This is a living-document of the Living-Death Doula Research in process | Move through to watch the Living-Death Doula unfold

LIVING-DEATH DOULA

Accepted Proposal for the American Academy of Religion’s 2020 Conference - Death, Dying, Grief Unit | Proposal Submitted and Accepted Spring 2020

Midwifing Rebirth from the Ashes of Living-Death as Queer Grief Care

 Abstract

Gender and sexual non-conforming, or queer, people of faith experience living-death when, after being told that they are ‘wonderfully and perfectly made’ that message is contradicted by the actions of exclusion from service in a church, exclusion and abandonment by family and community, thus creating a core fracture to queer people of faith’s institutions. Too often the modality of pastoral care offered is in the form of a cognitive understanding of the biblical case for inclusion. This approach negates the resulting embodied experience, or living-death, that has occurred in the personal narrative of the queer person. Accessing death doula’s wisdom at the intersection of pastoral care provokes movement within the queer person of faith’s living-death midwifing a rebirth from the ashes. I argue that technology could have a death doula function to help foster brave space for queer people of faith’s grieving. Using narrative podcasting, I discover new modalities of care for queer people of faith to share and compare narratives, as well as collecting personal narratives that cultivate possibility for further development of attending to grief through the living death doula model.

Proposal:

“Who told you that you had to hide your daughter,” I asked Daniel, an LGBTQ minister of worship and a friend. His eyes trailed off, “My family, the church I was raised in, and perhaps me,” he shared. We had been talking for an hour about his move from the United Methodist Church to a Lutheran congregation. While he shared grief around the transition, he tried to cover up a sentence about a recent trip to see his daughter. I had been friends with Daniel two years and had never once seen a photo on social media or heard a story of his daughter. I wondered why his child’s existence was in hiding. Daniel is an openly gay man and married, yet he wasn’t sharing his whole narrative. Was Daniel grieving? Did Daniel feel his narrative was whole? Up until this point I had never heard about Daniel being married at 19 to a cis-gendered woman, nor their child. It had been ten years since their divorce. After a few moments, Daniel added this truth, “No one has ever asked me to pin-point the moment I stopped sharing this part of my story. My divorce holds so much active grief. There is still a part of me that feels not enough.” Daniel had spent the last ten years working his way through the biblical case, moving into affirming church spaces, and going to therapy, all the while carrying a hidden narrative. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza’s work in Activist Theology (2019) would label this as Daniel’s rupture. Disconnected, Daniel has become desensitized to his grief and silent in telling a portion of his full narrative. Daniel is experiencing a living-death.

Too often the modality of pastoral care offered is in the form of a cognitive understanding of the biblical case for inclusion. This approach negates the resulting embodied experience, or living-death, that has occurred in the personal narrative of the queer person. An intervention is needed within pastoral care to not only deepen its understanding of queer people of faith’s grieving, but to listen intently as a living death doula. A death doula accompanies the birth of new stories at a time of palpable loss. Death doulas hear and foster voicing living-death narratives of people of faith. In this presentation, I discover new modalities of care for queer people of faith to share and compare narratives, as well as collecting personal narratives that cultivate possibility for further development of attending to grief through the living death doula model.

The Death Doula Movement is new to end-of-life care only emerging within the last decade. Death Doula Francesca Arnoldy describes, “Through all the ways we doula, we promote empowerment and healing born of processing and bravely facing that which threatens one’s sense of intactness” (Cultivating the Doula Heart: Essentials of Compassionate Care). Intactness, I argue, is the liminal space queer people of faith vacillate between when an untold narrative of their living-death isn’t heard and walked through with grief care. To support narrative rebirth within this liminal space, I crafted a brave space for death doulas to share their work and for queer people of faith to process their grief. This space was facilitated through a podcast platform. Crafting such a platform for grief care requires ethical and moral commitments to the stories recorded. Prior to each interview, multiple conversations were held on the type of environment desired, right to revoke use of the story, consent to engage in movements of grief along the conversation route, as well as equity in questions being exchanged between guest and myself as the interviewer. Grief needs breath for dislodgment and narrative podcasting lifts voices for such movement.

Pastoral care with queer bodies includes understanding their lived experiences, as echoed by the work of Cody Sanders and Joretta Marshall. Living death doulas go further, also offering a tool for re-birth into new and healthier narratives for queer people of faith. To begin where Sanders and Marshall tilled the ash, I listened as a death doula, pastoral care representative, and a queer therapist walked queer people of faith through Five Wishes (https://fivewishes.org/Home). Five Wishes facilitates narrative liberation where queer bodies could indeed hold the rights to “what happens to my body after I die.”

Death is on the forefront of queer people of faith’s minds, as well as within their bodies. If death occurs to and within the body, so it also occurs to and within the spirit. The markers of death are ash smeared across queer people of faith’s narratives. The need for grief care is an urgent life and death matter for queer people. Pastoral care as narrative rebirth is needed to support survival under such conditions. This paper argues within the moment of rupture in queer people of faith’s lives a disruption takes place that threatens not only their overall wellness, but existence. Viewing the human condition and all its complexities requires an embodiment of body, mind, and spirit care. These stories of living-death live within the body, mind, and spirit of queer people of faith. Sanders and Marshall are right that pastoral care givers must listen deeply. The living death doula reveals new routes of care to create movement in living-death narratives so queer people of faith may bear whole fruit.

The accessibility of technology offers mediums of care and with ethically sound commitments, I believe, can foster community that promotes brave space for grief care and story sharing.

Pastoral caregivers creating communities of resource need the metaphor and practice of living death doulas to nurture contemplation, hold hands with living-death narratives, and walk grief into new life. The living death doula transforms stagnant patterns of narrative and offers possibility for resurrection from deep-seeded harm that queer people of faith experience in their body, mind, and spirit. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved her character, Baby Suggs, offers this truth “…[the] only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine.” Our role as pastoral care givers in this realm of grief care is to caress the imagination toward a renewed sense of worth that family, churches, and organized religion have fragmented from the divine and the body, mind, and spirit of queer people of faith. And to imagine, we have to go into the depths of living-death with queer people. Queer people of faith’s living-deaths do not just exist within the cognitive – they are embodied and embedded in faith. Here is where the living death doula takes grief care givers and the griever through the torn veil between life and death to life again. I wonder what liberation could emerge for Daniel and other queer people of faith if they walked with a living death doula toward rebirth.

Embracing Death Panel

First Phase of Research | July 2020

Description of Event: How do Queer people experience death in the mind, body & spirit? Together this panel will explore and process ways as queer people that death impacts us, as well as, how we can shift the narrative to never speaking of death to preparing for end-of-life care. There will be a short Q & A after the moderated panel and an end-of-life care resource known as Five Wishes will be provided as a way for Queer folks to name the needs of their physical and mental well-being during the dying process.

Link to Panelist Bios

This is the mantra and offering of Katherine Kusmal, a pastor and end-of-life doula. She spoke these words in June during an Embracing Queer Death panel I hosted. Through my work in narrative podcasting, I have discovered haunting narratives twisted and mangled in the ash of living-death. Narratives that have been buried deep within the bodies, minds, and souls of queer people of faith. And, as Katherine offered in June, narrative is us and it can be, as I will share, the caring.

Living-death are the core fractures that happen to queer people of faith’s personhood. An experience of living-death can be when after being told that a queer person is “wonderfully and perfectly made” that message is contradicted by actions of exclusion from church, family or community. Grief encapsulates living-death narratives within a cyclical rhythm of dissociation, minimizing, persistent themes, and spiritual rationing. Without liberation from the disembodiment living-death creates, this cyclical nature will continue to sever the Queer person of faith’s personhood.

Too often the modality of pastoral care is offered in the form of a cognitive understanding of the biblical case for inclusion. This approach of care disembodies a queer person’s living-death narratives from being fully discovered and continues a binary disembodiment of the queer person.

I have developed a living-death doula directive to support the dislodgement of compounded grief that maintains a grip on the cyclical phases of living-death. The living-death doula directive midwives embodiment from the ash of death toward genuine flourishing.

Because this work is deeply rooted in narrative, let’s begin with Devon, whose narrative is throughout this work, alongside a queer death doula, a therapist, and a hospice nurse.

Devon began to have questions about her sexuality and gender at an early age and immediately found conflict with the “rules of how to be a Christian that were being presented.” Through spiritual leaders, churches, and a missionary program post high school, Devon has been in the cyclical phases of living-death. Her continued grief and inability to find rhyme or reason through a sole cognitive state, has kept Devon in a constant spin cycle. Now, in her first year of college, Devon shares how she’s facing “trauma that has been stored through all the years” from non-affirming and spiritually conflicting teaching.

Even as America has grappled with human rights and marriage equality for the past decade, there are still not enough pastoral care resources for queer people. Meanwhile, queer people are still physically, emotionally, and spiritually dying. The biblical case for inclusion isn’t moving queer people further away from death. I continue to hear a resounding and “clanging gong” of just how un-loving and violent the biblical case can be as our sole work of care. When queer people of faith are re-introduced repeatedly to the biblical case as the best and only form of care the church has to offer, both queer people and churches, continue to be stuck in the binary of living-death experiences.

Compounded trauma has resulted in dissociative ways of being.

Trauma Worker, Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, offers “it’s important to remember that any organism exposed to trauma will try to protect itself.” When human beings experience dissociation, they sever themselves from the internal experiences triggered by their trauma to protect their system. This is what we as queer people do, we sever ourselves.

Devon started to feel separation from loving herself or being involved in church. “I began to separate myself from certain parts of who I had been – my environment and certain people.”

Diane Ranna, a queer hospice nurse, offers how she’s experienced queer people’s bodies, spirits and minds dissociate in their dying because of compounded grief.

Ranna shared from her experience working during the aids epidemic that queer death is uniquely different because of the processing needed. If death care for queer people is uniquely different, then I argue so is the pastoral care for living-death narrative of queer people of faith. Brief pause

What begins to unfold from dissociation is minimization of the queer person.

Mara Collins, a queer therapist offers this gut punching sentiment on minimization:

Devon’s papercuts were minimizing her own joy in Christian spaces. “I began to accept this idea that maybe I’m just not chosen to partake in God’s gifts or blessings.”

Minimization fuels persistent themes that rattle within the queer person. For Devon this is a “deep seeded fear that God really doesn’t love me…”

As persistent themes wrap around the queer person, a spiritual rationing begins.

Psychologist Peter Levine tells us that a traumatized person’s nervous system is frozen in a suspended animation. While suspended, the traumatized can move out of an embodied state and live solely in a state of hyper intellectualism – in other words - we live only in the left side of the brain - the side that works in overdrive to make sense of the trauma.

For queer people, their living-death narratives can become suspended within the left, neglecting the right, or the “felt-sense” where a person finds grounding in where they are, who they are, and how they feel.

Devon’s spiritual rationing is a product of inability to access her “felt-sense.” She lives with the tension of not being able to be inside church spaces and experiencing a split of wanting spiritual nourishment but not knowing how to obtain it.

In Devon’s rationing headspace, the biblical case brings forth anger. On one hand Devon knows the case cognitively yet cannot integrate that knowledge with the rest of her personhood.

It’s important to note grief’s role in living-death. Melissa Kelley writes in her work about living-loss that some individuals in the grips of grief are able to restore their narrative through something already established – a core truth that grounds an individual. For queer people of faith, their core truth is what has caused such grief to encapsulate them in the first place – so this logic doesn’t work.

For Devon, her healing cannot be binary, and this is where the church is complicit. The biblical case in isolation subconsciously suffocates the complexity of human and spiritual life offering only two options: accept the offering or wonder in isolation why it is still not enough.

The rupture of living-death does not have to be a paralyzing affair. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza resurrects the hope that a rupture can also “motivate us and help create conditions of possibility for change.” Living-death can become a condition of possibility and embodiment.

Living-death doulas journey with the “sound of the genuine” caressing the imagination to transform living-death’s ruptures toward possibility.

Death Doula Francesca Arnoldy describes, “Through all the ways we doula, we promote empowerment and healing born of processing and bravely facing that which threatens one’s sense of intactness.” In order to bring a full sense of intactness to queer people, grief needs to be dislodged and narrative promoted to empower brave processing and healing.

The work of the living-death doula is to walk with queer people of faith through their pain of disingenuous narratives to discover the narrative that cares. It is more than listening to what is said, it is also listening for what is not said – “the story that has not yet been coaxed out.”

Living-death doulas do the bold work of letting die what must and re-birth what needs to arise intact.

By now you may be wondering, “who am I and how am I supposed to do this work?”

I am proposing a three-part living-death directive as a pastoral care modality of living-death doula work.

The first directive is no expectation. No promise of eternal life. No promise that there won’t be death along the way. No promise that it will be painless. No expectation in the work of living-death makes space for actualized narratives of the moment. Expectation can create a muzzled imagination, suffocating space for the true narrative to be lovingly coaxed outward.

The second directive is making space. Caressing the imagination through mindful questions can make space for the narrative of pain and identity felt at the rupture of living-death. Howard Thurman offers that the seeker is not told what to think, what to believe – they are helped to listen inwardly for the sound of the genuine by means of penetrating questions.

The third directive is an encouragement to break from culture. Collins offers, “In our queerness we break from the culture that won’t accept death is finite. We experience death daily.” When living-death narratives are integrated between the rational and felt sense part of the brain true re-birth can begin.  

Devon and I spent intentional time walking through the cyclical phases of living-death with these directives in mind.

Let’s hear from Devon about this re-birth:

Accepting her living-death narratives has dislodged the grief that has kept these living-death narratives hidden from her.

When the living-death doula model of care is brought into pastoral care, death care is not isolated or disembodied. Living-death is heard, seen, and fully explored allowing the body, mind, and spirit of queer people to flourish.

Death is a ritual of life’s rhythms, but it doesn’t have to be the demise of our living. Through the living-death doula, we can harness our narratives and choose the one that is true to our genuine self for embodied living.

Devon’s Living-Death Narratives

Living-Death Cyclical Phases

How Grief Impacts Living-Death

Full Paper for Download Below

Future Living-Death Doula Work

• Workshops facilitated through Bible Queery 2022

• Continued Research & Writing Fall 2021, LDD Model - Black Trans Women - in progress, unnamed