By Ned Buskirk, the founder and CEO of You’re Going to Die
First, I have to say, I would never wish such loss on anyone, but these inevitabilities of life are waiting for all of us… for some earlier and more often than others.
But it’s these ‘gifts’ (a word I choose and use very carefully, especially with others who have experienced their own loss) that make losing my mom the ‘worst best thing that ever happened to me’.
The meaningful work I do in this creatively conscious mortality conversation, along with my own continually unfolding revelations, and deepening rich intimacy with life and death, all of it, I directly connect to her death.
And while even today, almost 20 years after losing her, I shed tears missing her, I am so sincerely grateful for what’s still unfolding from her life and death.
I love you Mom. Thank you.
Here are Five Things that opened up for me after my mom’s death:
My mom is no longer stuck in the traumatic suffering of those last days of her life, and so, neither am I. It took me many years, but letting go of reliving the trauma of that week of her dying freed her… and ultimately me.
It freed us and our relationship to grow, change and evolve, released from the past and my memories, especially the heartbreaking ones. As long as I make room for her in my life now, in new, surprising, and enlivening ways, it’ll never be what it was when she was alive, but we are still together, in relationship. Even now, as I write this, I feel her with me.
But I need places to go where I can say her name and share her life and death with others. My mom deserves that powerful acknowledgement; my grief for her death is a part of her legacy. I deserve places to invite her in with my community, with people and their lost loved ones who deserve it, too… to remember we’re not alone AND that we’ll be continually honored, grieved and celebrated in community when we die, too.
But I must acknowledge the portal she dragged me into when she died. When a person you love dearly dies, someone so significant that some of your aliveness is bound in them, their death changes you forever. As if part of you goes with them, wherever they went. That transformation through loss is mine and mine alone.
At my mother’s deathbed, I learned there’s so much I don’t know. But I also learned that in this lifetime, it’s humbly at the feet of death, at the edge of our great shared deathbed of mortality, where I can continue to learn and discover more aliveness than ever before.
About Ned Buskirk
Ned is the Founder and CEO of You’re Going to Die, a 501(c)3 nonprofit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death and dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality. He believes that our community deserves ongoing and consistent opportunities to creatively and vulnerably show up for one another, to gather and grieve, to suffer the losses we’ve endured or stand to lose eventually, to be with one another in the so often unspoken truth that we ALL share: we are ALL going to die.
You’re Going to Die has an active hospice program sending musicians to patients’ bedsides, monthly sell-out live events facilitating creatively conscious mortality space for community, enlivening open mics for men inside the prison system, cancer patient workshops at UCSF for healing through creative writing, and an organizational branch offering safe space for Black & Indigenous community that’s reparation-funded by non-Black/non-Indigenous contributions.
You can keep up with You’re Going to Die via their website, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
