Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go

In her report on Torajan death practices, National Geographic author Amanda Bennett writes, “[T]he death of the body isn’t the abrupt, final severing event of the West. Instead, death is just one step in a long, gradually unfolding process.”

For example, consider the following questions a death doula may ask a dying person to consider when imagining their ideal death: Do you want candles to be lit? Do you have a special object that you want to hold or have placed nearby? Are there certain clothes you want to wear? Do you want someone to brush your hair? Should prayers be said? Do you h

When have you felt most alive? Most awake? Most connected? When have you felt most at one with a greater sense of meaning, purpose, or power? Most likely, such moments occurred while loving deeply, feeling deeply, and seeing deeply. Facing loss can inspire such moments. When we pristinely acknowledge the impermanent nature of this world, we can be

The work of being a doula and a chaplain means cozying up to fear, getting to know it, sitting with its metal taste in the mouth and its gut-ripping grip. It also means expanding beyond the fear, and we can only do this well for others if we can do this for ourselves.

Imagine a little girl entering our world at home in her mother’s bedroom. Blood, sweat, tears, and joy accompany the arrival of this beloved child. Years pass. The girl becomes a woman who inherits the house. Her mother’s room becomes her own. Time transforms the woman. Soon she is aged, wrinkled, elderly, dying. She asks to die at home, knowing th

Whatever techniques we draw upon, we can learn to sit with another person’s grief, anxiety, hurt, fear, and loss with more compassion and spaciousness. I often ask myself: What still hurts? What isn’t in place? What is beyond the scope of my sense-making capacities? What story still blows my heart so open that I’m left scrambling for any solid grou

Buddhist “wheel of life.”

I stop writing. I stop resisting. I stop waiting. I stop hoping for a response that can string together what had been unraveled, irrevocably. I start to accept the pain. Sometimes all one can do to make things “all right” is to hold gentle space for the broken, painful pieces that will never be all right and will never be repaired, at least in this

The extent to which we can do this for another depends upon our willingness to traverse our dark interior, our hungry ghosts, the ugly places within our own hearts haunted by our own buried cries of past harm and regret.

To look in all directions and see nothing human-made is deeply restorative. It helps remind me of our true place in the web of existence, outside of concrete, freeways, suburban sprawl, and the seemingly endless variety of shopping centers dedicated to constant consumption.