Alua Arthur: Loving the End
Alua Arthur is a death doula and recovering attorney who is the author of Briefly, Perfectly, Human, which is a guidebook for both how to live and also how to die. Alua is the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. In today’s conversation, we talk about what it would look like to get our death phobic culture a little closer to the end, why people fear dying, and what can be gained when we recognize the priceless gifts that come when our lives come to a close. Let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM ALUA ARTHUR:
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Related Episodes:
B.J. Miller: “Struggle is Real—Suffering is Optional”
Roshi Joan Halifax: “Standing at the Edge”
Frank Oswaseski: “Accepting the Invitation”
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I have to say that my brother in law, who is also my big brother, died and his name is Peter John Wertheim.
ALUA ARTHUR: Wow.
ELISE: I know. Yeah.
ALUA: Wow, when did he die?
ELISE: He died in 2017, when he was 39, in his sleep from a very rare undiagnosed heart condition. And he was at his older brother's wedding in San Francisco. He was married to my brother. They met their first week of college. So they had a staggeringly long relationship, 20 years. And he died in his sleep and couldn't be resuscitated. My brother did CPR and they got a trace on him when they he heard his death rattle. That's what woke him up in the middle of the night, I'm not a death doula, although I do like to talk about death but similar to you, it marked like a real door for me, it was massive. A massive shift in my understanding of life and death and who we are and what we're here to do and it put me in touch with the universe in a way that I am so grateful, as dark as that sounds, but I'm sure you of all people can understand.
ALUA: I do. I do understand. Although our, like, grief journeys are also individualized and different, I think that there is some just basic, like, Oh, shit, you've been through it at a basic level that we can recognize in another who has grieved somebody that they cared about. And particularly when that grief opens up a new portal in you, which it did in me for sure. I mean, all my work, but also just in the way that I am as a human and how I relate to the world and how much more precious life is when the people that we love die and disappear from our sight. And it's like, what do you mean?
ELISE: Death is something that I thought a lot about already in some ways because my dad is a pulmonologist and an intensivist and I spent a lot of time in the hospital waiting for him as a child and watching people on their worst days in the emergency room. It was a real bring your child to work environment when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time at the hospital. And this is why services like what you're doing is so profound because he would be with patients and their families and you would have someone clearly at the end of their life intubated in the ICU and he would say to the family, and this maybe was before advanced directives, but like, do you know what your person wants? And there would be just this denial and inability to even talk about that. And also with patients present in the room, my dad would try to advocate for them in the sense of what you got, there needs to be a conversation about what's happening here for everyone. Not a lot of receptivity, but do you think that's changing?
ALUA: I hope so. Otherwise all this is in vain. I hope so. I hope so. I think it is. The fact that I had surgery not that long ago, and when I checked in, they were like, do you have advanced directive paperwork? I loved that. Obviously. I was like, yes, something is shifting. Granted, it wasn't much conversation about what it is and how to make the decisions, but at least it was just a baseline like, do you have this? My hope is that as we keep talking about it, culturally, societally, thank you for this, this podcast, I think is tremendous. The fact that I get to talk about this here with you. I think that as we keep pushing the needle forward and keep the conversation going, it's going to continue to shift, but I'm seeing death doulas now on TV, like I was watching some random show a couple weeks ago and there was a death doula and I was like, this is so rad. So things are changing a little bit.
ELISE: Yeah.
ALUA: May also just be my bias because I desperately want them to.
ELISE: I think it's so wonderful how, you didn't come in through the practicalities, but maybe you can talk a bit about Your brother in law and his death and just what's left at the end for people and particularly, I don't know, you would know, more pronounced for people who are young. I hadn't thought about my own death I was not prepared even though I had young kids, Peter's death put me sort of in motion. Life insurance. All of it. Where are all my passwords? Just recognizing what a loving thing that that is to do, even though it feels morbid, and hopefully won't come for a while. But with Peter, you know, I did that work similar to you of transferring car titles, unwinding gym memberships, canceling trips, trying to hack into his accounts. You know, my brother was Not in any position. I moved into that over functioning role, but do you feel like people are starting? I know you have like a whole process, which is amazing.
ALUA: I think people are starting. I think people are starting to think about it. I honestly find that it's a lot of folks that have young kids where somebody in their life has died, either a parent and they had to like dig through everything, or an in law, or a sibling, and they're like, hold on a minute, I don't want to recreate this, so what do I need to do now? But I am finding that people are starting to do the things a little bit more. And sounds like you definitely served as a doula after your Peter's death, too, because that is a part of the doula role, or at least it can be a supportive part of the doula role, where folks are either trying to handle this on their own, or in such deep grief that they can't, or they don't even know where to begin, just to guide somebody along the way to say, hey, consider it in this order, or to ask the fundamental questions, even to see what we need to start digging through. Sometimes it feels like CSI to try to piece together all the little bits to make it make sense to figure out what we need to close or what we can still have access to. How was it for you?
ELISE: I find stuff like that soothing. I'm not unlike Elena and Mark in the book, the man who died of ALS and his wife, like, I soothe through making to do lists and getting things done, but it is wild, you know, when you're like, I'm just really sad and I don't, why am I on the phone with AT& T, as you know, proving someone's death it took us months to get the death certificate because they couldn't figure out what had happened and it was in San Francisco. All the things, like the indignities, right, of the lack of death care does make the process more, I don't know if you'd call it mundane. And also not honoring and tedious, you know?
ALUA: Yeah. And undignified in a way. Every single time I had to repeat to somebody, I'd tell them what I was calling for. I'd explained that my brother in law was dead and who I was trying to do this thing. And they'd asked to speak to him. And I was like, what? He's dead. Like you can't.
ELISE: I'm not a full body medium.
ALUA: Yet, thank goodness. Gosh. Also, I think about this often, like what a conflict of interest it would be if I also spoke to dead people, it'd be really interesting. Thank God I don't carry that gift, but yeah, it was like, so tedious, so mundane, so painful also in the mundane nature of it. You know, it's like, I'm just trying to do some regular thing with somebody who's on the other end doing their regular job and now they're confronted with me and my grief. There was one time where I burst into tears trying to explain what I was trying to do and how frustrating it had been. I don't do through checklists and to dos. I need to sit and stare out the window, stare in a space for a while. And so I was doing my best then, and my best meant like wailing on this poor customer service rep somewhere. But I wish that folks that were in professions where that could be a component of it, were at least trained to lead with some compassion and some basic, like, understanding about how to navigate the system. You know, I'm always surprised when I'm calling life insurance companies on behalf of a client, somebody who's trying to access it, they're having a hard time. And the person who answers the phone, it gives a very standard, I'm sorry for your loss. And then they jump into the bureaucracy of it all. And I'm like, this is the work that you do after a death. I would hope that they would be a lot more gentle with those that are grieving and in process. But this is why I think we need death doulas in every strata of society. Okay. I know. Again, I'm biased, but I think it would make a real big difference. This is an absolutely universal experience. We will all go through it at some point in time. If I don't live long enough to see the people that I love die, the people who love me are going to have to deal with it. Why don't we have support across the board? I can't make it make sense, you know?
ELISE: Yeah. Well, don't you think it's because people just don't want to think about death and or specifically dying and that it's too scary slash painful to consider, even though the practicalities are so intense.
ALUA: I think so on some level, but I also think that capitalism wants to capitalize on the things that make us feel good and happy and great. And so it's like, shun that and just focus on like the good things. But to me, there's a real good thing in supporting my fellow human. You know, capitalism doesn't have the human experience at its root. But if we were to focus on the human experience, there's a potential for us to like heal each other, to actually provide like services in a way that supports folks rather than just in ways that focus on our joy, or on the best version of ourselves or our youth or any of those things.
ELISE: yeah. Oh, and it seems like the structure of the book is it opens with a story from your life and then you transition to the end of someone's life and sitting with them. And what an honor. I mean, so terrifying, right? And I thought it was so beautiful how you wrote about how this work feels so sacred to you as an outsider. And maybe you want to Speak to that. But how beautiful and hard to get so intimate with people and then invariably have to say goodbye, right away. I mean, or maybe not right away, maybe over the span of a year. But can you talk about the energy that you get from that?
ALUA: This work to me feels like the best job in the world. I get to sit and be with humans when they are their most vulnerable, when the space is actually intimate and it's ripe for it. Like everybody knows what I'm coming in there to do, there's not a lot of talk about the weather. I mean, there is a little bit, but I generally veer toward like death and aliens and sex and shame as a human anyway. So it's a pretty good fit. Like I'm down for like the big messy emotions. So that part fits really well. It feels good to me. It also feels really good to me to be able to support another in something that they need. To be in a place where other people are turning away from to just be like, Hey, I'm here and I got you, you know, that feels really good to me. And so there's not as much like heaviness more to me, it's so life affirming. It's so joy bringing. It's so compassion filled when being with somebody who's dying and I get to talk to them about their lives and the things that they fear and the things that are still undone, the things that they regret, and I get to witness them in the wholeness and their absolute wholeness, because as they die, we wrap up the totality of their human experience. It's really easy for me to transfer that to the person on the phone, customer service, who's giving me a hard time. You know, I can't help but wonder, What's going on in their lives or where they're at or their shames or their regrets or their joys, it allows me to be with humans in a way that feels good to me, in the way that I want to be in the way that I want to show up in the world.
ELISE: Your family is fascinating to me, right? Because I know that your parents wanted doctors and lawyers and you were a lawyer, but it seems like all of your siblings, maybe they're tangential, but like you've all thrived in these unexpected avenues. Do you know why? What is that? Do you know how you're all so exceptional?
ALUA: That's sweet. Thank you for that reflection. My sisters are really rad. They're really cool. Yeah, they're really cool. And they're all, I think in the general markers of success, really successful. But also in like the personal ones, you know what I mean? I think my parents did a really good job grounding us in who we are and our lineage and where we came from in raising us up in Christianity for all of its benefits and difficulties. I turned away from the religion very early on, but you know, there are some principles in there that are really cool. So I think for the baseline principles, those are pretty strong. They were a good unit together. They worked well together for a while, for our good. My dad is really big on achievement and education and my mom was as well, but it's also like, please be a good person while you're doing it. And so I hope that the combination of those things made some pretty kick ass humans. And they're all really stylish. They're all really stylish. Great.
ELISE: Yeah, it feels like there's something maybe about, as you just said, like the maintenance of these big stories of community and like the story of Christianity, whether it's part of your life now or not, that feels like it was an amazing space. None of you are doing the same things, which is also so interesting to me. So it's remarkable.
ALUA: It's pretty cool.
ELISE: You guys need a TV show.
ALUA: We joke about that all the time, but more because it would be like so awful. We're ridiculous together and loud. Very, very loud. We're all like bold humans. Just for some context, my older sister is Bozoma St. John. She's a Hall of Fame marketing executive. My younger sister is Dr. Alba Arthur. She is a deputy superintendent for the Georgia Online School Academy. And my younger sister, Alba Arthur, is an actress. She was most recently in The Color Purple and Black Panther 2 and she's in a bunch of TV shows and stuff coming up. So they're all really doing great in their little niches in the world and all really bold and really fun. There's not a wallflower amongst us and it would be way too much for TV. It would be ridiculous. Okay. That aside. They're great.
ELISE: Oh, but it, it's, it's really interesting to watch, to understand the different paths out of the same family. My brother is a book editor, so that's my main point of reference is that we're more or less doing the same thing as each other. So there's not as much creative expansion. I just love that you're in death and your sister's marketing massive brands. And It's wild, and it needs to be studied. Speaking of TV, actually, and bear with me while I set this up, because I thought that the parts in your book about ageism and the way that we judge life based on its length is really important and profound, and you were in Unlimited. Is that what it was called? Yeah. Limitless Okay, sorry with Chris Hemsworth and Darren Aronofsky and BJ Miller is one of my dearest friends. And so I was, of course, interested in watching the show. And and it's funny, I used to work at goop. And I was in a show called the goop lab, which we did in beginning of 2020. And so it was funny to watch limitless because it was like goop lab on steroids literally and with like the most expansive budget so we went with Wim Hof to Lake Tahoe to do cold exposure and Limitless was in the Arctic Circle, you know, we did fasting with Walter Longo like in LA and he was like spear phishing and anyway, but so I watched it and I have my own thoughts about it in part because I found it like, oh, this is so boring. I have a lot of thoughts about longevity culture. And then I got to BJ's episode and your episode and I was like, holy shit, this is like one of the best hours of TV I've ever seen where in some way I don't know if that this was the intent but it flipped the whole show on its head with this reality of like Chris you are going to age and decline and die and it was so beautiful the parts with his wife were so beautiful and Oh my God, anyone who's listening, you need to watch like one of the episode one of the first five episodes pick your poison and then you just have just for context and then you have to watch the last episode because oh my God, it was so good. You guys, it was amazing. So on that note, let's talk about depth of life versus length of life because I think our culture is obsessed with longevity, where I'm like, are you going to spend your whole life trying to live longer? Doesn't that defeat the point of your life?
ALUA: Yeah. And also, what are you going to do with all that extra time? Like what do you need 12 more years for that you can't do right now, but for real, what are you going to do with this time? You have a finite amount right now. So do it all now. If you get an additional day, what would you spend that day doing? Got an additional 10 years, what else would you be doing? Do it right now. What are you waiting for anyway? I find that our conversation around like, aging and Youth obsessed culture is all rooted in death denial. It's all rooted in avoiding death altogether. Every time somebody says, Oh, you don't look 45. I'm like, first of all, what does 45 look like? And next, do not deny me all these years that I've had thus far. And also your death denial is showing because it's 45 supposed to look more decrepit. Am I supposed to look like I'm approaching death because I'm halfway to 90? Or can I just look as vibrant as I look because of this DNA I've got and this melanin that runs through my veins, you know? So I find that really interesting. I also just want to mention Darren Aronofsky is a ninja because it was very, very intentionally set up that way, that we focus for a while on living longer and how do we live better longer. And then, but at the end of it, you just have to accept that one day you're going to die. And so let's get to there. And I think that's why the series was created like that. And I just loved what he did with it.
I think the real juicy part of that series was in the acceptance that one day our lives will end. And how, how, how, how, how are we going to be with that? You know, do we approach it with resistance and sadness and frustration or do we just say well shit I did as much as I could for as long as I did, Maybe I lived the breadth and length and depth of my life and now it's time for me to go Which is I think the highest hope for any of us. I think it's a really really high bar I want to say that also, I will probably go kicking and screaming when my time comes if I can, despite all this death talk I do. It's a nice notion at the very least. My hope is that I spend my life getting a little bit closer to acceptance and surrender, but that's an everyday task.
ELISE: Yeah, so in the show, and I promise we're not giving anything away, but you take Chris through a death meditation and you do it in the book as well with was he in his 40s, a man who was consumed by the anxiety of all of the ways that he could die. And that's probably not Super common, but I think many people have some version of that, of Obsessive rumination about death. Is that something, the death meditation and the nine...
ALUA: nine contemplations on death.
ELISE: the nine contemplations. Yeah, is that something that you do with people who are actively dying, or is that something that you do with groups who want to get a little bit closer to their own anxiety?
ALUA: I do it mostly with folks that don't yet know what it is that they're going to be dying of, and people that are down to get a little bit closer to their ideas about their mortality. And yes, in groups, it's so fun in groups, just to watch all these folks, like laying down, breathing in and breathing out about mortality. We just did it at our end of life training retreat. And it was just so rad to see what people come up with when they have been with their mortality in that way. It's really useful for folks to begin thinking about what makes them anxious. And I, in the past, used to be really concerned when somebody who had a lot of death anxiety wanted to do this, but in time I've come to understand, first of all, how brave it is for them to say, hey, I'm terrified, but let me try it on anyway. And next, how useful it can be. Because like Jordan, in the book, He got to a place where he was able to pinpoint what his fear was rooted in. And when we're able to do that, we can learn from it. Rather than just wholesale, I'm not thinking about death, and when I do, it makes me too uncomfortable, but then I am thinking about it all the time because I'm afraid death could come around any corner.
When we can pause for a moment and rifle through all that noise to figure out what the root of the fear is, then we can be with it in a meaningful way, rather than just let it run our lives. And a little bit of fear of death and a little bit of death anxiety is totally normal, for all of us. I mean, it's that thing inside that tells you not to keep walking when you get to the edge of a cliff, and even to like drink water, you know, hydrate, stay alive. It's in us. It's in our DNA. It's rooted in there. And so the goal is never to get over it entirely, but rather to learn from it, to be with it, to not let it run our lives, but rather to let it fuel our lives.
ELISE: Yeah. And you don't have to do it all here, but can you explain to people what that process is in a death meditation?
ALUA: Gladly. A death meditation, the one that I run, is based on the nine contemplations of death, which were written by an 11th century Buddhist scholar named Atisha. And they were developed by Joan Halifax Roshi and Larry Rosenberg. And then I put a lot of my extra jazz and sparkle on it on top just to really fill it out. Yeah, we're just trying to buff it up, throw some glitter on it, like with everything in my life. But with this death meditation we start by reading through the contemplations. And I will only remember a few of them here. But the first is death is inevitable. My lifespan is ever decreasing. Death could come at any point, I think. My body's fragile and vulnerable. Death comes whether or not I am prepared. My loved ones cannot save me. My material resources will be of no use to me. My own body cannot help me when death comes. So these are like the real deal Holyfield ideas around how we die. And with each of those contemplations, I develop it a little bit further and talk about what it means and then give the participants an opportunity to breathe in and breathe out on some very basic mantras around that contemplation of dying and allow them just to be with it for a while.
And then after we've run through the nine contemplations of dying, I journey with folks through the body shutting down system by system, which is what happens when we're dying as a result of disease, all of our systems shut down. So I walk folks through that process throughout the body and then allow them to imagine in their mind's eye the body now as a corpse and what has happened with it in the time since death occurred. And then sit with that for a minute, and then bring them right back into Vitality and talk about what came up. Sounds like a good time, doesn't it? Sound like fun? I swear, I'm a good time at parties. I promise I'm fun.
ELISE: Well, that's what's so fun about your book is that it's this like wild, chaotic roving adventure, but then sort of grounded in this ultimate reality. Which makes the whole thing so interesting, right? And I know that you write about depression and all of these other very real things in your life that have teeth and shadow, but that you seem like more of a wedding planner, you know, like in your essential nature, like more about burning man, right?
ALUA: But yes, true.
ELISE: like, let's have fun. But you're making death sparkly, right? I thought it was interesting, too and I very, very much appreciate this, and I know it's probably a through line of people's work who do end of life, but that you talk about it as being a secular practice. Can you talk a bit about that, particularly considering the intense faith of your childhood and why that's so important?
ALUA: Yeah. You know, we became missionaries at some point and grew up with Christianity. I think that I learned a lot about how we die based on what Christianity told me what happens after we die. And it didn't jive. I was like, I don't know if I really believe that for myself. And also felt like so much of the religion was based upon what happens after we die. So live a good, long, healthy, nice life now so that when you die, you can sit at the right hand side of the father. And I think I wanted my life to be based on more than just what happens after I die, but rather who I am while I'm here, just for that purpose at all. When I started the practice, I noticed how people would talk about their ideas about the afterlife, and often looked to me as though I had some real answers for them, even though I'm still right here, like, talking out of this mouth and being present with you, still very much here. I don't know what happens after we die.
I have a lot of theories for myself, and I love to hear people's theories. So the way that I envision my role is to be a mirror for people to bounce back their beliefs about the afterlife, which means no matter what your belief system is rooted in, whether or not you got it from Christianity, or Islam or the thriller video, no matter where your ideas about what happens to bodies afterward and what happens after we die, I can support you in getting clear on that belief system. So many of the fears around death are around fears of the afterlife and what is awaiting us, if anything at all. And so in order to support people as they work through those fears, if they can get really clear on their belief system, that helps. You know? And so I just reflect back. I ask questions. I must be secular so that I can allow people to have all types of beliefs. There are doulas that practice within particular faith traditions and I love that for them. There is a student that I trained a few years ago who was a pagan and just wanted to work with pagan folks. I said, fuck yeah. They needed too, you know, and it's great to have somebody who has the same set of beliefs so that you can like really jive on those. But if you don't, then it allows me to have space for everybody, no matter what their belief system is.
ELISE: Yeah, it's interesting too, because there's something about And it wasn't in every story that you chose to tell in the book, but there's something that's also profoundly confessional about the end of life where there's like this great, not that you're absolving people or assigning them, what do you call it, when you work with a rosary? But that there's this unloading, this bearing and you write about it. Yeah, unburdening. You write about it with Summer really beautifully about like how much healing there is, even when, of course, there's no cure. But can you talk a little bit about that? Because it's in every part of people's lives, right?
ALUA: Yeah. Well, we all have the opportunity to unburden ourselves right now. I just think as people get closer to the end, either they are worried about what happens afterwards, they want to make sure that they're good here, or they just realize that there's no more time left and so they just want to make things right now. I've heard a lot of secrets, things that I will take with me to my deathbed. People with lot of anger and frustration, things that have happened to them in their lives, things that they just finally want to get off their chest. I wish that we did it a lot more while we were still living. I wish that we allowed people the grace to be human and to have fucked up and to have had terrible traumatic things happen to them and to be able to hold them there. Because it happens at the end, but how great would it be if it also happened while we were living still, you know?
ELISE: Yeah. It was interesting, the story that you told about the father with all the children who didn't, know about each other
ALUA: Yeah.
ELISE: and how you were left feeling like wanting a mediator instead of yourself on a zoom with all of them, sort of bringing them together. I felt for you. And yet, as you think about this practice, as you build going with grace, as you train and teach more people, do you feel like your toolkit is your toolkit? I know someone was like, you should earn your CPA. Are there things that you feel like are still missing from this experience?
ALUA: For me, in my practice?
ELISE: Yeah. Or it could be like an universal idea of what people need ,generally.
ALUA: We think a lot about legacy, the individual life in the grand tapestry. But I think that it would be really useful if we also looked at the individual life within the grand tapestry, within like the grander scape of Earth and our time here on Earth within the galaxy. Huge. But bear with me for a second. There's folks that I've trained that are working And think of themselves as death doulas for the climate, for example, for the planet, for the systems, for the patriarchy, for racism, for transphobia, for homophobia. Folks that are looking about death in a really large way, not just based on the individual lived experience, but based on how we as a collective have accessed and used those systems, which must die in order for the good of all at some point. And in the case of the planet and the climate, the opposite, like, how do we fix this issue that we've created? And I find that to be a really right place for doula work, because it looks different. It's not like just being with somebody through their process, but it is with being with a collective body through its process. And that's really, really cool. Really cool. Is that kind of what you were asking me?
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting like to think of This most critical moment at someone's life sort of as it winds down and being someone who's present with so much potential unfinished business and then thinking about that as a process of like This is sort of the toolkit, These are all the the resources and then to think about how you apply that to any ending or any transition because you write about that a lot in the book too, which is like, our lives are nothing but practicing little deaths, right?
ALUA: Over and over and over again.
ELISE: death of job... but I don't know that people think about it like that.
ALUA: I don't think they do either. I don't think they do either. I think by virtue of being so steeped in this work, I do, I must. But it also means that I'm really adept at recognizing when I'm grieving and when grief is showing up for folks. And also just like being with that, you know. In little things also. Like, my car is 24 years old. It's so rad. It's this like red Jeep Wrangler that I adore. That little, beautiful vehicle, that machine, is dying. And my heart hurts because we've lived so much life together. She's parked in the garage, it's been parked for a couple of weeks. I just, sometimes I want to cry when I think about not riding in that car anymore. It highlights, like, all the people I've been along the way, all the places she's taken me to, all the adventures we've had together. I'm grieving. I'm grieving, and it's not my mom's death, you know what I mean? But it's still an emotional experience that I'm having around something, something that's gonna process, that's gonna help me conceptualize this loss in some capacity, and hopefully, eventually, to be able to put it down to make space for whatever may be coming afterward. I want another little red jeep, but still.
ELISE: I know. I mean, that's what felt intense in my body. You mentioned recognizing or knowing grief, I think we're drowning in grief. I know that I don't have access to my grief. I think it's every day on social media. It's all around us all the time. What does it look like to help people find that in their bodies or access it or help them get it out?
ALUA: It's tough, because when you are grieving, There's one or two responses that come up, either naming it can be really supportive to somebody, or they get angry and rally against it. It's one or the other. I want to just mention for a moment that I agree with you that we are grieving big lately, not only collectively over the pandemic and everything that occurred there, All the death that we were privy to, but also in how we access information about what's happening around the world with the mass deaths that are occurring and people watching it in real time and the responses to it. A lot of vitriol and finger pointing and shaming and moral superiority. And when I see it all, I think that is grief. You are mad about, you are sad about what's happening out there in the world and you want somebody to do something about it. And this person isn't doing it right. This person is doing it wrong. This person is focused on the wrong thing. That, to me, is grief. However, naming it as such sometimes really pisses people off, okay? And I've pissed a few people off. But it is. Because you want to point the finger, but rather what you're mad at is the fact that it's occurring, not this human.
ELISE: Yeah. And you're trying to repress or suppress or project what's happening in your body, which is deeply painful, uncomfortable, and hard. And we're not good at this somehow. And again, I agree, I think we're experiencing it on a scale that we're not equipped to encounter it. But what do you think has happened? Is it patriarchy? Like what has disconnected us? Is it the loss of rituals, rights that where we reach for the tissues and shut those tears down as fast as we can? What would it look like to sort of start to get a practice going for all of us?
ALUA: It would be so nice and soft. It would be hard also, I think there'd be a lot of rage because we suppress that too. But I think some of it is a patriarchy, I think a lot of it is also capitalism, I think colonialism, I think white supremacy. I think anything that says button up. I think the loss of ritual, I think the industrial revolution, I think all these things that are forcing humans into these tight little boxes where they must stay, don't allow us to access, like, the depth of our pain and our sorrow and our grief, the grief of our ancestors, all the things that have been done to the bodies before us, the bodies that we're born into that bear the scars and the wounds of it.
We have become disconnected from that, which makes us really, really human, which is our death and also the experience of being alive. We're disconnected from that, from community, from our fellow human, from the stars and the lemons that fall from the tree and feed the soil and rot and feed the bugs down there and this beautiful ecosystem that we're a part of. We're disconnected from nature. If only I could understand that nature is as nature does. I am of nature and nature is of the nature to die. Then I think I could just allow myself to just be human for a while, which means to be angry and to be sad and to be frustrated and to be joyful and to be happy to be talking to you and be sad my car is dying.
ELISE: Yeah. I wrote a book about women and goodness and the seven deadly sins and about women and patriarchy and internalized patriarchy, specifically. But then I also wrote a chapter, the final chapter is about sadness because that was on the original list. There were eight thoughts and it was dropped when they became the Seven Sins in 590, and we're assigned to Mary Magdalene. And it's funny, I argued with my editor about including this chapter on sadness, because the chapter is primarily about men. It's about women, too. I think many women are disconnected.
But to what you were saying, too, when you touch that grief, the rage that can spark the chapter is about what happens to men when we disconnect them from their feelings and turn boys into men and how wounded boys become wounding men and sort of seeing that on a culture wide scale. I'm not suggesting that women can't harm, but it's not really the women who are doing it on a massive social level. It's the men. And curious in your work, and maybe you really don't think about it like this, but do you feel like women are better at accessing our grief? Because it's not as shameful, I think, for women to feel sad or depressed. And you write a lot about this idea of bravery and heroism and how insidious it can be for people who are just sick and dying. But do you feel like men feel like they need to be particularly armored to their own deaths?
ALUA: I can't say so. Maybe on some level. And it's hard to draw it across gender lines also because of all the folks that inhabit both so well and neither so well and transcend it all. But I think that, on some level, that there are parts of grief and the experience that different genders have access to, like I've seen many men behave in anger after a death, and I've seen many women engage in sadness after a death, and the opposite is not often true, like I've seen some women access their anger, and I've seen some men access their sadness, but it's all grief, so I feel like everybody, If they have an entry point, it's one or the other, mostly and, but both are part of the process.
I think who you are determines how much and what measure they show up, but both are part of the process. After my brother in law Peter died, I was angry. And anger isn't something that I'd really allowed myself much in life. But I was pissed, okay? I was mad at everybody. I was mad at God. I was mad at Peter for being sick. I was mad at him for dying and leaving us. I was just mad. And it was, in retrospect, it was really refreshing to witness myself in that way because I don't often get really mad at things. It's been much easier to access my anger since then. But really, really refreshing to be angry. I'm used to sad. I think a lot of women are comfortable with sad on some level, at least privately. And men maybe are used to anger. But if we can all access all, that would be pretty cool.
ELISE: Yeah. I agree. It just belongs to all of as whole humans. And to that point too, I think it was with Summer, this is a very young woman who was dying and how you said something and you were sort of like, I shouldn't have said that, you talked about her grace, I think. I think it's so important the way that we construct disease as a battlefield in our culture. And could you talk a bit about why that sort of goes against this idea of just being present with what is?
ALUA: Isn't it so fascinating that we talk about fighting against disease, whereas the body is just doing what the body will do. You know, some cells are working really well, some aren't. Some are working to rectify the things that aren't. Some are just chilling. The body is going to do what it'll do. Bodies either respond to medicine well, or they don't. And medicine is an experiment. It's an applied Science, an art form. Where you and how you receive medicine depends on where you are in the world, how old you are, what your race is, what your gender expression is, what your sexual orientation is. And so when we take that applied science, that experiment, and put it on bodies, and some bodies respond well and some don't, it's strange to me that we make the human the issue, that they fought or that they didn't, or they fought bravely and they lost somehow. But we didn't lose. The experiment just didn't work on your body at this point in time.
ELISE: Yeah.
ALUA: And that has to be okay. I feel like we make losers and winners out of people that we care for. I think people when they approach death with some grace are winning. Not those that don't are losing, but if it's coming and you're gonna ride it for what it is, that to me is something to admire. Not how bravely you fought. And I don't even know what that means. Like, what does fighting look like when we're talking about illness?
ELISE: Also, I think you just said this, that it's a disease process, like it's in us, right? It's also so strange. It's like, just part dissociated culture to be at War with yourself or this idea of these foreign invaders in your body. It's a pretty meta metaphor. It goes throughout our whole culture of like, actually we're all, this is all present. This is all us. This is all here. And you can't isolate and destroy... it's a strange metaphor, I guess.
ALUA: It's bizarre to me. I don't understand. But I think that maybe battle is something that we've gotten used to in certain times. And so we make battlefields out of our bodies when they don't need to be. They are neutral.
ELISE: Well, thank you for your work, and thank you for being a really significant part, I think, of mainstreaming this idea of what it is to be present with people in this way, and that there's this middle ground. You know this better than I do, but everything gets conflated, hospice, palliative care, death doula, and like, they each kind of in their own way have their own function. And it feels like you need All three, right? In some ways, ideally.
ALUA: We need as many hands on as we can get. It's a difficult process. We need as many people caring for the people that are dying and the people that are caring for them as they're dying through the process. All right, it's tough. It's hard. Let's not leave people alone in it. Let's give them as many services as possible. So I'm a big advocate of folks having hospice care and also receiving doula care, and getting a palliative care team, and getting meal trains, and getting friends and circle of support to show up. Like, let's love on folks through their difficult times.
ELISE: Mm. Beautiful. Thank you.
In Briefly Perfectly Human, Alua writes about her outsider status as someone who came to the U.S. from Ghana when she was very young as political refugees: “Today, I see that being an outsider prepared me for my life in death work in ways that the girl in the “Out of Africa” spotlight in the yearbook could never have predicted. The dying, after all, are outsiders. They are on their way out of this life while the rest of us are steeped in it. We regard them as if through a pane of glass. I’m drawn to get close to it, to the place where people turn away because it is too frightening, too different, too scary. I don’t think it’s an accident that in my Going with Grace doula training classes, white cisgendered and heterosexual folks are sometimes in the minority. I can only remember three straight white guys in thousands of students who are otherwise queer as folk, inhabit many intersections, and celebrate their difference.” And then she writes: “Those who sit on the fringe in life can more easily get close to the fringe in death.” May we all be those people, become more comfortable with the fact that this beautiful life, this experience will end. This is ancient wisdom, but Joseph Cambell says: “The closer you get to death, the more fully you can live.” I’ll see you next time.
