Death educators Gina Colombatto and Meredith Hays, facilitators of the workshop series The Ultimate Shavasana: Where Examining Death Makes Life a Little Bit Easier, speak about the importance of embracing our mortality.

Transcript:

Ojig: This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public Affair show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Ojig Yeretsian. Today I'm speaking with Gina Colombatto and Meredith Hayes, death educators who recently led workshops entitled The Ultimate Shavasana where examining death makes life a little bit easier. 

Ojig:Welcome to the show Gina and Meredith and thanks for joining us. 

Gina: Great to be here! 

Ojig: Tell us what you do and the problem you're trying to solve.

Gina: The problem we're trying to solve is that everyone is going to die and no one wants to talk about it. But it's something that we all have in common and it happens all the time. We all have loved ones who die and as a death educator I want to continue to bring creativity and levity into the subject of death and dying so that it becomes something that is SO normal instead of fear-based, it would be much more a celebration of whoever has died. So we do death education.

Meredith: What I do is I work as a death Doula or an end-of-life Doula. And my hope is that we can fill the gap between over the nurses who were working so hard and the caregivers who are coming from their homes and they're exhausted. And both sides of the medical professional and the personal they need help, and so doulas can step in. We are not medical; we offer practical, emotional and spiritual support and we can be there when the caregiver needs a break or if the nurses are too busy and can't answer a call right away. We’re hoping to make it more of a normal, comfortable situation for everyone.

Ojig: And as a death Doula, can you describe things you would do?

Gina: Yeah, well first the word Doula comes from the Greek and it means to serve or a female servant or female slave and while I don't love that there is some truth to it. We serve, that's what we do and we don't have to be female, the majority of us are. Like I said before it's non-medical and we can do pretty much anything. Our job is to serve the family of the dying person and the dying person themselves and to a larger degree the community. And we do that however we can, whether it's running errands for someone, whether it's holding a ceremony of some sort, or calling in a spiritual counselor, whatever it is. 

Ojig: It sounds like it's really important. I'd like to follow up about the fear of death that Gina mentioned. There seems to be a taboo around acknowledging dying and there is silence around planning for death. Why is it so hard for us to talk about this?

Gina: I think it moved from being very home based during the Civil War when we had soldiers going across country and they would die somewhere else and we needed them to get home. We wanted their bodies home. Before that, someone would die in the neighborhood and you would bring them to the parlour, which we now called the living room, oddly enough. And you would gather and you would lay out your dying or your dead and everyone in the neighborhood would come and women would wash the body and there would be preparation of the coffin by the men. It was very divided. But it was also very familial and community based. You knew who was dying and you knew when they were dying and you knew how they died and it was all very open. Whereas for us, we've turned death into dirtiness and it's like you don't touch a dead bird, it's going to be toxic, or you don't get near a dead body, it’s is going to smell. We’ve really created that from the Civil War because these bodies were far away and we needed to get them home so we started the embalming process. The embalming made it easier to get a body across country, but what happened at that time, though, is we started looking at there are only certain people who know how to take care of bodies and those are the the embalmers. We shifted at that point that only people who knew how to embalm would take care of the bodies. And we are bringing back home funerals because we want to remind ourselves that death isn't scary, it's perfectly normal, it's not dirty. Yes there can be blood, just like in birth there is the birth doulas, in death, there is the death doula. It’s the end of life. It's messy. Life is messy. But it's also so amazing and brilliant and then we can all share it so when someone dies you don't have to say, ‘quick! get someone to take away the smelly body.’ A body can be in your home for three days. It can be even longer if you're just putting it on ice and everyone can come and say their goodbyes and reminisce about that person.

Meredith: I think we’ve made death seem like an emergency and it really isn't. When a person dies, there's nothing to do. The status isn't going to change. The first thing that I think people should do when someone dies is take a breath and just sit and be and don't rush and don't pick up the phone and don't call out for the nurse. You don't need to do that. It's not an emergency. 

Gina: And people do find things that are important to them at that time. And it may be something as simple as singing to the dead or reading a poem or telling stories about that person. And that person’s not going anywhere. They're not rotting away. They're just a body that's lying there and you can enjoy all the memories of who they are, right there. They’re right there with you.

Ojig: Your perspective is that this is just a natural part of the process of living. It’s just the end stage. 

Meredith: Exactly. Yeah, and we need to also, part of the education is letting our kids know about this and to open up the conversation for not just adults, but for the younger ones as well because we hide away our old people and unless you have the fortune of living with your grandmother or something, kids don't really talk to old people that much. And there's so much wisdom and so much beauty there. We need to work on that. We really, really do!

Ojig: Religion and medicine are the usual realms that death is discussed. However, in Mexico, loved ones who died are acknowledged and celebrated. Is our fear of death a western or American phenomenon?

Gina: It's hard to say American because we’re made up of everything right, but that's a little tricky but it's yes, it’s definitely more western culture. At the same time there is Mexico in the western culture, so it's very different group to group and how we've been raised. I like that you mentioned Dia de Los Muertos. Coco, the film that came out last year that just covered everything in a playful way. It was very joyous. It was very easy for everyone to watch. There's a little bit of the Disney piece in there that you just go ‘really?’, but it opened that door as culturally some religions do talk about it, you may also have someone that understands it from their religious perspective, but they still have terror.

Ojig: And what is thanatology? 

Gina: Thanatology is the study of death. We got into the study of death. That's where we met.

Meredith: Yes, we met at the open center in New York City four years ago. We did a 9-month study in a course called The Art of Dying and I think that's how I describe thanatology because it covers so much and we talked about every aspect-- the physical aspects of dying, spiritual, emotional, historical, you name it, we covered it.

Gina: Part of what the thanatology brought to us was that there are so many ways to look at death. And you had mentioned medicine and religion. And in medicine we study how to not die, and that becomes a real problem because doctors aren’t trained, raised, experienced in saying, ‘Oh, this person is going to die. How great!’ That's not a reality in a hospital. They’ve been trained to save us. That’s how we’ve given them that job. You need to save us. And you'll find some people who really, and we learned this in school from the palliative care doctor, there are some people who want to stay alive, to stay alive. What are you going to do by being alive? I want to have more chemo. What are you going to do with more chemo? Stay alive. Is that really living or is that just surviving or what exactly is that? And doctors are supposed to offer everything they can and as a culture again we don't say oh you know what that maybe pretty miserable do you want to go that route because otherwise maybe hospice and doula and end-of-life practitioners that know how to offer what can you do in this body that you can still do while you're here.

Meredith: Right. There's still definitely a way to live while you die and that gets overlooked and what matters to someone at the end of life may not matter to someone else. We've heard stories of people who all they want to be able to do is be with their kids and eat chocolate ice cream and that's, to them, that's living, and if they can't do that, then they're done. And those are the questions that doctors are now starting to ask. You know, what is it that makes you want to wake up in the morning? We hope to see more and more of that but doctors aren't taught that in their schools and we do see it changing now which is awesome.

Ojig: That’'s great.That gives us hope. And what is the standard practice in the field of thanatology? Is it bereavement counseling?

Gina: As a culture, we are very grief-based. Grief actually comes from a French word that is to burden and I think that we all sign up for the burden. By looking at death as grief, as loss, instead of as the joy of that person was with you for as long as they were, what a different experience we’d be having. Bereavement is one, that yes, it's very important to be able to sit with someone and, and this is one of the parts of an end-of-life doula, is being able to sit with the family in anticipatory grief in that place where the person is not all the way gone, but they may be gone in their minds but their body is still there, so that pain is, is pretty intense because you love someone that's really not the way that you want them to be. And so, those places of bereavement, to be able to sit it that and be able to say that’s painful, it really is, tell me more, who were they, because they lived, and we tend to focus on, they’re gone. 

Ojig: What have you found to be with a common need with patients that you’ve helped?

Meredith: Well, every person is different and every death is different. I try really hard. We were taught this too, you walk into a situation and let everything go. No expectations, your own baggage, you gotta deal with that first, or else it’s trouble. Walking into a situation, it can be anything and you have to be okay with that. People grieve differently. They can be freaking out and screaming and yelling. There could be tears or there could be silence. And as a doula, you accept that, and you just embrace it and let the people do whatever they have to. As for the dying person, again, it could be anything. I've seen a lot of sadness. I would call it sadness. I've seen fear and hope, a lot of hope. Also humor. Some very funny things happen at the end of life and I have some of my best memories, gosh, from people who were dying. That's a hard question to answer because it's all over the map. I think you get every single emotion. 

Ojig: if you're just tuning in, you’re listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today’s guests are Gina Colombotto and Meredith Hayes. They're speaking about their recent workshop series entitled, The Ultimate Shavasana, where examining death makes life a little bit easier.

Ojig: I wanted to now ask about your workshop. So the flyer reads: The Ultimate Shavasana-- where examining death makes life a little bit easier. Lose your fear of dying, get wrapped in a lively conversation, and then in a beautiful shroud or coffin. How are you innovating in this field of death education and tell us about your workshops. 

Gina: When we started, I was like, this is what I want to do. It’s a dream of getting people to get really close to their fears and really what their fears are is about the love of their bodies, or their love of someone that has left or their love of someone that they don't want to die. So it’s really all about love which sounds so corny, but it’s so true. To me, it’s like OK, how can we remind people that you’re invited to come look at why it’s so fearful and then touch upon how can we make it less fearful. I like to add art into it. I like to add creativity into it so it’s not all dark and black and dungeon-like.

Meredith:  I call it part death cafe, part meditation, part party, because there is a celebration aspect to it. There is a point where you're invited to climb into a coffin or get wrapped in a shroud and do a short meditation. People have come out of that, transformed seems like a large word, but I would say transformed, and there's this look of relief and happiness. That's not to say it’s super scary beforehand. It is for some people, but not for everyone. it's a safe place. It's very calm, but happy. 

Gina: We’re planning on taking this all around-- to continue to invite people to look more closely and laugh more closely with and around death and dying. We have been in Maine and New York and Berkeley. But it is a serious, it's a serious step. It's 2 hours.

Meredith: Yeah it's pretty powerful. And back to where we hope to have these workshops, we’re reaching out now to hospice groups, and hope to be part of their training and offer the workshop to the volunteers so the volunteers can get sort of up close and personal and take the experience when they go volunteer with hospice patients.

Gina: For anyone who doesn’t do yoga, shavasana is the corpse pose that is for the ultimate letting go at the end of oftentimes yoga classes. It has a long long history of being that hardest thing to experience. 

Ojig: You sound like you're both these containers for holding it all together for folks to take this risky step and check out their fears and demystify a little bit and think critically about what they’re wrapped up in. Who attends your workshop? Is there a cultural group or social group that’s more open to talk about our mortality?

Gina: I’ve been doing death cafe’s probably for 4 or 5 years and I've had so many people come through and usually I would expect it would be all elders, but actually there's quite a few of the 20-somethings, 18-35 somethings. It's a huge age range and people have different reasons they're there. Someone might come because they have cancer and they're in their eighties and they are kind of thinking, I have everything in order, but you know I'm here to learn anything else and you think, how great, they’ve shown up, and then someone else will arrive and they're 18 and their best friend just did an opioid overdose and it's a hard thing because nobody wants to talk about it. With suicide, I will always turn it around and say, instead of the person, you know they took their life, I will always say, they gave their life, because if you just look at it from that angle, they were here as long as they could stay, so maybe they were here for 18 years, like they gave their life for 18 years. What were they like? Tell me about them. We forget that piece because we focus on the end, that last hour, and that’s how we define the person forever after.

Ojig: You’re shifting the focus from the loss to the gifts, to what was given. So important.

Meredith: I just want to say, some people show up to these events, not knowing why they are showing up. There’s a lot of that. When we ask, ‘What brought you here?’ Oh, I don’t know. I’ve just always been interested in death.’ And in this circle of people, we have people nodding, ‘oh, I know what you mean, I know what you mean.’ When I say it now, it sounds a little weird, but it makes all the sense in the world. And people are exploring. They want a place to be able to talk about this.

Ojig: Yeah, because it’s not something you grow up with. You’re not learning it at school or in your family. If there’s taboos around it or it’s unsafe to ask anyone.

Gina: I think what the humor is is that we all are going there and when you start talking about it people will say the most amazing things. You know, we had a woman say ‘what is the worst thing that could happen to your body’ and she said, ‘I know this is odd, but I’d actually have my legs cut off and I think it's that wouldn't be so bad because I would become the best swimmer.’ Now we're just sitting there looking, going HUH, okay well, that's good, but she thought about it and she hasn't told anyone anything like that and yet that's her getting closer to letting go of her body. Like how can I let go? What would be comfortable? What would that be like?

Meredith: And then there was a woman who wanted her body to be eaten by alligators and she was dead serious. And when we said, how would you like to go, she didn’t miss a beat. She said, I’d like to be pulled apart by alligators.

Gina: And, don’t tell my mother until after it’s done. And for us, it’s amazing how hard it is for people to sign up for these workshops. People are so fearful that it’s ‘please, don’t talk to me about it. No, I can’t show up. If we talk about it, we’re going to die’. Yeah, that’s true, but maybe not tomorrow.

Ojig: When you educate about dying and death, do you also share information about what options folks have for what to do with their bodies? 

Gina: Yes, we have lots of what to do. And different states have different things that they can do with bodies. So first of all there are dead bodies everywhere and we don't know that. You know, in the hospitals, there’s tons of dead bodies. They're just not parading them through for you but that's where people go to die so we forget that and we think oh my god really there's dead bodies. It’s like yeah, and that's normal, and that's okay, and those people were loved, they're all fine. And then some of the green burial options, we like to think of cremation as a very green way to go but actually it’s incredibly toxic. The mercury and the toxicity that goes into the air even with all the filters is pretty extreme. In Maine, which is where I'm living now, has alkaline hydrolysis, which is water cremation. It’s also called aqua-cremation and bio-cremation where you put the bodies into basically a big canister and it’s all stainless steel. The body is on a rack. It fills with water. They put in potassium, I believe, to break down the PH level and then every part of the body except for the bone just disintegrates. And it goes into the water system as no DNA, there’s no DNA in the water. It's all just liquid and it's perfectly fine to go into the water system. People say YUCK, it’s going into the water system, forgetting that when a person is embalmed, everything that’s taken out of that body goes straight into the water system.

Ojig: This is fascinating. We are SO not informed.

Meredith: True. A lot of people are turning to green burials and choosing to be wrapped in just shrouds or bamboo caskets or cardboard caskets and and just being put into the ground. Also there's a lot of movement for making your own casket and I don’t know if you’ve seen these caskets that are made to place into furniture, like a bookcase that you can use until you're ready for it to use it as a casket, so you can get to know it--and like live with it for a while. Until you die with it. Yeah, so I’m sure there’s going to be more creative things coming up.

Gina: It’s exciting. There are different ways that we're looking and people are trying and planting bodies and what people have an illusion about is that when someone is burned in cremation and you have ashes, they said we're going to plant a tree in these ashes, well, that's not really good for the tree. They won't grow in ashes. There’s not a whole lot of good stuff for the tree in ashes. But you can put them around a tree.

Ojig: How did you find your way into this field?

Meredith: I was one of those kids who always liked to talk about death. It was a pretty open conversation in my family. We always talked about how we wanted to die and where we wanted to be buried or cremated and it was like a conversation around the kitchen table, so there was that. But then my dad died about six years ago and he and I didn't know much about the industry and he was in hospice his last 4 days. It actually was awful. I think in retrospect I think part of the awfulness was because I wasn't informed and everything came as a shock to me. Also I think we did not have a cracker jack staff at the time at the hospice. But it was painful for my entire family and my dad was someone who was in service of other people his whole life and for him to struggle and suffer this way, it just seemed completely wrong and extremely difficult to get through. And on the third day...he was there four days... on the third day I just, I had lost it, and I thought, why is this happening to this man who is like the greatest, kindest man. It was like a slap on the side of my head. I thought, oh my God, he's doing this for me. He was like YO, wake up daughter, and see what what I'm doing for you because this is what we need. We need people to figure this out and to make it so that no one else has this experience. Once that I had that thought, I thought, okay, let's do it then. It was his definitely, his last gift to me. I went away from there thinking, I got to do something. And it took a couple years to figure it out, Googling end-of-life opportunities, death jobs, you know, and then I made my way to the Open Center and that's where it all started. Yeah, so it was very personal and it wasn't until I worked through all this baggage with my dad that I was able to be ready to help other people because I think that's super important. You have to do the work. It's hard and it takes a long time, but you can't go on to serve others until you've got that figured out. 

Ojig: And how about you Gina? How did you find your way into this field?

Gina: I have a lot of people who've died and who I loved dearly and they've all had different deaths. I happen to have a larger amount of people who have given their own lives or taken their own lives. Even when I was younger and people would be very critical of that, I just had a different feel towards it and I thought well, it’s a another way to leave. And I know that just riles people. And at the same time, I think that we emphasize mental illness. And, yes, I think that that can play a part in it and I also think that there are some people who there just done, they’ve had a good life, they lived their lives and they're done. It's easier for us to accept that when they're 85 years old than if they're a 25 year old and who’s to know. We just don’t know. So I think it's always been this intrigue that I haven’t looked at death as the worst thing ever but more a real curiosity and how we all get there is so fascinating. 

Ojig: The poet Mary Oliver wrote “And When Death Comes”:

When it's over I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

What does it mean to die well and what does a good death look like to you? 

Meredith: Personally a good death for me would be I would like to be aware. I hope not to be in pain. I think that’s a pretty universal thought for people. But really, I want to know what's going on and I would like to be able to relay what's going on to those around me, especially my family and my son. If things go according to you know the laws of nature I will go before him, and I won't be there with him when he dies, and so I would like to give him the gift of explaining what I'm experiencing. So that maybe he'll experience the same thing or maybe he won't be scared when something comes up. And I think if he can then pass that on, then I guess a good death to me would be to leave that legacy.

Gina: I don't know if there is such a thing as a good death. And a good death, I think, as with everything, it’s individual, because if I weren't aware and I have been around people who are leaving with dementia and people say, oh I would just hate to have dementia, but you don't know and the person who has dementia seems, we don't know, but seems to be perfectly fine and it's almost a gift to those around. It may look like a very uncomfortable death but maybe that's the gifting like your papa gave you. That there's a gift there. I would love to say that I go with grace... who knows. And I ask in death cafes over and over and over what’s a good death and it's so individual. I mean a good death for one person is I'm all alone, I'm on a mountain, and I have a heart attack, and someone else's is I have my whole family around me and I've had cancer for 6 months so I can say goodbye to everyone and it's loud and the kids have pans and they're dancing around and you’re thinking, oh, well those are both good deaths.

Ojig: Young people, children, are not very prepared for talking about the last days. And most deaths happen out of sight in hospitals. How do you help youngsters navigate? What can we do to educate the next generation?

Meredith: I don't agree with the fact that they're not ready to talk about it. I think in fact they are more ready than anyone else. It's just that people don't know how to bring it up with them, how to educate them. I think we just need to start the conversations. There's a way to get some sort of education in schools and I I don't know what that is yet. I think if they can talk about sex ed why can't they talk about death ed? There’s no difference. At my house, my boy has a death plan for his pet snails. We know that he wants them cremated and and he wants to bury them then. And we talked about that and he knows what I want and it's a normal conversation for us. We went to the dentist and the fish in the fish tank died and the nurse ran over saying, ‘don't look, don't look, don't look’ and he said, he stepped right in front of her and said, don't worry, my mama knows everything about death and the nurse was like what are you talking about? That fish shouldn't be whisked away without any explanation. I think it just has to be normalized and I hope that there will be some programs. I hope to work on that in my communities.

Gina: And I want to add to that that we do talk to children about death. We just talk in the same mode of fear. Because we are taking kindergarteners to active shooter drills in their school. So you have five and six year olds who are learning how to not die because it's gonna be really terrifying and this is what we need to do to avoid that at all costs and that's what they hear about death. And then they hear that someone famous died and the flag is at half mast but we don't really talk about that, it's just you know you're supposed to be quiet and honor it, but not really talk about it and so I think as Meredith says, it’s so important to have the conversation.

Ojig: If people want to learn more about your innovative work and get more information about your workshops, how can people contact you?

Gina: I actually make contact on Instagram with just the Fine Art of Living and Dying. If you look up The Ultimate Shavasana we will be taking that around and so that will pop up. Another way to reach us would be through email: andthenwhathappens@gmail.com because we really don't know.

Ojig: We tend to think of death as a separate thing and not connected at all to the living process and that's where we need to shift our thinking and expand life to include the ending chapter. Similar to other transition points in life where we get help and guidance like with the birth process, college counseling, athletic coaching, career building, wedding or marriage counseling... end of life is just another phase for which we can also get support. And I want to thank you Gina and Meredith for sharing about your process and the important work that you do to bring death and dying into the discussion about how we live.

Meredith:Thank you! 

Gina: Thank you very much!

Ojig:  You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcast on iTunes University. See you again in two weeks. 

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