The Boulder We Carry and How To Drop It

Hey friends!

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing some resources around end-of-life planning. They’ll range from helpful PDFs to guided audio meditations, and maybe a few poems here and there to help digest the material.

To lead up to that, I wanted to spend some time today talking about a personal experience and my philosophy about why I think it is so important to begin having these conversations right now, no matter your age or the quality of your health.

To be honest, I’m very torn about even sharing this today with all that is going on in the world right now.

Hearts are heavy, souls are confused, and the energy in our shared humanity right now is filled with so much anger and despair, and rightfully so.

I figured the last thing anyone wants to read right now is about voluntarily exploring our own mortality for the sake of growing and learning as a living, evolving, breathing, and eternal being.

But I decided to go ahead and share because I believe that the best thing we can do for others in difficult times is to show up as the best versions of ourselves, as different as that may look on any given day.

And the best way that I know how to show up as authentically as I can, is when I move through life through the lens of mortality.

I do need to say this: not everyone needs to be reminded of death. For many communities stateside and abroad, death is as loud and as present as any neighbor can be. The last thing they need or want is a personal growth perspective on mortality.

It is a privilege for most of us in the US who are so isolated from this reality.

But I believe wholeheartedly that this kind of inner work can reconnect us to each other and the rest of the world in ways that we have lost sight of.

Thanks for listening and making space for getting that off my chest.

Passage of the Week 📜

Reading Rumi is like walking on water.

You might want to dip your toes in that a couple of times :)

My life’s work is becoming dedicated to helping provide others
a “chance to look.” 👁️🦋👁️

We all know the feeling.

You get a call, and you hear that Abuelo is getting worse in the hospital, and they are sending him to hospice.

You’re a little surprised.

After all, he’s 82, he still has at least a few years left, right? This can’t be it.

But when you visit him, it starts to sink in: Abuelo won’t be making it back home, at least, not back to his physical home.

You gently approach the last bed he’ll ever lie in, your feet getting heavier with each step.

He can’t talk or move anymore. But you tell him you’re there with him and grab his hand.

He grunts, and you take that for the last “hey, mijo” you’ll ever get. Maybe you imagine him trying to force his lips to smile but at this point, he can no longer talk or move.

But you know he’s in good spirits because how someone lives is how they will die, and Abuelo was always in good spirits. The nurses say that he still has the ability to hear, so you play him some Chente, because what else says “I love you” like music can?

As hard as it might be to come to grips that he really might be on his last days, you also can’t help but wonder, what were his last wishes?

Did he want a burial or a cremation?

Would he want to keep on fighting until his last breath, or should we encourage him to let go and give him permission to leave us as soon as he is ready?

Should we play one last episode of Bonanza for him to listen to? Or is music okay? Who is his favorite artist? Does he have a favorite song? What if everything I am doing is wrong?

Sometimes, details like these are planned in advance, but most of the time, they’re not. Not even the crucial details like how someone wants their body cared for.

In Abuelo’s case, he and my grandma had planned a traditional funeral in advance and paid for their plots in the cemetery.

After he died, we learned that he chose a very modest casket, and my family wanted to pay more so he could have a nicer, more comfortable resting place.

My abuelo died in hospice care and was looked after quite well. The nurses took great care of him, but we never talked ahead of time if being in a hospice center was even something he would have wanted if it meant not being able to die at home.

But we did the best we could do.

And I know that you have too.

The Forgotten Boulder

Chances are something similar has happened to you, and you might remember the feeling of walking on a tightrope between the uncertainty of navigating unspoken last wishes and the grief from the fresh loss of your loved one.

Both of these ends are daunting on their own.

But when you’re dealing with both at the same time, it doesn’t get much harder than that. You know who those people are in your family or circle of friends.

In fact, if you’re reading this, chances are that person is you! I see you, I acknowledge you, and have so much love and respect for you. (Seriously, take a moment and recognize your own strength, resilience, and capacity for love. That’s your gift, and I’ll be damned if you don’t recognize it.)

This topic around our last wishes is something that we are always stressed about. We just don’t know it or are in denial of it.

This stress begins as a pebble but becomes a boulder as we grow up in a society that refuses to acknowledge or talk about mortality in helpful, healthy, or practical ways.

As time passes, not only have we forgotten about this boulder while still carrying its weight, but we’ve instead become fixated on the mud that covers it, the day-to-day stress and anxiety and overwhelm and burnout that fill up our lives, empties our cups, and disrupts the flow of how we show up in the world on any given day.

This is why, in my experience, no matter how much inner work you do, it is futile if you fail to recognize the fact of how short and finite your life is.

Without this crucial piece, you’ll become content with focusing on removing the mud instead of releasing the boulder.

After you do sit with the fact that one day you will die, the boulder will start to fall on its own.

And then you can see life in color for the first time, and you’re experiencing everything brand new. You crave poetry and art and anything that shows you the world you were living in yet you never knew.

You still come across plenty of mud, though.

But you find yourself playing with it now, and maybe even admiring it. The mud just doesn’t feel as heavy without the boulder anymore.

You even take a closer look at it, and you discover how it glistens when the sun reflects off of it. You can’t help but laugh at how something that feels like shit can actually shine, and then all of a sudden, you shine too.

You need to share this new awe with somebody new, but nobody listens, cares, or understands. It’s hard to see the mud as anything other than mud when life gets so fucking out of hand.

This stress is heavy.

With not just the lack of last wishes, but also the fear of the void that follows our inevitable last exhale, when the breath becomes the wind and we follow it to wherever it takes us next.

Infinite Frustration

Not everyone is fortunate enough to die from old age.

Oftentimes, the more sudden a loss, the harder and more confusing it can be to navigate life while being paralyzed by grief and mourning.

Here’s the thing about creating a death plan (or the legal term, Advanced Directive) that you’ll only hear from a death doula:

How we die can be considered a gift.

And I’m not talking about the number of incidents that could happen to take someone’s life.

I mean how we exist in our last days can be the most powerful gift you could give your loved ones.

Why?

Because dying is the very last memory and experience that you will leave your friends and family with.

How you will die will set an unconscious blueprint for the way your loved ones will live.

It is a lack of preparation while we’re living that feeds the desire of so many people to isolate themselves to “protect” their loved ones from witnessing the dying process.

How many times have you heard someone say “I don’t want to be seen like that?”

Or how about “I don’t want to be remembered like this?”

We are actively hiding each other from this very real part of life that we will all eventually experience.

My dad often says, “I don’t want you to remember me with pipes sticking out of my stomach. Don’t let me get to that point.”

I don’t think either of us conceptualized this at the time, but by speaking his desire, he was wielding the most power anyone can have around their life and death: expressing their wishes.

But more often than not, it’s not talked about, so instead we become hellbent on keeping as much control as we can around this for the sake of protecting those we love.

Think about that.

We never talk about death and dying.

And the reason so many of us are terrified of dying is because so many people who are dying, are terrified.

Why are they terrified?

Because nobody ever talks about dying!

So they have a lifetime of fear and questions that they are now dying to explore, and yet no time or energy left to explore them.

Do you see how this is a vicious cycle?

Planning is a Present of Presence

Often, when someone is dying, the family focuses most of their energy on the arrangements that need to be made or the funds that need to be raised.

The hospice nurses who cared for Abuelo told us that most families abandon their dying in the hospital. They say their goodbyes, but usually the dying person will last a few more days all alone.

(In my case, most of my extended family couldn’t be around him anymore, so me, my brother, and my dad would trade shifts. It was during this experience that I learned I was a death doula, but more on that another time.)

The reality is that very few family members or friends are present with the person dying.

Imagine something unexpected happening to one of your loved ones, and their life is in now jeopardy.

What is the first thing that comes into your mind around this?

…

Whatever you thought of, how might you feel different if you knew that this person planned all of their final wishes ahead of time?

In theory, this means that there aren’t any immediate, physical, or logistical needs to worry about other than being present.

This scenario might be even more terrifying because it wouldn’t give us an excuse to distract ourselves from the impending loss, this state of inhospitable dread otherwise known as anticipatory grief.

When you make a death plan, and share it with your family, you give them the gift of presence during your last moments of living.

And not presence for you, but presence for them to be with you.

To be with you and sit with you and to see you off, or as Ram Dass says, to “walk you home.”

One scary, monumental step you can take to begin dropping the boulder is to talk about it.

Write about it. Think about it. Ponder it in the shower.

Sit with it before you make your next big decision.

Talk it over with someone you love and trust.

Eventually, you would want to create a written and signed record of it with witnesses in the form of a death plan or advance directive.

This would put the nail in the coffin (see what I did there?) to settle any potential disputes among your family that might arise when you die.

It’s important to note that a conversation alone won’t hold much legal weight like a signed document with written wishes but they’ll release a ton of emotional weight, and that's as good a start as any.

The resources I will be giving away are all to help with this, so stay tuned for more on that if you’re interested!

Thanks for reading, friends.

Sending with so much heart,

David
Mor.intune