What do Little Debbie Rolls have to do with grief? Artist Day Schildkret explores the impact of losing our rituals in modern life and how to bring them back in big and small ways.
Find out more here: www.dayschildkret.com
Transcript:
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Hi, I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode we explore death, dying, and grief, through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page.
Today I'm talking with artist, teacher and author, Day Schildkret. Day's internationally known for Morning Altars, these beautiful pieces of impermanent art. His teachings revolve around three pillars, nature, art, and ritual. And he's written a couple of books including his latest, Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration, and Change.
We started our conversation talking about his grief after his father died.
Day Schildkret :
So my father, probably about 15 years ago, was diagnosed with cancer and I would say was very scared of his grief as he was dying. That fear really came out in the last few days where we could sense his unease and his disorientation around what was happening. My brother and I, midwife, Tim, in hospice, and we sang him songs, and did ritual, and played music, and stayed up with him. And really spoke to him about letting go and transitioning. That was a very, very special time.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Were you drawing on your Jewish faith at the time?
Day Schildkret :
Yeah, so Judaism, and especially in the book that I just wrote, Hello, Goodbye, Judaism is a very, very golden thread that's woven throughout the book. And so I draw upon my culture. I say culture not tradition, by the way, because it's more than just a religion. This is a people, and we have our own rituals and our own ways of being, and our own foods and our own languages and our own dressing. And so yes, that's informed me tremendously. Also, I've studied death and dying and grief, and so that's woven in there as well. And then of course, my own relationship with making impermanent art. And so a constant practice of making something and letting it go, making something, letting it go.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah, it's hard to really be there with someone who is actively dying.
Day Schildkret :
Being in the room with my dad, yeah. We have to in some ways contend with what's uncomfortable for us. And my job and my brother's job at the time was to not turn away from him. There's an author by the name of Bayo Akomolafe, is a West African author. He plays with words which I love to do as well. And this is the one I'm borrowing from him because he got to it before me and I just love it so much. He said, "Instead of using the word witness, what if we use the word with-ness, W-I-T-H. Our capacity to stay with what's happening and not to turn away from it." And so that is a function of being with and midwifing someone passing through. That very sacred gate is to not turn away when the preferences are not what you want them to be when you're uncomfortable, when it's looking so heartbreaking, and putrefying. All of the things that come in those moments, how can we stay with it and be faithful to what's happening? That's a skill that is so desperately needed in our culture right now.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I agree.
Day Schildkret :
So desperately needed to practice that, and especially with our youth.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
And so you stayed with your dad in the most difficult time, the difficult time in your life and his. You talk about taking care of the body afterwards. Was there any resistance in your family to taking care of your father after he died?
Day Schildkret :
I don't know if I would say resistance. I would say unfamiliarity with it. My culture has a very amazing group of people that we call [foreign language 00:04:39]. In translation, it really means the holy friends. These are people that are called up in the middle of the night if necessary, or during the day. Whenever there's a death in the community, we have a tradition where we do not leave the body untended until it gets into the ground. So from the moment of death until the moment of burial, the body must be tended. And not just tended, it needs to be cleaned, purified and needs to be offered prayers and prayed with because we consider the soul to be hovering near or around the body, and it needs to be guarded.
And so we have this band of folks that has nothing to do with any kind of ego. It's very, very quiet offering in our community. That's one of the ways of tending to the body, especially the washing of it. Which isn't to really purify the bodies before it goes into the ground. So removing any kind of makeup, removing any kind of nail polish because you're moving through something into something else and it's good to, in some ways clear what was so that you can make room for what is.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
If you're willing to share, what was it like for you to wash your dad's body?
Day Schildkret :
My father's body was not just for me to manage. I had my mother in there, I had my grandmother in there, I had my uncle in there, I had other family members in there. And so we had the morgue and the [foreign language 00:06:19] show up relatively fast to take my father's body away. So the washings that I did, and I speak about this in the book, when you don't have time, to just focus on washing the hands and the forehead and the feet, and it doesn't have to be a full naked experience. And so that's what I did with my father. We washed his forehead, and we washed his hands, and we washed his feet, and the rest of it was up to the [foreign language 00:06:51]. And that was enough for me at the time to really walk him up to that moment and do what I could do, and to be in that long farewell with him.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Such a huge blessing that you're offering that and talking about it, quite frankly in this book. And I appreciate it very much. My mother died 20 years ago and they showed up and took her away before we really had a chance to do any of that.
Day Schildkret :
And that happens.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. I talk a lot about a death story, which is really looking in the rearview mirror, looking back, previous generations, how they handled death and dying.
I'm super curious how you feel now. What your grandparents, your great-grandparents, were they caught up in a cultural denial or do you feel like your culture gave them a leg up, if you will, in the death space?
Day Schildkret :
There was a time not too long ago when my own people lived in a village, or born in a village, died in a village, knew all of their neighbors, their neighbors knew all of their children. There was a common way of dressing. There was a common language, there was common recipes, there was a lot of shared life experience, and by the way, many deaths by the time you were five. I spoke to someone yesterday, 50 year old woman, she's only experienced one death in her life. So there was a certain way of being together.
Now keep in mind, I come from a culture where we've been persecuted for thousands of years and a lot of my people have been on the run for a long time. But we've in some ways managed to preserve to a fault sometimes, but preserve our traditions and teachings. And so I'm imagining in that village there was a common shared way of being around death and dying. And so when my own family had to leave Eastern Europe because of the [inaudible 00:08:58] in the late 1800s, early 1900s. They had to leave. And the keyword is, had to, they were on the run to save their lives. Everyone that stayed died, including my entire great-grandfather's family in the Holocaust.
And so coming to a new culture, a new place, new language, new food, and not just that, but a culture whose very... The heart of America at the time was all about the melting pot, was all about assimilation and it was all about the American future. My grandmother said something like this. She said, "I was so focused on who I was going to be that I had no interest in what was," which means my own grandmother didn't know her own grandparents' names.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Right?
Day Schildkret :
Think about that for a second. No interest in the old country.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yes.
Day Schildkret :
And so you asked the question, did coming from this culture give us a little bit of a leg up? Maybe. Sure. We have rituals like shiva and shloshim. These are the days after someone dies that keep us into a grief container. We've kept those and those are very amazing. And there has been enormous loss in that trek over.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I feel like the source and core of many of our ills are not grieving as a community.
Day Schildkret :
From my experience and my learnings, grief is a skill. It's a capacity to know life well. Because knowing life well is to know that it's not meant to last. Just like my art, I build it knowing it's not going to last. Does that mean I love it less? Absolutely not. Maybe I even love it more. And so life is the same way.
We shouldn't have to see grief as a affliction, it's not. The culture has convinced itself that it is because it's addicted to growth. And anything that's in the way of productivity is an unwanted thing. And grieving is not a productive thing. It doesn't add to the growth of the culture. If anything, it's a way of knowing our limitations.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It feels like your book and rituals in general, having lost them over the last three years, this is a really significant time for what you have to offer in this book. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why they're so important?
Day Schildkret :
Ritual, the root of it, the etymology of it, it literally means to count. To count, it's such an interesting thing. Why would ritual mean counting and how do you count? Well, we all know if you watch Sesame Street, the count, it's like 1, 2, 3. So there's that sense of increase. 1, 2, 3, you're counting to get from somewhere to someplace else.
But I like to spin on that understanding because there's many different ways to count. I'm a creative, so I tend to look at other creatives. If you look to musicians and dancers, they're also counting, but they count differently. They're counting in patterns. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2. And so ask yourself, why is a musician counting like that? Well, first and foremost, it's to stay in the music. The music has a beat to it, and so that keeps them in the music. But if they're playing with other musicians, it's to keep them all together. As soon as you stop counting, you fall out of the music. Same with dancing. As soon as you stop counting, you don't know where you are in the music.
Ritual has the same function. Ritual is an individual and a collective way for us to stay in the rhythm of our lives, daily, weekly, annually, lifetime. Because it is totally human to forget where we are, or who we are, or why we're here, or what we're doing. That's very human. Rituals help us to remember. They say, "Oh, yeah." Like for instance, autumn equinox, oh yeah. Change of season, different needs, different focus, different purpose. Or my father's death anniversary was just here recently. Oh, yeah. Renew that relationship. Remember him, because during the year, I forget. It just happens. And so a ritual is our way of remembering.
Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, puts it even more beautifully. She says, "Our elders tell us that our ceremonies are our ways to remember to remember." There's something very, very important that I have to share about the function of ritual, which is all ritual has symbolic action to it. Meaning you break something, you bury something, you rip something, you tear something, you submerge something, whatever. All ritual has it. You can't think a ritual, you have to do something with your hands, your feet, your mouth, your belly.
And why? What does symbolism do? I work with symbolism a lot in my work, especially with my art. Symbolism externalizes the internal so that you can see what's going on in your inner landscape, externally. Therefore, it's a sane making device.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Wonderful. You have a strong faith tradition to pull from. But what about those of us who aren't religious, or don't feel anchored to a particular faith?
Day Schildkret :
The place where my culture and many others get caught up, we get into a place where we think rituals need to be stabilized and preserved, and I get that. There are many cultures where rituals have been stolen, or appropriated, or made illegal, et cetera.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
That's right.
Day Schildkret :
And so my own culture is not immune to that. So there's been a very important and necessary need to protect rituals and ceremonies from eradication and appropriation. But the double-edged sword of that is that you can also kill a ritual. It's the same way that you can kill a firefly, keeping it in a jar. It needs to breathe. And therefore, the other aspects of rituals is that they need to be reimagined. They need to always speak to the time and place that we're in. They need to be in service to this time and this place, not 500 years ago. There's probably many people who would contend with me, and I would stand face to face with them in this contention. But as an artist, we have to speak to the times that we're in, and the places that we're in. And we have to change things, reimagine them, reinvent them.
And so the rituals in my book are reinventions, many of my own rituals, especially in the death and dying chapter. And around death and dying, we recognize that grief, it needs these boundaries. Because grief is so tender and it's so volatile, and it's so vulnerable. The ocean of our lives is so relentless. And so it's very easy to, someone dies and then you have to get back to work, or you have to deal with the grocery store, or you have to handle phone calls. My culture says, "No, you don't, actually." And for seven days you're at home. You have to be with your grief, and your community is taking care of you. So everyone's cooking you food, everyone's handling your business, everyone's taking care so that you can just be with your broken heart.
And then those seven days pass, and then we say to ourselves, "Okay, we work in sevens a lot." And so after the seventh day, we go into a 30-day cycle. And so in those 30 days, we have a totally different way of being, which is kind of half in, half out with our grief. We're emerging back into our lives, but we're still very much in our grief and in the original grief.
And then after 30 days, we go into a year cycle. What that does is it helps us to move through and honor the different stages of grief. Because being right next to it, and having some time between it is different. There's distinctions there. I have three sections in the death and dying chapter of my book, and each one is devoted to a different cycle.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
In my own experience when my mother died, someone gave me some wonderful advice. I had a newborn at the time, and they said, "Give it three years." Because I was so immersed in this culture of denial, I remember thinking of what a gift that was. Just a gift of time, a gift of saying, "It's not going to be over tomorrow, or next week, or the week after." It was just such this spaciousness, just not even having the concept that you could have that container.
Day Schildkret :
If I can in some ways just speak to it in terms of gender, it's very feminine in a way. If I can speak to it in terms of an element, it's very watery, which means that it's not predictable. It's not looking to get from point A to point B. As I said before, it's not trying to be productive. It needs space to come and go, when it comes and goes. It needs space to be sat with. It needs space to be witnessed. It needs space for it to be itself and to not be controlled. That's a very hard thing to do in our culture because we're more and more these days, very GPS minded, very scheduled, very much in a sense of this false sense of control. We don't see much value with grief. If anything, it's something to overcome.
And so the time containers help us to return to the guests being visited by the grief and to not turn away from it, but to get to know it well, as a part of our life. Because of the pandemic, there's been enormous amounts of loss. We are trying to proceed in the presence of so much loss without marking it. And if you don't mark what's happening, then you are on the other side of a threshold, but you still think you're on the other side of it. Here's a very benign example of what I'm talking about.
I interviewed almost 300 people for the book. One of them was a woman who was at her job for 30 years. She retired. Every morning at five in the morning for two years after she retired, she would wake up with a panic attack. In her psyche, she wasn't retired. In her psyche, she still had a boss, she still had work to do. She still was late for a meeting. And she woke up and had a panic attack and needed the whole morning to come off of it. I said to her, "You walked through that threshold, but because you didn't mark it, your psyche still thinks you're on the other side. You still think you're working. And so you're trapped in kind of like a two world experience. You need to mark the threshold so that you can change, and you need to do it symbolically so that your psyche understands it. Psyche speaks in symbols." And so she did, and she stopped waking up in the morning.
Now look, that's a very nice story with a resolve to it. And sometimes it's not as neat. But I'm telling you, if you don't mark the moments, if you don't mark the losses and the celebrations, then you're proceeding in your life but you still think you're someplace else. And so the question is with the pandemic, what does it look like to be in this time and to still think we're in that time? Or to be in that time and still think you're in the time before? It's a very disorienting experience to be in two realities at the same time. Ritual helps to plant us in the times that we're in.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I don't know if this is a proper analogy or not. They say if you leave a book of poems on the shelf, it's not alive and it's not living. But once you read that poetry or you perform these rituals, they have a life and they have the potential to heal.
Day Schildkret :
I work a lot with art, and a lot with nature, and a lot with ritual. Those are the three kind of pillars of my work, nature, art, and ritual. I teach a teacher training, by the way. And the question I keep asking them when it comes to both nature, art, and ritual is, is it alive or is it not? If it is, it has totally different needs than if it isn't. And you have a totally different way of relating to it than if it isn't.
That's a very big mind shift when you walk, for instance, on the street, or in the woods, or at the beach, or wherever you are. And you're thinking, "Is it alive?" It's a different way of relating to life. So when it comes to rituals and you just said it, they're either alive or they're not. Poetry, either it's alive or it's not. And if it is, it requires a different way of being with it, of keeping it alive. That's the key, is the maintenance part. What does it mean to keep something alive? What is our responsibility to that? And rituals need to be done. That's how we keep them alive, over and over and over and over and over again.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So what does the ritual look like for you now and how you remember your dad?
Day Schildkret :
So last week was my dad's birthday. I tend to make art out of nature, leaves and flowers and berries and bark. And so I said to myself, "What did my father love?" I was in a very whimsical mood. And so I thought to myself, "Well, he really loved these little Debbie treats." These are like Swiss roll, Little Debbie's. And so I went down to a creek and I brought a bunch of those Little Debbie rolls and I created a bunch of circles with them. I put them in a circle and I put more in a circle and I did my art, but with Little Debbie rolls.
I lit a candle and I burned a little sweetgrass. I spoke to my dad as if he was right there, and as if I made him a beautiful dessert. For each one I put down, I remembered a different thing about him, and not something that I remember easily. I tried to really remember the parts of him that were just an everyday thing. The way he used to hum in the car, or this really bad way he played guitar and tried to sing Beatles songs. Or the episodes of Seinfeld that made him laugh really hard. Each roll I put down, I put a memory too, and that was it.
It doesn't have to be fancy and it doesn't have to be inaccessible. It actually could be something just like that. For me, I'm an artist, so I like making art. My brother ordered a pizza. My dad loved pizza. With his wife, every year on my dad's birthday, he orders a big pie and they raise a glass to him. And that's a ritual too. The difference between rituals and routines, are rituals are things that help us to remember.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Beautiful. Thank you.
Day Schildkret :
You're welcome.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. You can learn more about this podcast and my online course at my website, peacefulexit.net.
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This episode was produced by Larj Media. You can find them at L-A-R-Jmedia.com.
Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. More of his music can be found on Bandcamp.
As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.