Kicking the bucket
Liz Rothschild writes about the background to the forthcoming ‘Kicking the Bucket Festival’ in Oxford
‘Why are you obsessed with all this?’ my old friend Helen asked the other day. ‘Not obsessed’, I said, ‘passionate’. The first knowing Death. I have travelled with it from an early age, not through traumatic loss but it has just jostled into view. When I was fifteen, I used to visit an old lady who lived near the bus stop close to my school. After a while she got ill and ended up in hospital and I visited her there. Once I came and entered her little room, and realised that she had died. No-one had noticed. I always feel how lucky I was to encounter death that way. Not in the way that cuts you off at the knees because the loss is so traumatic and shocking – but quiet and close. Someone I was very fond of but not bereft without. The first knowing.
Encounters
Fast forward many years to the very sudden death of a close friend, Carol, around twenty years ago. We gathered around – close friends and family – and talked and cried and laughed and remembered. We looked at photographs and read out bits of letters. Carol was gay and an atheist. We knew there was nothing out there on the shelf that was right. We had to do it ourselves. We arranged for her body to come to someone’s flat so people could visit and when the undertakers brought her she had make-up on her face. This was a woman who never wore make-up. So we learnt that, unless you ask, assumptions may get made about what is wanted or right. During this process I became the mistress of ceremonies. This was a huge honour and between us we made a celebration worthy of our friend’s life and we managed it all ourselves.
I was then asked to perform this role in a range of other situations: weddings, namings and other, more unmarked but significant, stages such as menarche and menopause, the end of a relationship or accepting that having children is not going to be a possibility – moments our society does not always suggest we give weight to but which can be marked in personal ways that help us live with them positively. So I became what people call a celebrant. I am still looking for a better word. Death has visited me again in the loss of a child late in pregnancy and now through the death of both my parents. I feel I am being taught things all the time through each of these experiences.
A green alternative
My partner is an organic farmer. In 2000 I suggested we could create a green burial ground. I was very excited about being able to offer a place where people could get as hands-on as they choose. They can do everything without using an undertaker or gravedigger or have their support if they choose to. The point is there is no right way. We want to encourage choice, and the idea that the family and friends know what is best if they are just given the confidence to think that way.
We now have a small site where the trees are beginning to grow. Our shelter, with its green roof, offers a place where people can come to picnic, to hold a small service or just to have a quiet think. We have planted a living willow bower to sit in and look up to the Downs. We love to see children coming and running around – enjoying the space and freedom, picking the blackberries.
Death on the stage
In my theatre work I have also developed two pieces looking at death and dying. One was with Partners Theatre Company (part of Reach Inclusive Arts) for performers with learning or physical disabilities. We toured a piece of forum theatre into schools, entitled ‘Behind you!’. It told a story of someone dying and the ensuing exclusion of her nephew from the funeral. This was followed by lively improvisations to improve the way things had developed in our storyline. I really wanted to involve young people and the community of Partners in these conversations about death and dying because when there is a taboo in our society these groups become even more excluded from them – often out of a misplaced desire to protect them.
I then created a performance with Jackie Singer, ‘Marigolds and Ashes’, in which we tell stories, recite poems and sing songs about death and dying. In the interval we all eat together, whenever possible, and then at the end there is an optional period of silence in which the audience are invited to share experiences/thoughts/feelings in the style of a Quaker Meeting. This has proved a very moving experience with people bringing a wide range of experience and, sometimes, sharing very intimately. In my experience, given the chance, we have a lot we want to say and ask about death and dying.
Part of life
Now a festival, too – why? By the time people come to me at the burial ground it is sometimes too late to help in certain ways. Everything is urgent and acutely painful. We can bring comfort by the way we work with people but if there are tensions in the family – for example, different interpretations about what the person who has died would have wanted – it can be very painful. You cannot avoid the pain of loss but if some conversation about death takes place as part of life then many of these misunderstandings can be avoided and families and friends can be confident they are doing the right thing. But many of us avoid the subject, less so these days I think, thanks to the pioneering work of people like Elisabeth Kübler Ross and the hospice movement, Dying Matters and The Natural Death Centre.
For me, facing up to death can enable me to engage more positively with life, and I have heard this from people facing terminal illness too. It can allow us to simplify, see what really matters, repair relationships and review our life choices.
‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ as the poet Mary Oliver so wonderfully says.
In Quaker faith & practice it says Friends have the gift of silence to offer those who are dying and bereaved and although I have used a lot of words here I do feel this. I have also been very inspired by Diana Lampen’s words from 1979: ‘You don’t get over sorrow; you work your way right to the centre of it.’ I hope that we will begin to remember the value and importance of grieving without any rigid rules about what that might look like. We are all mortal and, given death is a certainty, it feels as though we miss an opportunity if we don’t engage with it creatively.
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