Community Death Companion Series - with Alexandrea Wilson & Laura Green

Many of us have been raised in cultures that interact with death combatively. If our socially reinforced habit is to pour energy into fighting and forestalling death it's very easy to feel lost, defeated and resourceless when its inevitability becomes unavoidable.

Humans lived closely and well with death, everywhere there were humans, for most of our history on this planet. Finding a way back into community with death can feel tremendously stabalizing and empowering. 

We feel sure we can live that way again. We are hopeful we can teach each other how. We would love for you to join us, trying.

Series Overview:

This series will provide skills, tools and connections you can use to support your beloveds and/or yourself in dying. This is not a professional training (though it will form the foundation for an in-person death doula apprenticeship program we're in the process of dreaming up). At the end of this series you will be in a position to stand confidently with your community as you navagate this universal passage.

The Structure:

We will be welcoming 15 people into our first group. Our time together will span 4 months. 

We'll meet each Sunday - the first 3 weeks of each month we'll meet on Zoom from 11:00am - 12:30pm

The 4th Sunday we'll meet in person at The Grief House from 11am - 4 or 5pm. 

Our hope is folks in the cohort will gather in smaller groups as feels appealing and supportive, though this will be entirely optional.

Our 4 mayor topics:

October - Cultural Connections to Death

• Week 1: Capitalism and Dying
• Week 2: Who are your ancestral people and what were their practices around death and dying?
• Week 3: Who are your people now and what are their practices  around death and dying?
• Week 4: Reconnecting to spirituality, inventing and re-inventing ritual.

November - The Dying Body

• Week 1: Dying inside the mainstream medical system - logistics & considerations
• Week 2: Dying outside the mainstream medical system - logistics & considerations
• Week 3: Western pharmaceuticals and alternatives
• Week 4: Everything you wanted to know about your dying body but were too afraid to ask (panel and community led). Practice with moving and touching bodies. Community building activities around our experiences of being in physical bodies.

December - Legal Concerns

• Week 1: Special Circumstances - including: incarceration, immigration status, poverty, feuds
• Week 2: Death paperwork
• Week 3: Physician assisted death
• Week 4: Role of community death supporters. Administrative and financial aspects of death support. What is your communication style around boundaries? Boundary setting in funeral planning. 

January - Your Own Death

• Week 1: Our personal history with death
• Week 2: Our current relationship with physical death, our hopes for our deaths and after deaths
• Week 3: The space beyond death
• Week 4: Creative explorations of relationship-building with our own death including writing, collage and music-centered offerings.

We are inviting in Portland-based death doulas who approach this transition in a variety of ways, to gain insight into the many manifestations of this work. We'll also collaborate with people practiced in Western medicine, plant medicine, end of life legal work and creative and somatic grief tending. 

Each month we'll offer a reading list, podcasts, useful art, natural resources we've found supportive, journal or meditation prompts and/or community resources to help deepen and broaden your connection to to the subject. We won't have assignments - everything we offer will be invitational. We also hope to build resources from your discoveries and wells of knowledge.

We offer this series as a chance to engage playfully and generously, within the support of a compassionate community, in the work of finding poorly marked, abundantly available paths to deeper, richer connections to the ends of our lives. 

Cost

The cost for all 4 months of the series is $800. This will allow us to offer stipends to teachers and to ourselves and support the house and project. 

It's important to us to make this offering available to as many people as possible. To that end, if you have the ability to pay more than $800 we'll use that money to offset the cost for people with less financial ease.  If $800 is more than you can afford please contact us at info@griefhouse.org to talk about scholarship options.

We feel grateful and honored to be doing this good work with all of you.