weaving loss into life
Guided By Nature;
A Closer Look At Our Approach To Death Care
Many of us have been raised in cultures that interact with death fearfully and combatively. If we've been raised to pour energy into fighting and forestalling death it's easy to feel lost, defeated and resourceless when its inevitability becomes unavoidable.
Support from people who have knowledge and experience is tremendously helpful. The Grief House collaborates with death care workers who can help reconnect you with a steadiness and trust in this universal human process. Nature, also, offers constant support to understand the duality of life and death. Breathing in and out, sleeping and waking, the turning of the seasons - we’re constantly participating in transformative cycles.
Our Death Care Stewards use two broad models to better understand and assess the needs and desires you and your family are experiencing; our Moon Cycles and our Earthly Houses.
Moon Cycles help your Death Care Steward understand what phase of death you or your loved one are in and see on the horizon. Earthly Houses help your Death Care Steward learn about the needs and gaps in your death care and end of life support.
Moon Cycles
Our eight moon cycles conceptualize the phases of death. Identifying current and upcoming phases can help us know what supports will be useful to gather as we work to meet and move with the phases of death.
New Moon: The Moon is between Earth and the Sun, making the unlit side face Earth. Meet Your Death. You’ve met the force that will bring you out of this incarnation. Whether a terminal diagnosis or old age you and your death have come face to face.
Waxing Crescent: A small sliver of light appears on the right side. Grow Steady With Your Death.
This is new terrain and dark, but there’s a sliver of light; an opportunity to get to know this phase of existence. With support your eyes adjust, your other senses brighten, fear quiets and the beings of this darkness start to become known.
First Quarter Moon: The right half of the Moon is illuminated. Explore Your Death.
With less fear and more awareness you can move in the night. You can notice the familiarity and newness of a well-known world transformed by darkness.
Waxing Gibbous: More than half is lit up, increasing toward full. Prepare For Your Death.
Steady in this new terrain you start to gather what you need to pass through just as you desire.
Full Moon: The Sun fully illuminates the side facing Earth. Active Dying.
You meet your life’s one death in the full light of the whole, illuminated moon.
Waning Gibbous: The light decreases, with the illumination shrinking from the right. Care For Your Body. Your loved ones, who are part of you, remain in incarnation. In the dimming brightness of your death, they tend the body you’ve left behind.
Last Quarter Moon: The left half of the Moon is illuminated. Your Body Meets the Earth.
In half brightness, your people reunite your body with the earth. What was hers, in time, goes back to her.
Waning Crescent: A sliver of light appears on the left side, disappearing toward the new moon. The practice of connecting across mysterious vastness begins.
Your Community Grieves.
Earthly Houses
Our eight earthly houses help us identify what areas of life need tending to allow you and your family to find ease and connection during this time. Our lives consist of many different facets that hold and shape our experiences. Knowing we're leaving these houses well cared for can help us let go with peace.
The eight Earthly Houses are interdependent, influencing one another in covert and overt ways. As we move through the phases of dying, different ones may ask for more or all of our attention, others may never need any of our time. Your Death Care Steward will help you look at your hopes and dreams, fears and worries, resources and gaps in each of these houses, making space for reflection and opportunities to address problems that need to be resolved to die well and leave wellness as your legacy.
Community
Tending our family and community house invites us to resolve conflict, connect in meaningful ways, consider how we would like to live on in the hearts and memories of the people who remain.
Emotions
Surveying our emotional home, we become familiar with fear and joy, longing, worry, contentment so we can meet and move through them with steady attention.
Spirituality
Considering our relationship to forces larger than ourselves, we enter this house to find well known practices and/or discover new practices that offer us a feeling of connection.
Creativity
In this house we consider dreams and projects that are undone or never begun and ways we might offer our unique perception of the world to those we leave behind.
Physical
We take note of how and how well our needs are being met in the house of our physical body, and how they might be best tended as long as we stay in this home.
Nature
We seek out or embrace our relationship with the huge open house of the natural world.
Finances
We consider how our finances will affect our loved ones and do our best to create ease in this house
Work
We consider how our life's work sits and whether there are steps we need to take to reassure ourselves this house will be sound in our absence