Mystery School Mondays: Altar-ing our perspective on death.

Each year, on the New Ancestor Moon, we dedicate a large space in our living room to death.  Rather than one hallowed eve, we spend the entire lunar month honoring this great mystery and those it has already taken from us.  Over the years, as time demands, our ancestor altar slowly grows.  This year we framed a picture of my sweet uncle who passed away just before Christmas last year and carefully nestled his image near that of his oldest brother and parents.  The process of making the altar is always bittersweet.  We feel the loss of no longer having those that we love alongside us in the world today.  Yet, we also are enlivened by seeing an image of them that so well conveys their essence.  Most often we've selected pictures of them at peak enjoyment of their lives and being their most inspired and authentic selves.  Their immortalized joy and zeal reminding us to live well while we can.  Bright fabrics of smiling skeletons and tissue paper flowers frame our memories with a festive, celebratory feeling.  In honoring death our altar inspires us to deeply appreciate the life that we still have.

As word has circulated through our extended family about not only our altar but the "dumb supper" we host yearly, curious items have begun arriving annually in the mail;  a fragile, yellowed newspaper clipping, a special necklace, a dusty cemetery rock, a handwritten grade school autobiography.  Each arrival initiates a quest, or at least a phone call, to a branch of the family tree.  Our need to "get the story straight" on our dearly departed always leads to a deeper connection with the family that we still have with us.  I am convinced that this savoring of our kinship would not be prioritized had we never stumbled into the seasonal part-time gig as our lineage's wisdom keepers. 

This year as I was sewing a paper binder that would preserve some precious handwritten letters,  I realized that this work is a craft, a service, and a responsibility.  I can't help but surmise, by the steady stream of items directed our way, that others know deep in our tribal bones that we're all a bit delinquent when it comes to keeping Death, and those it inevitably takes, in our lives.

It has been my experience that our common culture doesn't encourage this type of work.  The reality of death doesn't seem to have a place in a social landscape where themes of death and destruction dominate much of our entertainment while age defying advertising tell us to avoid the prospect of entropy at all costs.  Either we are obsessed or in denial of death and from the looks of things neither approach is working well for us.  A friend so poignantly summed it up for me after she experienced her father pass away in his hospital bed this summer.  "It was just all so scary to me.  I wasn't exposed to death before.  All I could feel was fear.  I wish I had been able to feel something else...we do it all wrong in this culture..."

Our ancestor altar is my attempt to do it differently in our family's own micro-culture.  So far, I can see an intimacy with death developing in our children that is rich with many feelings rather than dominated by the one and only feeling of fear.  It comes through the storytelling.  It comes from them witnessing first hand that when you die you are not forgotten.  They feel connection, experience legacy, and endure the force of mystery all with curiosity as their guide.  My job, as I am coming to understand it, is to be the keeper of the artifacts that initiate the questions that will lead them on their own journey of self-understanding.

This fall at The Warthog School we are going to post a few more explorations we have regarding the mystery of death.  As always we would love to hear any suggestions you may have about sharing the cycles of life and death in a naturally magical way with children.

As part of our "dumb supper" every year we read "The Tale of the Sands" found in Linda Booth Sweeneys book Connected Wisdom: Living Stories about Living Systems.  Interestingly, it is within her book of "living stories about living systems" that we have found the best story to share with our children regarding death.  Her commentary begins, "Everything in nature moves in cycles..."