In Community Support of The Rowe Center
Befriending mortality can be seen as a spiritual quest, a psychological assignment, a philosophical riddle, or a culture making undertaking. In this six-part series we approach the fact of our deaths as a subject for learning.
Holly J. Pruett’s “Befriending Mortality” course, already popular in the Pacific Northwest where she has been a deathcare practitioner for two decades, is now available to the Rowe community. Dedicated to democratizing information and rebuilding our collective knowledge base around how we care for our dying and our dead, each session engages poetry, stories, big questions, and nitty gritty details. It is an opportunity – with a tender, experienced, and clear-eyed guide – to explore what a consequential and practical relationship with mortality might look like for you and your people.
Holly is a kind of a secular chaplain who for years has been braiding, at bedsides and in community spaces, practices, and principles for those of us who find ourselves culturally bereft when it comes to how we die and care for our dying and our dead. In the absence of intact multigenerational understandings, most of us are dependent on outsourcing or avoiding most of this terrain. The spiritual and consumer marketplaces offer lots of quick fixes to resolve or diminish the dilemmas of death. This course inhabits the dilemmas while providing detailed wayfinding information and worthy companions.
These six classes of 90 minutes cover a sequence of topics. Opening with an invitation to reconsider how you view mortality and closing with a framework for both individual and community planning. In between, the group will confront the reality that our bodies will eventually need to be disposed of; survey the contemporary landscape from diagnosis to death; detail what happens (or not) between death and disposition; and explore how we tend to (or not) the work of bereavement and remembrance.