Victoria Spence | Holistic Funeral Director / Counsellor / Celebrant / Mortality Doula
Dear Tina
What is death?
Death is an impossible question that takes us beyond what we can know. To the ends and beginnings of things. A mystery, to be kept for the experience of it, alone.
So whilst I can't speak of my death, I can speak about what I have experienced of the deaths of others that have graced and shaped my life.
I believe that the idea and fact of death, so definite and sure, yet unknowable and incomprehensible, may well be the organizing principle of life.
Understood as a rite of passage, death marks how we mature as individuals and as a society. It is a rite of separation, transition (liminality) and reincorporation, involving so many more bodies than the one whose final breath has been taken.
The space that is created in life, once death has come, is profound. Poignant, deeply human, sometimes achingly beautiful and so full of love and loss that it forges us anew. Individuals, cultures and civilizations owe their progress to death. It unleashes our life force and breaks our hearts, open.
Death produces the need for cohesion. The threads of a life usher themselves towards narrative completion, to story telling, meaning making and understanding for those whose lives continue.
As a speaker for the dead, it is the gaps and spaces in these stories that draw me in. What is and isn’t told, shared and articulated.
Leaning in to these openings, new possibilities, indeed, new worlds emerge, as we give form and language to what it is to have lived, now that death has come. In this way, death harvests life.
The willingness to meet mortality is to put out a hand to that which takes so much and to receive what it is that death may give us.
What is death? It is a way of knowing we are here and that this too shall pass.
—Victoria Spence (2015)
Editor's note: Victoria Spence is the founder and Director of Life Rites—a team of independent funeral directors, end of life doulas, counsellors and celebrants based in Sydney. Alongside her work in Rites of Passage, she was one of the team that created Picnic Among Friends, a decade long, yearly community memorial event that invited people to bring their own creativity to how they live with love and loss. She co-created the Sydney Festival of Death and Dying (2015-24) with Dr Peter Banki, and the Winter Solstice Dusk Ceremonies at the Elephant House at Rookwood Cemetery.
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