Sairey Luterman Grief Support

04/15/2024

Sarah Kerr (Centre for Sacred Deathcare) often talks about being ‘church for the unchurched’ when working with her clients - and I get it. We both often work with secular but spiritual folks. So while I will never (ever) force a connection, I will make offerings if there is interest in other ways to think about life and death if there seems to be a lot of interest. I like the ‘Nine Contemplations’ shared below. Thoughtful, meditative perhaps they could be useful to you.

It’s the Nine Contemplations of Death, a Buddhist writing attributed to Atisha, an 11th century Tibetan scholar. I hope you will find it as calming and meaningful as I do:

The First Contemplation
Death is inevitable, no one is exempt.
Holding this thought in mind, I abide in the breath.

The Second Contemplation
Our life span is decreasing continuously, every breath brings us closer to death.
Holding this thought in mind, I delve deeply into truth.

The Third Contemplation
Death will indeed come, whether or not we are prepared.
Holding this thought in mind, I enter more fully into the body of life.

The Fourth Contemplation
Human life expectancy is uncertain, death can come at any time.
Holding this thought in mind, I listen with utmost care to every sound.

The Fifth Contemplation
There are many causes of death— habits, desires, accidents can be precipitants.
Holding this thought in mind, I consider the myriad possibilities.

The Sixth Contemplation
The human body is fragile and vulnerable, our life hangs by a breath.
Holding this thought in mind, I attend to each inhalation-exhalation.

The Seventh Contemplation
At the time of death, our material resources are of no use to us.
Holding this thought in mind, I invest wholeheartedly in the practice.

The Eight Contemplation
Our loved ones cannot keep us from death, there is no delaying its advent.
Holding this thought in mind, I exercise non-grasping and clinging.

The Ninth Contemplation
Our body cannot help us at the time of death, it too will be lost at that moment.
Holding this thought in mind, I strengthen my capacity for release’.

04/10/2024

Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.
Toni Morrison

photo credit: Jerry Harris

04/08/2024

My work as a grief counselor has had a natural evolution over time to end of life work - some might call me an end of life doula. Below is the clearest description I have seen of this work so I thought I would share.

I companion a single person (and often their family and close supports) at a time in this role, and find I can be most useful and effective when I we begin work together early on in a life limiting diagnosis.

At this time I could work with a new family. Please reach out to me if I could be helpful to you in this way. My email is - [email protected].

This emerging field of support honors death and dying for people and pets.

03/29/2024

My colleagues at The Death and Grief Worker Collective are sponsoring an online viewing of ‘The Last Ecstatic Days’ on Tuesday April 23rd, 5.30pm MST.

I will be watching - Ethan Sisser was a young man diagnosed with terminal brain cancer whose end of life goal was to teach us to die without fear.

Consider watching as a self-gift to feed your brain and heart a counterbalance to the prevailing cultural narrative that the end of life is something solely we must fear and dread. I hope this viewing helps you begin or continue your own journey to learning about this most important time in a life.

Get tickets for the virtual screening of The Last Ecstatic Days

03/26/2024

Anxiety and Grief are deeply entertwined experiences. ‘Grief’ is an umbrella under which anxiety, anger, and fear (among other big feelings) like to cozy up. I agree with this author that what we keep naming as an increase in anxiety since the beginning of the COVID pandemic is most likely grief. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s mostly grief.

This is even more true for our children and teens and their puzzled parents who can’t figure out where on earth all of this ‘anxiety’ is coming from…it’s grief.

Make room, stop trying to hold that beach ball under water…let it bobble along and be curious about your feelings. It’s the first step to access and understanding.

"We need to acknowledge the individual and collective grief we are carrying," writes Claire Bidwell Smith.

03/19/2024

I have witnessed this ‘transformation’ many times in dying patients. I call it ‘beatifying’ because the change can be so powerful in the person they seem profoundly relieved and saint like. I’m glad for this research, it confirms what I already knew but perhaps for other folks it can help bring them along. - Sairey
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Kerr’s latest research is focused on the emotional transformation he has often observed in patients who experience such visions. The first in this series of studies, published in 2019, measured psychological and spiritual growth among two groups of hospice patients: those who had visions and a control group of those who did not. Patients rated their agreement with statements including, “I changed my priorities about what is important in life,” or “I have a better understanding of spiritual matters.” Those who experienced end-of-life visions agreed more strongly with those statements, suggesting that the visions sparked inner change even at the end of life. “It’s the most remarkable of our studies,” Kerr told me. “It highlights the paradox of dying, that while there is physical deterioration, they are growing and finding meaning. It highlights what patients are telling us, that they are being put back together.”

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

03/15/2024

For a few years I consulted to businesses after the of loss (of an employee). Companies would bring me into help essentially stabilize the environment a bit so everyone could - yep - get back to work. Invariably what I learned was that those deaths (suicides/heart attacks/catastrophic health failures) often took place right before, immediately after, or (I wish this weren’t true) an employee collapsed and died WHILE being laid off.

Workplaces are microcosms of our culture - including that which is most toxic - and the grief and trauma of a constantly expanding and collapsing workplace is brutal for people.
The ‘Reduction in Force’ paradigm dehumanizes and crushes the incentive of workers. I don’t pretend to know a better way but it’s clear that the echoes of not valuing the humanity of a person are played out quite intensely in the workplace.

I have cheered for the many people who saw a better way (maybe it paid less) and took it after Covid. One way to change the machine is to starve it.

I understand some folks feel stuck for lots of good reasons. My reminder for you is this - your employer is an employer. Not a friend, and they actually don’t have your best interests at heart for the most part. Protect yourself, value your time and your own life and hold it close as best as you can.

I watch these next generations coming up and chuckle to hear older generations of workers saying they have to ‘do their time’ and that they are ‘lazy’ and ‘don’t understand the real world’. I love the refusal of younger people to buy into this harmful paradigm. What’s more, they don’t care how they are ‘perceived.’ Just watch them go folks…they are going to make choice after choice that is humanity centered and reap the rewards in terms of their mental health and own lives for it. Father did NOT know best.

P.s. I no longer ‘consult’ to businesses for grief work. It made me an enabler and a cog in a system.

The workers who remain deal with stress, guilt, and a changed workplace.

02/15/2024

We want so fervently for the world to make sense. We want, too, to be able to understand our own losses in a meaningful narrative, only no matter how hard we try to Jenga those pieces together there’s always a few shaped like a moving octopus. It’s easy to release the world from a meaningful narrative when it feels less personal…but when, say, your child dies or your spouse falls asleep one night at 40 years old and simply doesn’t wake up the next day the need for an explanation becomes personal. The hunger for an understanding of what has unfolded can be relentless for some folks.

My sacred work is to listen. Similarly, I listen to the thoughts, wishes, dreams and regrets of the dying. Sifting through the story of a lifetime and turning over each stone and examining it is the end of life work for those of us fortunate enough to have the time and brave enough to truly attend to that work. Unlike the grieving, often the dying will relinquish that need for the ‘why’ explanation over time. (Not always…there are no absolutes here folks…ever…not in this space)

But there is often a relinquishing…a releasing of that demand for things to make sense. I think the central lesson of life is to simply stop making that demand, and stay in the stream of what is actually happening for you at any given time. Train your heart, thought, enjoyment to what is directly in front of you. Hard stuff too. Cope with what is directly in front of you. Keep your horizon at the tip of your nose. Easier said than done, I know.

It’s my privilege to watch this play out in life again and again, and I am grateful for all the teachers that have shown me the way.

01/21/2024

“Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
excerpt from ‘The Fern’ by Dylan Thomas

The sea is my most essential natural touchstone. There are bits of it strewn throughout my home - driftwood logs, piles of shells and sea glass, every size crab carapace. I have been hypnotized exactly once in my life and I apparently spent the whole hour talking about the sea and my connection to its life force.

I serve as a guide at the end of life. That means from the moment of life limiting diagnosis, living right into the end. I provide a Compassionate Presence to the final, most essential work of being human - the leave taking. I invite you to consider that the end of a life can be rich, precious and beautiful even if profoundly sad. Exerting agency and choice in planning and enjoying the last years or months of your life is a gift you can give yourself and your loved ones.

01/11/2024

The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers.
Sarah Durham Wilson

As we have become a less religious country, we also don’t connect with the sacred in a secular space. But it’s everywhere. It’s alive and well in my work, in grieving, in naming what was beautiful and still is, and also in dying if you are brave enough to trust and make just a little room. It is everywhere and you only need remember and embrace it.

Photo credit: Hazelle Steriti

01/07/2024

It’s funny how the end of the year and the beginning of the next generates more content about death, dying, mortality, our choices, the brevity of things, how to converse with our kids about this wildly important stuff, all of it. It’s like the journalistic, theater and art world all throw in for a few brilliant weeks on what I consider to be the most essential matter of our lives. It’s the same kind of ghetto-izing of content that we see with months dedicated to black history, women’s history, LGBTQ lives…we just don’t call January ‘Mortality Obsession Month.’ We fetishize mortality for a month and then briskly it’s time to move on to ‘cheerier’ things. It’s time for Valentine’s Day, the Super Bowl, Ground Hog day (among other things of course).

As always, this is the essence of my work and what is at the core of each of our lives. The. Core.

Yes, it’s true January is a dying time. It is the month of the year with the highest mortality rate - and where you live in the country doesn’t affect that statistic. And I am writing to you on January 7th, the day AFTER the most common day of the month to die (Jan 6th…)

So yes, it does make additional sense to reflect some on this topic in January. September, however, is the least ‘dying’ month. I drop statistics and stories into each month of the calendar year (and I do, right here), and then, briefly, for the month of January, the rest of the world joins me. It’s so lovely to feel that focused attention. It makes me feel less like I am dragging a sack along all by myself for a little bit. But it’s just a ruse.

Our mortality, how we spend our days…that is how we spend our lives. Our attention is fickle. There are so many things to pull on it. But I have yet to find anything more fascinating, more important, more wonderful, than the measure of how we spend our precious hours, our precious minutes….our precious seconds. I hope that you, too, hold that dear in the other eleven months too as you make all those small choices that add up to the biggest one - how you spent this time earth side.

Photo credit: Georgia Harris

12/30/2023

On the eve of my 55th bday I’d like to tell this nineteen year old version of me (with my sister on the right - twenty one years old or so) in this photo a few things…

Boundaries are good. It’s going to take you a looooong time to learn that - it is not possible to ‘fix’ anyone but yourself. THAT is worth doing. Keep taking hard looks at yourself…then…

Take responsibility for your choices. It is possible to cut corners and delude yourself for loooong periods of time. It WILL catch up with you. Then your choice becomes to repeatedly chose to be a victim of your past choices or wrestle hard with your big girl pants. The latter pays major dividends in terms of contentment and peace. Be brave enough to look really really hard at yourself. No one is blameless. NO ONE.

Trust your intuition - do not try to tamp it down and turn it away. Listen to how your body feels and what your mind shouts when presented with something or someone new. Then honor it.

I look at pain, and sometimes despair, every day in my work. We are capable of the deepest sorrowing as humans. We are also capable of mucking, crawling, and dragging ourselves out and through hideous losses and traumas. I never fail to be inspired by enduring - yes, enduring.

Some of life is solely about it until you arrive at a slightly different and adjusted plateau. Enduring is courage. The courage to endure is a corner stone of the best part of humanity. It’s why we are here today. It isn’t always possible to thrive and be joyous. Sometimes you will scrape and you pray for a little bit of light between the cracks. Day after day. After. Day. Keep on keeping on.

Pack up your toys and head home if you fall in with someone who loves their own suffering. Life will give you enough real hardship without attaching yourself someone who enjoys playing a victim. The energy vampires in the world can spot you at 1,000 paces. Learn to spot them first. Then run.

Go to therapy. Go. Stop questioning it and back pedaling and wondering. You know it will be hard and painful sometimes. It will be, but a good therapist will light a candle and help you find the best way. Don’t wait. Don’t put it off. Therapy has changed my life for the better again and again and again. And. again. There’s a solid chance that if you aren’t in therapy yourself you are very much the subject of someone else’s sessions. Mental health IS health. And health is your greatest treasure - protect it, look after it.

Lastly, I know the world is brutally sad. I know hateful terrifying things are happening to people and children every moment of every day. It can be paralyzing to think on. At the hardest and lowest points of my own life I have never wanted everyone else to stop celebrating and having joy. The suggestion that the holidays should have been cancelled this year will never resonate with me - there will always be pain.

As long as there is a black hole of pain and suffering in this world if we cancel out its opposite we will surely be lost. It’s all the more reason to reach for some light in a sea of darkness… or we will all drown. I am a much better raft with some buoyancy in my heart.

12/23/2023

Happy aging is helped by friendship, love, service — and the outdoors.

12/21/2023

We’re in the narrow passage now and if you’ve had a loss recently you are likely at best giving the holidays a serious case of side-eye, if not wishing the covers could be pulled up over your head til the Christmas music stops in every store ever.

This guide my colleague Leslie Barber put together is loving and concise. I hope it might help you strategize to get to the other side of the ‘most wonderful time of the year.’ It’s okay to feel whatever you are feeling - you are entitled to have big feelings around your loss.

Merry and bright. Cheer and joy. To a griever, the gratitude and festivities are a neon Las Vegas style reminder of what once was—an activation of sorrow, anxiety, and isolation that doubles down through Winter. Here's what you can do as a sympathizer and a griever.

12/09/2023

Some funerals reflect ‘their person’ exquisitely - a true send off. Much like weddings the most resonant reflect key pieces of the person they honor. I respect those of us who want no funeral at all, or perhaps something small and quiet. To each his own.

Shane MacGowan’s funeral (lead singer of The Pogues) was an extravaganza truly reflective of the beautiful and complex soul he was. This tribute from singer Glen Hansard is one of the most beautiful tributes I have ever seen. I love the wicker casket, too. I may have one of those some day bc I’d like to be composted.

Lastly, consider those beautiful loved ones who climb over their pew in the church and start dancing….what a way to celebrate a life

There was dancing inside the Saint Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Co Tipperary during Shane MacGowan’s funeral as the Pogues’ Fairytale Of New York was...

11/21/2023

As promised…here’s the link to listen!
Enjoy, love to hear your thoughts.

‎Show The Right Mind Media Podcast, Ep On Grief - Nov 19, 2023

11/08/2023

Teee heee!!!

So we just finished recording my segment for WUMB but it doesn’t air until Sunday morning Nov 19th at 7:30a (watch this space - I will connect a link to the podcast when they release it)!!!

11/04/2023

Wanted to let all you wildly supportive folks know I will be on WUMB 91.9 (U Mass Boston’s Radio Station) this Wed Nov 8th at 10:00a talking about grief. The program is ‘Right Mind’ and it is their program dedicated to all things mental health.

****It WILL be saved as a Podcast on UMass Boston’s website after it airs live. I will post the link here when I have it*******

91.9 fm WUMB Boston WBPR Worcester WFBP Falmouth | 91.7 fm WNEF Newburyport WUMG Stow WUMT Marshfield | 88.7 fm WUMV Milford, NH | 91.5 fm WUMZ Gloucester | 1170 am WFPB Orleans University of Massachusetts

Photo credit: Trevor Barcelo

10/27/2023

I hear the sound of heartbreak and what I can offer is to listen.

——

Watching My Friend Pretend her Heart is Not Breaking
by Rosemerry Whatola Trommer

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

10/15/2023

There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.
Octavia Butler

When times are hard, and I am sad and tired I have two simple phrases I repeat to myself ‘gentle, gentle’ and ‘slowly, slowly.’ It’s a way to remind myself that I deserve grace and to quiet myself. I often share this little coping mechanism with patients. I hope you will consider trying it too.
Grief that is not tried to be outrun and smashed down is grief that can be slowly processed and integrated into your life. Making attempts to gently regulate your nervous system in these simple ways makes a difference.

09/30/2023

We only seem to understand the work ‘sacred’ in this country as it relates to traditional religious mores - and as a result we miss so much and have depleted so very much - at our own peril.

This space is sacred, it needs to be protected. Trammeling on the rights of the underserved, oppressed and those who haven’t had a voice is destructive and toxic for everyone involved. We don’t seem to learn.

I will continue to make my own little way along, noticing what I notice, treasuring what I treasure, calling vulnerable work sacred, and hoping I perhaps change a mind or heart (both is best) along the way. Consider this.

In Georgia, Texas and Washington, D.C., three Black women are working to preserve desecrated African American burial grounds and the stories they hold.

08/26/2023

Writing is transformative - and grief needs a certain amount of transformation and integration to be incorporated into the narrative of one’s life.

This course promises to be wonderful for exactly that - and you know I don’t pedal much of anything in this space at all except for that which I personally feel a true connection. That can be said of Rachel, and her endeavors (she’s also an actress/producer & director of film in addition to being a respected grief coach). At the end of this class each person in the cohort will have refined a piece that will be collected in a book and can then be shared amongst friends and family.

There is information in the link about free short ‘sampler’ versions of the course to give you a taste of what the class will be like.

This is weekly guided group work, exercises and sharing. Plus witnessing, guided meditations and weekly journaling prompts.

08/13/2023

People don’t want to be rescued, they want to be witnessed. You don’t need to take on anyone’s pain. You don’t need to immediately fix it or go into solutions. It’s a loving act to trust an adults ability to cope. It’s a loving act not to go into an anxiety spiral when you see someone suffering. - The Holistic Psychologist
(The Holistic Psychologist)

08/08/2023

Sometimes a ‘story’ comes along in the news that sticks to me - a narrative that takes over my consciousness and my heart. This is not a story, though. It’s the real life of Harmony Montgomery and the hell that was visited upon her by her father and mother, the welfare system, and society at large.

We didn’t just let her down a little. We seem to have tossed this precious child - seen in so many photos in her little glasses with a giant toothy smile - down a slick well and hoped she’d somehow grab a moss covered brick. Her disappearance was not reported for two years. After an exhaustive police search it is learned that her father brutally killed her (after years of abuse). It’s all chronicled in this article - the bureaucratic mess of it, the disinterest, the overwhelm. It’s been written about and written about and written about. What hasn’t been written about is this child - who she was - what she liked - her humanity. Her humanity glowed.

Harmony, you were a beautiful little human. You deserved all the love in the world, visits to the park, fun in the snow, a trip to the beach where you kicked in the waves and examined shells. You are owed so much, you are owed the whole world. I can’t even figure out who grieves you, honey. I know I do. I grieve you. It seems like your world was populated by monsters - and when you were in the hands of angels it didn’t last. You deserved to feel comforted always, to have a full belly and to get to your doctors visits, and have the tooth fairy leave money under your pillow. You should have had a sweet first day of school in new clothes in Manchester, NH. I’m sick you are gone, and that what you knew of the world was mostly terror. I cannot stand the thought that no one knew you were missing for two years, and no one stepped forward on your behalf. You are owed every single good thing. I feel a crushed inside when I see your little trusting face. So I will remember you. I will think of you lovingly. It’s far too little, far too late, but it’s what I have to offer.

Source: NBC News I write with heartbreak and rage about a child who was removed from her drug-abusing mother at the age of two months, placed with a loving family that wanted to adopt her, ripped f…

07/25/2023

Again, love.

There is so much goodness in people. Look these folks up if you’d like help finishing a project a now dead loved one started but never finished. They are waiting for you.

It can be heartbreaking to let go of a hand-made rug or sweater that a loved one didn't quite finish. A group of volunteer knitters, quilters and other crafters offer some closure.

07/20/2023

Death is particularly fearful in a culture that views nature as an outsider and an adversary.

In such a context death becomes a hateful insult and final defeat.

Except nature is neither outsider nor adversary.

It is our author, keeper and kin.

Returning to nature is not a loss. It’s a homecoming.
Jarod K. Anderson
The Cryptonaturalist Podcast

07/11/2023

This is love.

My achamma died today in Kerala. She was 94 years young. I am dressed in the most inelegant grief. It’s mutinous. Each memory, a shard of glass I walk on with bare feet -- willingly. Out trip to the Grand Canyon where I learned every crevice in her eyes just as heart earned as a mountain. Her love of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels, sudoku, martinis. That time she called everyone to let them know I had diarrhea, looking so concerned she might cry. And I wanted to cry because she loved me in a language I can’t even speak. All of me – rainbow hair, rainbow life – with such rigor and devotion. It feels like the sun has been usurped by a florescent bulb.

We’d sit around in the living room, do nothing together. That’s what I’m going to miss most: the nothing that felt like everything. The way that she filled every crevice of it. And every bit of me with all the dosas, idly, pazham pori. I’d leave her house and travel the world, tell people, “I’m from Kerala.” By which I mean: I am hers. That adventurous woman. The oldest person I knew with the youngest soul. The one who called me to say “hello.” And outside the party, backstage that one time in Bucharest, I’d hold that phone close to me, say “hello.” And I felt like I belonged to this strange earth. Like the sky was there to remind me of the indisputable fact that she was somewhere out there underneath it too, beside me.

When I visited her last, she told me that she was ready to die. I said she’d live to be a thousand. She laughed and she said she hoped not. She hoped it would come swift and immediate. I looked back as my car pulled out of the driveway and I saw her waving and I knew this was it. That next time I would return to a house, not a home. I called her from Fort Kochi, said, “hello” the way, I suppose, one says “goodbye.” (With hope.)

I keep losing people I’ve known my entire life. I figure this is what it means to grow up: to become aware of the gross mechanics of matter reassembling itself inside of you. To have the wherewithal to witness it, at least. The person writing to you now is not the same one who was here yesterday. Love lacerates us. And it’s worth it. With all our wounds, it’s worth it.

07/09/2023

I promise you that you can still make a beautiful life for yourself even if you lost years of it to trauma, mental illness, or abuse; your story isn’t over yet.
Credited to Beaufort Chalkboard

There are so many kinds of loss - loss and grief aren’t experiences that spring solely from the death of a loved one. We live in a time of great mental health awakenings for many of us.
Often the first piece of that realization is profound grief at the unconscious choices we were held hostage by before we became more aware. There is time. Take steps to begin your work today - whatever that may look like for you. For some of us it’s therapy, for others it’s a quiet time of reflection to get started, reading a bit about experiences we had and suspect have affected us. You are brave enough to take that small step today.

07/02/2023

“In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra's breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms. When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don't you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don't you dare."
-Caitlin Moran

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When I struggle with what I ‘believe’ about an afterlife it is science and Mother Nature who step in again and again and provides me with comfort.