In the Presence of Death: Hospicing
As the days grow shorter and chillier and summer growth slows to a trickle, death and decay return to the foreground of our senses while we collectively transition into fall. The dead leaves we start to hear crunching under our feet are a reminder of one of nature’s simply perfect processes of continuity through collapse – what was alive will inevitably die and be returned to the living earth. Through the coordinated breakdown of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen by a network of interconnected microorganisms, living matter is composted to redistribute its resources. Death initiates this cycle of composting, holding purpose as the provider of life-giving nutriment to feed the future.
The word hospice in its modern cultural context evokes a strong, less-than-positive image of an often-overlooked yet critical stage of providing care for life. Coupled with associations of terminal illness, palliative care, and the ultimate uncomfortable task of accepting one’s own mortality, it's a topic most modern minds are eager to avoid. In modern culture, which mistakenly equates the concept of wellness with eternal youth and immortality, hospice is seen as a final destination, equivalent to defeat. Our modern healthcare system is structured to defy death, instilling beliefs of a human superiority which posits that pain, disease and discomfort can and must be avoided at all costs. Accepting death, along with the pain and discomfort which often accompany it, is something we collectively are not given the training or guidance to do. Death is the great equalizer, and hospicing is an inevitable task that we cannot dismiss or deny any longer.
I was fifteen years old when my father looked his children in the eyes to tell them that he had accepted death. After twelve years of what was nothing short of a miraculous “winning” battle against a mutiny of his own cells, this news came as the ultimate defeat for all of us. The notion that my dad could die was not an option; it was a possibility that I had rendered impossible through many years of radical hope and unrelenting optimism. But it was a future that was not in my control, and his graceful acceptance into the unknown liberated me from the chains of delusional denial to see the elements of hospice work that are so integral to processing death and the subsequent approach of an uncertain future.
Hospicing is by no means easy, pretty, or even rewarding work. It is a form of providing care for life without having any stake in the future of that life. But proximity to death also has a way of illuminating a deep appreciation for the living. In the presence of death, hospicing makes space for the sacredness of life to be amplified. Only in surrendering to the acceptance of death may we discover new, deeper ways of connecting to life.
By holding the concept of hospice in mind as this inevitable transitory release into the full acceptance of death, we offer up the question of who or what is in need of hospicing. Death and decay is not limited to human existence – while the human body is the most personal teacher of impermanence, the world around us is dying all the time (and I’m not just talking about those crunchy leaves we’re starting to stomp on.) The very fabric of modern human life as we know it was built on death – so much needed to die in order for this current form of modernity to exist. So much continues to die so that modernity can exist – the newest technologies and comforts the West insists are necessary to civilization and progress rely directly on ecocide and genocide. With this knowledge in mind, any reluctance to accept modernity’s long-overdue death comes wrapped in a sheet of denial, woven by threads of guilt and a subconscious understanding of one’s own complicity in harm.
Despite a great Western denial, modernity itself is destined to die.
And it is our responsibility to accept, witness, and hospice it.
So, what would it look like to hospice modernity? How do we begin to accept the death of a dominant culture which has seemingly permeated every facet of our existence through colonization, exploitation, hierarchy and various levels of human supremacy?
Vanessa Machado de Oliveria lays out the framework for addressing these questions in the book that largely inspired this lunar cycle's discourse, Hospicing Modernity. She proposes that “Hospicing requires intellectual accountability and existential surrender. Intellectual accountability is about facing the truth behind our denials and projections, sitting with our complicity in harm; shedding arrogance and accepting accountability without seeking recognition, redemption, innocence, or purity… Existential surrender is about interrupting addictions and business as usual, confronting fragilities, learning to compost personal and collective shit, and relinquishing colonial attachments.”
Acceptance of the very necessary death of a system of beliefs unsuited to sustain life on Earth requires one to unravel the threads of complicity on their own protective sheaths of denial. In this vulnerable state of full exposure, some may choose to crawl back into the cover of modernity's temporary comforts. But to continue to deny death is to remain complicit in the harm that modernity inextricably inflicts on the most vulnerable forms of life.
If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve already dipped your toes in the collapse-aware acceptance and reckoning with the death of modernity. But hospicing is the follow-up action to acceptance. Once we know what is dying, hospicing asks us to to witness death and to not look away. It requires us to sit with the discomfort of death and tend to what is dying with no promise of reward. It tells us to decolonize our minds, to stop watering the seeds that modernity planted in our youth and allow our radical hopes and unrelenting optimism for the future of modernity to die.
Fundamentally, we can acknowledge that modernity is a system that only exists through the minds of those who believe in it, feed it, and allow it to grow. As those minds face innumerable crises from all fronts and regain the capacity to recognize that the root of these systemic issues stems from an imposed belief system which holds virtually no value for life, modernity teeters on the brink of death.
The work of hospicing modernity will start internally. Only when we can individually dismantle the structures from within will we begin to recognize that our individuality is designed to keep us disconnected from the greater entangled network of life that suffers under our denial and complicity.