Handmade Death
Intimate Rendezvous With Mortality
What if…
death experts, despite their best intentions, keep us from what we need the most?
we have an innate wisdom how to care for the dying and celebrate the dead?
through our hands the bereaved heart can heal?
When the person who birthed you wants agency over her own death, how do you support her?
The gift she leaves you with her last breath is how to take your own.
When you have cared for her decline for years at home, how can a stranger possibly care for her body better?
So you learn to fight for the right to bury your dead on your terms.
When who you helped conceive dies in your arms, how do you keep living?
As a potter, you turn your grief into vessels to contain the grief of others.
After three years in a basement, it’s time to pry loose the lid of that
institutional urn and send your mother’s ashes down the river.
Intimately aware of the cycle of life, when a naturalist dies,
her children find a way to turn her body back into soil.
One secret you have learned is that little we do holds as much power as simply sitting with the dying.
But there are secrets still - in the work of death doulas, human composters, medical-aid-in-dying patients.
These will all be gathered into a feature-length documentary to invite others to step into their circle of death.