S1E87 - Woven Ends on Death & Dying Pt. I

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by Wōen and Roxanne from the Woven Ends Collective to talk about death, dying, death work, and everything from how to determine who gets to make decisions about your end of life, to how to have your remains dealt with in the manor that you would like, to how to bring community collaboration into death. Next week, they continue the conversation, focusing mostly on the work of death doulas.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

**Live Like the World is Dying: Woven Ends on Death & Dying Part I **

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host for today Inmn Neruin and I use they/them pronouns. Today we're talking about something that we sort of reference all the time on the show, and that is death, a thing that we should all live like is going to happen someday. Because it is. I wanted to have Wōen and Roxy on to talk about this because I found myself thinking about it more and more as things change evermore rapidly in our world. And, I think it's cool to talk about because it's just another form of community preparedness that we can all engage in to make our end of lives easier for ourselves and for the people that we care about, and in general, just demystify the topic as we figure out how to leave this world, whether that pertains to navigating funerary industries, medical industries, legal logistics, medical interventions, the choice to die at home, how to have home burials, how to care for the dying, and how to have these conversations as a community. A content warning, obviously, we're going to be talking about some heavy stuff, and we approach it with some amount of levity, but we do talk at some point about the idea of choosing to die from the perspective of terminal illness. But before we get into it, we are a proud member of Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [saying these sounds like a song melody]

Wōen

**Inmn ** 02:43 And we're back. Thanks, y'all so much for coming on the show with us today, especially to talk about a subject that I feel like is like a little bit more grim than we usually talk about. Or, I guess we kind of always always talk about it, but we never actually talk about it. So yeah, would you like to introduce yourselves with your names, pronouns, and kind of like what you do in the world?

**Wōen ** 03:17 My name is Wōen. I use he/him pronouns. I work in grave care, so burial, and generally any rot-honoring practice that I can help with.

**Roxanne ** 03:41 And my name is Roxanne. I am a nurse and have been doing end of life, and death doula sort of work outside of that, for maybe 15 years or so. Yeah.

**Inmn ** 04:01 Cool. And y'all are part of a collective that kind of specializes in this kind of work. Would y'all want to introduce that now or we could talk about it later?

**Wōen ** 04:17 Yeah, no, we can introduce it now. Our collective is called Woven Ends. We're more recently becoming more outward facing. We're a collection of death care practitioners and community members who are interested in helping the community. We are focused on combating the domination and alienation in our world through making our death rites and the care for the dying more autonomous and a lot more intimate.

**Roxanne ** 05:08 And accessible.

**Inmn ** 05:12 Cool. Um yeah, it's weird how much the State is like intertwined in death. And that's like not...I feel like that's not something I ever realized until I realized it and then I was like, "Oh, like can you die without the State being involved?"

**Wōen ** 05:35 Like the bureaucratic storm is also guided by the industry and a lot of the rituals that we have now and the way that death operates is it's a contrived effort, the funeral industry, to deal with all aspects after death. So, it's a really troubling, difficult thing that families and loved ones navigate.

**Roxanne ** 05:35 No.

**Roxanne ** 06:14 Yeah, it's pretty devastating. It's like Capital will take hold and commodify any and every aspect of our life possible and not even our life but our afterlife as well. Like yeah, it's hard to believe in true freedom sometimes, but that's why we're here fighting for it.

**Inmn ** 06:38 Yeah, I feel like...Whatever, I'm gonna take like a pretty like light hearted and like whimsical tone today because we're talking about something grim, but I feel like we have these ideas that like, "You know, the State's got me in life, but at least when I die I'll be free," and it's like maybe? I mean, your body won't be.

**Roxanne ** 07:14 Sadly, no. Eventually Yes but initially, no.

**Inmn ** 07:22 Yeah, I feel like that is a literal nightmare of mine. Could y'all kind of break down like what is death work? Like what is a death doula? What is the Woven Ends collective kind of like do in like a material or emotional way?

**Roxanne ** 07:50 Well, I can speak towards death doula work. What a death doula is, is a little undefined. And there are powers that be that are trying to make it more defined and kind of like more commodified. But basically, a death doula is someone who helps a family or a loved one sort of like go through the process. So that could look like, before someone dies, helping come up with some like legacy project, some things that people want to leave behind, or how someone wants to be remembered. So, that could be like, you know, if a 40 year old who has three kids dies, kind of legacy work you could do with someone in that situation is like, you know, help them record videos for their kids' future birthdays, you know, stuff like that so that way when their kids get older, like hit those milestones, they can have this video from their parent that has been gone for a while. So yeah, just kind of like, you know, one aspect is focusing on legacy work. Another aspect is just kind of like emotionally helping people with the grieving process, whether that be the person who's actually passing away or the family sort of like talking through the process of all of that with them. And then, you know, other aspects could be more helping set up funerary services, trying to help work on community aspects of disposition. Yeah, death doula is...It's sort of that the individual does different things. And I think if someone's interested in having a death doula, I would really ask questions about what specific services they provide.

**Wōen ** 09:59 Yeah, And I can speak more to like our collective. We definitely, we try to connect the right people to help different community members. So, that could be a death doula or even a grave digger. So, a lot of what we do is like guidance around the whole process. And we definitely want to like expand our scope completely to be able to care for the whole process. But most of what we've been doing in the past, and currently, is helping folks with finding burial options that are accessible and hopefully free. And we've been able to create a network