The drums of a Living Wake that awoke a sleepy town – By Maria Lazovic

July 26, 2018 Other

“Death is the natural end to life, a certainty that everyone will experience, and yet it is something we are often unfamiliar with.”  Zenith Virago (Deathwalker)

Stan was 63 when diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer that had quickly metastasised to other organs.  Immediately upon hearing this news an image came to me of Stan’s funny faces and popping noises he made for my daughter when she was little.  They always amused me too.

Residing in the country home he had built himself, Stan had acquired the appearance of a robust, strong and handsomely weathered man living off salubrious air and his own grown vegetables.  In this remote coastal Tasmanian town, known for its wild surf beach, secluded abodes and population of black cockatoos, Stan and his landscape shared a common vigour and unpretentiousness.

I had the pleasure of being part of this community for 3 years when happenstance landed me here from Melbourne 15 years ago.  I was welcomed into the fold and I could immediately feel the beginning of meaningful bonds being forged.  This community was created organically by commonality of location, rather than of class, education or culture.  For the most part, this was a random cluster of humans who by choice resided in this magnificent location.

I often returned for short and sometimes long stays.  When booking my last trip I heard about Stan’s terminal diagnosis.  Bravely he organised a living wake to be held with an open invitation to all the community.  Stan was a musician who had taught me drumming, and his wife Karen was a friend too.  This couple were very special to me.  Joyful, generous and open hearted.  I didn’t know what to expect of the living wake, but had a feeling in my bones that reverberated with a sense of familiarity.  It was to be held at the little town hall by the old cemetery.  I hadn’t seen Stan since last Christmas and I wasn’t sure how he would look or how much energy he’d have.

My family and I arrived at the old hall.  Mum was apprehensive, like many people she never knew what to say or do around death and dying.  The girls were uneasy too.  They imagined sitting through sombre talks and teary faces.  We struggled to find a car park.  Children bustled around in fairy dresses, the local real estate agent donned a sultan sheik costume and belly dancers in coin skirts moved among us. There was much colour and frivolity.  I missed this detail of the invitation – dress up colourfully!  We squeezed past the crowds to get inside the old timber cobwebbed hall and joined others sitting on the floor in front of the standing crowd.  Stan was centre stage, leading an ensemble of drummers in a samba beat.

He’d lost much weight since I saw him last Christmas and gone was his giant bear gait.  Despite his illness he was animated as always. His tongue and mouth still motioned nearly as much as his hands as he drummed!  This is what he loved to do – play music.

This evening Stan was fulfilling his own needs to connect soulfully and share this most vulnerable experience of dying in the best way he knew how – by playing music.  I’ve often heard it said that we die in the same way we’ve lived.   Stan played music, conversed with us from the stage and hugged all as he moved among us.

He joked throughout his sets: about the possibility of the doctors getting it all wrong because he felt so good; about getting behind in the evening’s schedule; and about life’s schedules getting mucked up.  In fact, he joked about anything remotely to do with death.  Our sensibilities attuned to his resonance of both strength and frailty.  The unmentionable and unfathomable was bantered around, mocked and poked fun at until we were at ease with the reason we were all gathered.

Eventually a relaxation permeated the hall and slowly, one by one, we got up to dance.  I noticed how being physically involved in a friend’s dying gave somewhere for the grief and sorrow to go.  Preparing food, playing music and dancing allowed the energy our emotions carried to move through us.  In the moment I had an embodied feeling of impermanence, of never again living this moment – this night – again. It felt perfect.  There was nothing to add or take away. As I scanned the room expressions of peace and joy shone from faces – some smiling widely, some contemplative.   Being together was easy as breathing.  The effortless beauty bypassed our minds and plunged us into a state of heart felt gratitude.

For the most part, my overwhelming experience with death centred on its medicalisation, where conversations were dominated by diagnosis, treatment plans and doctor’s appointments.  Our culture seems to have given the medical profession and its institutions exclusivity when dealing with death and dying.  This has resulted in the immediate family often feeling isolated and alone among strangers. Support for death and dying need not be the exclusive preserve of medical establishments. That evening Stan allowed us to experience being part of a community holding emotional space for their own in the face of death.   Whole communities are affected by death and so it follow that it must also be their concern and responsibility.

In his book ‘The Way We Die Now’ Seamus O’Mahony writes ‘death cannot be sanitised, work-shopped or managed.  In death, there is only affliction’.  A myriad of afflictions come to come to mind when I think of people dying – experiencing one loss after another.  The strongest is an angst that most probably stems from feeling alone in the world, particularly on the journey from illness to death.  An awareness of one’s impending death surely requires the soothing and comfort of companionship and connection.  Stan invited us to slow down, focus on this awareness and give affirmation to the fact that a significant transition is occurring for him.  This evening, the secular world of temporal joys, through the ritual of gathering and music, was sanctified in its ability to constellate community, calm an existential angst and assuage the potential crisis that dying can represent.

I decided that Stan is a kind of magician.  I wondered if the constraints of our corporeal existence had a spiritual purpose.  Could magicians even tap into their full potential and develop their magical feats of transformation without the restraints of physical laws and a human capacity to believe in illusion?   Does sacredness and spirituality exist in simply participating in this life, upholding our perfect right to be, or turning up for each other day after day?  Stan may never make anyone levitate or disappear, but he did take the most common and feared experience of facing loss and the unknown in death, and rather than limit his world, he transformed it by opening up his world for us, forcing himself and us to be more daring and bolder than we knew we could be.

The mystery of death now felt like something to be tendered to, rather than tackled and solved.  It matters not if the loose ends of our life’s story are neatly tied up or orchestrated never to be so.  The tension and gravity around death forced us out of our normal channels of responding and thinking.  A space was created where uncertainty, the unknowable and mysterious could be held, without necessarily letting go of our questions or expecting a certain kind of resolution.  This terrible thing that was happening to Stan, and eventually will happen to all of us, gave us an opportunity to grapple with the struggles of the limits of our human powers.  It called forth an easing into maturity and the complexity of emotion – that somehow profoundly advanced the surrender of our spirits to love.

Stan’s courage to share his dying openly and with dignity made all us better and braver people.  I have been to many gatherings throughout my life where we marked archetypal rites of passage. I know how a birth, wedding, birthday and anniversary celebration looks and feels.  Attending in Stan’s particular way to the last passage of life – death, was a new experience for me.  I noticed myself wondering in what manner I would like to be sent off when my time comes.  I pondered what memories and legacy I would leave behind.  I became more aware of how it was actually possible to create these as a gift to my loved ones and community.

Mum left content to have witnessed that her community was given the freedom to express a tender joy, as well as sadness at Stan’s impending death.  The girls were relieved and exuberant that all was not doom and gloom at the end of life.  They felt that they had participated in an age old ritual that immediately felt natural and authentic.  And so, family in tow, I left this most unusual and enlightening evening with a little piece of Stan with me.

Later that night as I relaxed into my slumber I reflected on the feelings and images surfacing within me.  I could still feel the rhythms of the drums and how they pulled us into a cohesive assemblage and pulsated within us the significance of the gathering.  I imagined that called forth by Stan’s desire, together we beared witness to the truth of our physical mortality and created in our imaginations a safe place, saturated with love, to assist Stan in the intense work of withdrawing from this physical world.

The living wake roused from deep within us the knowing and familiarity of a life ending, and that evening we all borrowed from Stan’s courage, grace and open heartedness to eventually one day do this thing we all must do – called death.

You can find Maria Lazovic’s listing <<here>>

To find your nearest end of life doula, <<click here to search our directory.>>