where I'm dying at home is the kind of beingness together in a way of being vulnerable together, in a way of sharing together, in a way of allowing, just as Kat was talking about, the presence, to allow, often our family can be, can hold a great deal of fear about the whole process.

So what's happening is maybe I'm at home, but I'm surrounded in fear, because we're all afraid and we haven't ever done this.

And we haven't ever talked about it.

You know, and all these things that you're hearing in the theme of what we're saying.

And so what's different is what we're offering at CCLD is we dive into the messiness together and we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with each other together.

And why, man, what happens when we just open up those doors of our hearts?

And even if it feels really and looks really messy and it will and does, then we're creating an energy that dispels and moving into the fear and through it instead of resisting it.

I think that's what I'd say.

- And one of the ways in which that can happen obviously is through doulas, which everybody's heard of birth doulas, right?

Well now there are end of life doulas.

And I was fascinated.

I looked up the magazine again, there was an article in People Magazine last spring and it talked about how end of life doulas, there were about 2, maybe 300 of them about five years or so ago.

They're now over 2,500.

And full disclosure, I just took the doula training and I will tell you it is an amazing, intense, really worthwhile heart opening experience.

So Wilka, you look like you'd like to jump in on that, please.

- I'd love to chime in about this because we all need to remember that before we had specializations and systems of care, we were attending to each other and that our dying and our grieving belonged and belongs to all of us in community.

And one of the ways in which community is built is through holding space for one another in this way that we all have a compassionate impulse that has been now sort of interrupted by, if you don't have the badge, or the diploma, or the letters after your name, you're not allowed to get close.

But part of what this movement of community death care, and of death doulas is serving is the fact that we reclaim that capacity to do it.

That we don't, we don't need, we may be helped by the systems, but we don't need the systems to do our dying.

Our dying is programmed into ourselves the same way birthing is programmed into our nature, right?

So it's about reclaiming our own nature and the permission that we have the right, that we have to hold that space, to learn from that space, to give and receive love in that space.

So the difference between the systems that we have and the community approach is that it empowers all of us, because we are all mortal beings who have an intimate relationship with our mortality.

Whether we are engaging with it or not.

- I think we need to bring you folks into the conversation.

[audience applause] We have the mics here, if anybody would like to step up and ask a question.

Yes, please.

- Hi, my name is John and my question is predominantly for Greg or Wilka, either one and or that might have some wisdom to impart.

I grew up in a very religious baptist, evangelical home and my understanding of life and death was predominantly based on heaven or hell, up there or down there.

And this fear of death that was instilled in me for so long until maybe six or seven years ago when I tried to abandon all of that upbringing and be more of an agnostic or mystic and study many of those teachings, but sometimes this, when I hit grief with a family member so forth.

So that fear of death of what that looks like, what an after in life unknown looks like and what that was taught to me.

So I was curious if either one of the two of you have worked with anyone in that capacity who has had that similar experience to mine, and if you have encouragement towards peace.

[laughing] - I think the one thing I know to say about that in my experience with that, that very thing you're talking about, even still alive in this world before the death has absolutely occurred, I have witnessed that there is a place beyond the fear.

There comes a place even as, and as Scott was saying, we move into the fear and through it instead of resisting it.

And the process of dying in my observation and my witnessing and in front of a semi-truck were, my doctrinal beliefs at the time were meaningless.

And that moment was not a fearful moment.

That moment was timeless, loving, peaceful awareness.

And I've seen it in the people I've served that even while still in the body, there is that place that I've witnessed every time that the fear factor has dissipated.

Now what that means beyond the death, I'm not speaking to that.

I'm speaking to the lack of fear that I have witnessed even while we're still in our body.

That's all, that's really all I know to say about that.

- I'll just very quickly say that a lot of what we think about, assume or believe about dying, death, grieving, all of these things are stories that have been told to us.

And the moment that it hits us, whether it's facing the possibility of our own dying, or somebody's else's dying, all of those stories fall away, because we're having an immediate experience with what's happening.

And it's what you're saying.

All of a sudden all of those stories are not valid, because the experience itself is showing us our truth.

And so that's what I think you're referring to.

- Yes.

- Yes.

- I'm also reminded of that wonderful quote that many of you probably have already heard before, but it's one of my favorites.

It's one of the things that the skeptical journalist got my attention years ago, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit scholar of the early 20th century who said, "We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical one."

And it took me a while, again, skeptical journalist for 35 years, to wrap my head around that one.

But that puts it in a completely different context, doesn't it?

Regardless of the stories that we've been taught.

Yes, ma'am.

- Hi, it's glad to see a fellow [indistinct] on the stage.

[laughing] Bringing wisdom.

Appreciate that.

I was wondering how can the process of dying evolve out of one that centers cultural appropriation into the honoring of the process of dying itself?

- Is that?

- It shakes you.

I'm sure that's, yeah.

- Oh my goodness.

Well, one of the things that we need to start doing is to get closer to our dying, you know, to welcome the opportunity of being with dying.

And dying is not just the physical dying of the body.

Parts of our lives and ourselves are dying on a regular basis.

Things can no longer be a certain way.

There's been some kind of change in our lives.

And there is that space of disorientation before there's a new orientation in life.

Those are opportunities to practice dying or to be engaging with our dying.

And the closer we get to that, then the less unfamiliar it is and the less we, I mean, the more we begin to understand of how it could be, right?

So when we are engaging directly, we don't need to appropriate anything.

- One thing that comes to me about that question too is I've come to understand a definition for dying for myself in these many years.

And for me, dying is the inbetween or the transition from who I thought I was to who I would choose to be.

That's the definition of dying from my perspective.

And we do that.

We have many dying seasons in our life.

- We can't choose to be native Americans.

- Choose to be beyond our race.

Expanding beyond, I'm talking about, I'm not talking about my human body.

- Can I choose to be white?

- You hear what I'm saying?

- No.

- I'm talking about, that's for me in relation to who my true essence, who I really am, and who I really am is not male, is not white or Latino or black or any of the other.

And so I don't know how it relates directly to your appropriation question.

I know how it relates to my understanding of who I am beyond my definitions and our ways of labeling each other and myself in this world.

So that's me.

- Thanks.

- But that's what it is, for me.

- Thanks Greg.

Yes, ma'am.

- Hi, I wanted to ask your opinions and maybe for some guidance, but for a person who has either friends or family who are going through the process of dying and dying at what society would call, you know, before their time, or an early death, what are some ways that you would recommend that someone who hasn't been trained as a death doula, or has much experience with it to support them in their journey?

And I liked what Scott said when he was talking about being in the room and he wasn't a death doula, he wasn't trained, but just being there and having presence.

But prior to the actual experience, what are some ways to support that person along their journey?

- Well, the grieving person or the dying person is the guide, right?

So we don't go there to try to fix anything, solve anything, change anything, but just to be present with, and there's something amazing that happens when we don't have to do anything and we can just be and welcome the person's processes as has been said here, right?

So to encourage someone to speak about or explore whatever they feel that they need to at that time, without judgment, without evaluation, without interpretation, but just honoring and in reverence of what is arising is probably the best service.

You know, we've talked about presence, so cultivating presence on a regular basis in our life is great, so that we can be prepared for any moment that somebody needs our presence.

- And I would add to that, to do our own work, right?

That whatever's unresolved or unacknowledged in ourselves is gonna come up as we look at the dying person and as we face death.

So the more we do our own work as separate from the person who's dying, not in their presence, and get ourselves to a place of being able to be calm and clear and just be, be that presence for someone.

It doesn't just come like that, you got to do some inner work.

- Thank you.

Yeah, - Thank you.

Yes, please.

- This has been a phenomenal panel.

Thank you so much.

This is a question to the panel.

It takes us slightly in a different direction, because we've been thinking about our own death, or accompanying individuals through the death process.

In my own chaplaincy work and work in the community, I've been accompanying individuals who are grieving mass death.

And I just would love the wisdom of the panel in thinking about how do we grieve people we don't know and we don't have a relationship with, you know, whether that's because of warfare, or because of natural disaster.

How can we grieve individually and as a community in those circumstances?

Thank you.

- Beautiful question.

For me, grief is, there's many portals into grief, right?

If you ever read, I highly recommend Francis Weller's book "The Wild Edge of Sorrow".

He talks about these five gateways to grief.

Ancestral grief, climate grief, our grief of lost expectations.

There's five of them and there's, I think there's many more.

But it grief seems to be this sort of, to me it's like an ocean under there.

And if you can find a way in whatever it is, even gratitude can be a way in that you open up your heart and you start feeling that and you can get into the grief.

Then it, for me, it just sort of, then it takes over.

The grief does the work and it starts pouring out.

And it doesn't really matter what your mind attaches it to.

It's the process of allowing yourself to feel that and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in that and to hold others in that I think is what is what shifts things.

- We hope you enjoyed this program.

I'm Kirk Swenson and thank you for joining us for this year's Asheville Ideas Fest.