How to Show Up for the Dying & Their Loved Ones offers practical, compassionate guidance from diagnosis through death and into the long landscape of grief. Was there a particular death or caregiving experience that first made you think, “People need to be taught how to do this”?

Absolutely! For sure, the foundation of how I show up, I learned in my big family and through my work as a midwife, but there was still a lot I needed to learn.

When I first moved to Paonia, a small rural town in Western Colorado, I met three families, each with a young parent dying of cancer. Without giving it much thought, I dove into caring for all three of them, and the nine children between them. Caring for them was excruciating, and also beautiful. The way our community came together reminded me of what we all long for when we say “It takes a village.” Our little town supported them as I imagine a tribal community would. Most of us, myself included, had never been so intimately involved with the dying process. With the support of one of our local death doulas, Carrie Lerner, we were taught about this sacred and ancient rite of passage. As a birth midwife with decades of experience caring for families at the veil, I stepped in and took on a leadership role with all of them. This included: caring for their children, taking the dying partners to appointments, feeding their families, cleaning their houses, and taking care of their partners. When the time came, I participated in cleaning their bodies after death, transporting their bodies in my minivan to their resting places, and facilitating their burial and cremation ceremonies.

These three parents, Freeda, Javier, and Jordan, died 6 months to the day of each other. Two days after Jordan died, I thought to myself, “I’ve just received a download, and I need to share what I’ve learned with others!” Having never written anything substantial before, I began the long and oftentimes unbearable process of writing this book.

As a midwife, who traditionally would have been at the bedsides of the birthing and the dying, I was surprised by how little I knew about the dying process. This led me to assume that most other people in the Western world also know very little about it, and could benefit greatly from what I had learned.

Your framework includes self-care, sacrifice, staying close, bravery, and sitting in the fire. How did those five principles emerge?

Ahh, what’s up with the five principles you ask? Jake Woods, Freeda’s husband, is to thank for this book. He said, “Moriah, there’s something different about the way you show up, and you need to share your ways.” So I got to thinking about what it is that I bring to caring for others, and out of that inner exploration emerged these five principles. Caring for the dying and their loved ones is hard, but it’s not rocket science.

These principles are to be used like road signs to help folks remain on course with their intention to show up. They’re anchors to help us stay grounded so that we don’t unintentionally drift away when people need us most. If at any point during the process of leaning in to offer support, someone feels unsure about what to do or say, I encourage revisiting these five principles. While I wrote the principles and they emerged from somewhere in me, I’m still very much a student of them. I haven’t mastered any of the ideas or tools in this book. What I’ve found is that when I get stuck, if I sit and reflect on these principles, my next best step always emerges. I hope that is the case for others too.

Caregivers often become almost invisible because attention naturally centers on the ill person. What do caregivers most need from their communities?

That’s a really great observation and question. Sad but true in many situations. The absolute best way to care for someone who is dying or facing a terminal illness is to care for their caregivers. Those who are sick can’t fully lean into their caregivers unless their caregivers are well supported. If their caregivers are not well supported, they themselves will try to support them, or lessen the burden of what they have to carry. I see this as an example of what is broken within our “human ecology.” For example, when a primary caregiving parent is under-supported, their child or children will actually try to care for them. Even though this isn’t fair to the child, the support has to come from somewhere for the child to be stable. Similarly, if after a birth everyone’s attention goes to the baby, the mother will struggle if her needs are unseen. The same is true with the dying.

In nature, the actions and reactions that take place in an ecosystem are like a spiderweb. When one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. One strand does not equal a web. One strand equals: At Risk of Breaking.

Primary caregivers are one strand within the web of life that surrounds them. They need to be held up and supported by many competent layers of support, so that the person facing death can actually lean into them. This is essentially what the whole book is about: Finding our place in the web of our families and communities. It’s not just the primary caregivers who need support. Those who are supporting the primary caregivers need support, and those who are supporting those who are supporting the primary caregivers also need support, and so on…

The book opens with the broader Standing at the Veil initiative. What do you hope that movement becomes?

Thank you for asking. I believe the book has value for readers on its own, and it’s also a doorway into the Standing at the Veil global support initiative. Two and a half years after completing the first draft of this book, my only brother was diagnosed with cancer. There are no words to describe the pain I felt at my inability to help him and his family more, given that we live thousands of miles apart. And in this way, our family isn’t unique. So many of us in the Western world live far away from those we love and have deep ties with, and at the same time we’re surrounded by people who’ve also chosen to live geographically distant from their loved ones.

While my brother was in the hospital, I spoke with his partner about her needs. She said she longed for people she could rely on and lean into within walking distance from their home. Her needs included: food prep, house cleaning, help with errands, help with projects around the house, and childcare so that she could attend to my brother’s needs and her work. And then, of course, there were her needs for self-care and emotional and spiritual support. She said she desperately wanted someone to physically hold her and a shoulder she could cry on.

Instead of allowing myself to become immobilized by my inability to help them, I channeled my energy into the Standing at the Veil project I’d been gestating. My dream is to empower and train people to feel more confident, comfortable, and capable of showing up for their friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and those in their local communities.

With trainings for lay people and professionals, along with workbooks, social forums, a global interactive map, and limitless local, national, and international resource links, I believe Standing at the Veil has the potential to transform our current death and dying landscape.

Just as viruses and bacteria constantly evolve in order to adapt, survive, and thrive, I believe this vision of a global support network will reawaken dormant seeds of ancient wisdom and reshape how we show up for each other during the dying process. And on a much bigger level, support the transformation, evolution, and adaptation of our species as we re-learn how to cohabitate with each other and all of nature on this beautiful planet we all call home.

Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Standing at the Veil | Website | Amazon