This death in you is coming. You’re going to your edge anyway, I’m here to be with you through the massive transformation.
I am a midwife for death, though I’ve fallen in love with the term Deathwife.
They’re very different, a “midwife” is a “woman who is with.” Contextually/idiomatically we usually mean a woman who is with another through the process of birthing new life, but really a midwife can be with another through any transitional process including death. Both literal death and metaphoric death.
I recently stumbled across the term Deathwife and fell deeply in love. In the same kind of etymological construction, a “deathwife” is a woman of death like an “alewife” is a woman of brewing/ale and a “midwife” is a woman who is with. We don’t control the process, but we guide it.
We Deathwives are here to assist those going through deaths: The literal, the metaphoric, the complete, or the partial. Death is the thing we are experts in creating, fostering, bringing forward, and bringing through its necessary cycles to become something beautiful.
We all die, and things in our lives die. Both other people and beings that we walk with as all who live must die. This also applies to phases, parts of ourselves, ways of being, systems, they all must die as well.
It has to happen, but there is no one way that a death looks. I’ve seen both conscious and unconscious deaths. Deaths of violent necessity with painful attachment to the dying, beautiful deaths where the letting go is still painful but we are able to see the beautiful gift that is left with the living, deaths sudden and shocking, deaths slow and graceful, deaths that took themselves back to life for a while before proceeding further, deaths were we ourselves must perform the tenderly loving mercy killing of a being that is dying in agony, all of these and more exist. There are as many ways of dying as there are of living.
A flower must die in order to create a seed, a seed must die in order to create a sprout. Whoever and whatever is dying for you right now must die in order to allow the next thing to arise. Sometimes it happens simultaneously and obviously: The death of the old overlapping the birth of the new. Sometimes the death occurs long before we can see the new arising as it needs the compost of the dead to feed its rising.
Part of my role as a Deathwife is to hold you in the dying process while reminding you that this death is not the end. It never is. It usually feels that way and certainly it is the end of something, but it’s not the end of all things forever. That is not the way of this spiral of existence we live (and die) in.
This death is coming. You’re going to your edge anyway, I’m here to be with you. The emotions are big, and the shortcut to being with them is just that: To be with them.
I’ve been there over and over again. Tsunamis of emotion. Running from the wave, hunkering down and hiding, managing it… none of those things really work. We can’t run fast enough to outrun death nor the emotions and we can’t hide from the powerful wave. What we need to learn to do is to float. To allow the wave to hold and carry us where it will and to trust that it will be a good place, a place we can build again.
The best way to face it is not accidentally. The best way to face it is consciously. You will have times of feeling very deeply alone and unseen in this process, but it doesn’t have to be always. One of the greatest gifts I bring as a Deathwife is that of seeing you, of holding you through this process. Like birth, death will come whether we will or no, but it doesn’t have to come with no preparation, no support.
Many traditions emphasize that the best way to face your inevitable physical death is to face these daily deaths and practice, practice, practice.
One greatly comforting thing that the daily deaths remind us of is that there is always something next. Usually better. The greater the thing that dies, the bigger a thing it can feed. The more consciously we walk through that death, the more prepared we are for the thing arising next, the more consciously we can shape the thing arising next.
In Nordic cosmology, the earth is created from the body of a dead giant. Because one enormous being died, all the beauty we live in today arose. What will arise from that which is dying in your life right now?
