With increasing medicalization and technological intervention, dying, as with birthing, has been taken from the home surroundings. The experience of living with a terminal diagnosis today may not value or allow much room for a ‘dying time’: it may in fact be difficult to recognize one is dying, in this context. For many reasons, the dominant culture of North America lives with an ignorance, an unfamiliarity, a phobia around death, dying and by extension, grief. If we learn to care for the dying by witnessing death, have we lost touch with how to care for a dying person? What if we need to learn how to grieve through witness, experience, practice and a proximity to death in our daily lives?

Riverssong is a culmination of my experiences with death and learnings about it, professionally and personally. It is one attempt at an answer to what we need now, where we live, and what we can do to remember well our dying and deceased family, friends, neighbours and fellow humans. Familiarity with death is in peril. How do we take back death’s rightful place in life, in the living of our days? Let us consider together a deeper way of living and dying and make a place to reclaim dying, death, grief and remembering; a place to spread ideas, to query – to expand grief, dying and death learning, literacy and familiarity. The current terrain of those who are dying, their caregivers and the bereaved could benefit from some advocacy and navigation.

In addition to wonder and contemplation, let’s invite ceremony and beauty into these rememberings, acknowledging those who have gone before us so that we might live. Can we elevate the place of grief, dying and death in our lives and nurture our relationship with them?

~ Jennifer Bennett Pond, DipAT, MA