Editor’s Note: Cortes Currents asked Margaret Verschuur, Lead Steward of the Cortes DeathCaring Collective, for her reflections on this past year and thoughts as we enter 2023. This is an edited transcript of what she said.
By Margaret Verschuur
When you asked me about doing an interview, Roy, I hesitated. But then I thought of Jennifer Stevens, and her courage, and thought: I can do this. Jen was someone who really showed up in community, and she let the DeathCaring Collective be a part of her experience.
Of course, confidentiality is something important in everything we do in the DeathCaring Collective, but Jennifer was always very open and her daughter Darshan has been generous and eloquent in sharing her experience with her mom and has given us permission to talk about Jen as well.
Jen Stevens Journey
Jen has been part of the DeathCaring Collective and involved since we began meeting and learning a few years ago. Her vibrancy, warmth, presence, community-mindedness and sharing added a lot to our meetings.
In Jan 2022, she and Darshan gave a talk at one of our meetings. Jen shared what it was like to live with a potentially life-threatening illness. At that time she was putting a lot of energy into healing and was hopeful she’d have more time. She allowed us to be part of her journey and trusted, as did Darshen. When Jen died and up to her death, we were able to participate in the ways that she had asked us to.
It was/is sad to witness Jen, so full of life, cross over into death. She was easy to love. That we as a Collective were able to participate in that journey, even contribute – to find ways to create beauty, to be with her body and help prepare it for burial, be with her family in meaningful ways. Death is something that affects a community, especially for someone like Jen, who was so involved, and the Collective was a part of that community experience.
She died on the island, her body stayed in her cabin for three days, she was buried in the nearby cemetery. This was all done by family, supported by the DeathCaring Collective.
This was the first death we’ve participated in this fully: with someone we knew, who was part of the Collective, who planned ahead. She became our teacher, our leader, we’ve learned from her.
As I reflect on this past year I say, thank you Jen.
2022: A Year of Building Confidence
As a collective, we’ve grown in confidence and competence. We meet each non-summer month, and at each meeting we share, like a death café. We talk about our experiences with death, dying, and grief – whatever has come up for us, and we learn something about a particular topic. I know for me – and I can only share my experience, but others have expressed this as well – that by sharing and learning, we get more comfortable with death itself.
Talking about it normalizes it. As it becomes easier to talk about, I realize how death-phobic we are. It feels right to talk about something that affects us all so much. It feels right to express the loss of those we know, other losses, our sadness, our fears, confusion, thoughts. Talking about this becomes the new normal, and going back into the world where it is not talked about begins to feel strange. The education helps as well.
As I look back on the past year, having people from the community teach us has been helpful. Like Jen telling us 2022 what it is like to live with a potentially life threatening disease. We’ve had a retired hospice nurse telling us about the moment of death; a notary public about end of life planning, a beautiful presentation on Jewish practices around care of the body after death; a couple sharing their experience with the loss of their child. People pass on articles they’ve read, and I pass them on to the Collective through the email list, there is so much information out there and a lot of it is about empowering people to take death back into the family, into the community, to be more aware of choices.
And the DeathCaring Collective is about creating choices, making people aware of the ones they have – like natural burial. The DeathCaring Collective has been working with the Whaletown Community Club (WCC) and Noah Davidson, the cemetery manager, and the Southern Cortes Community Association (SCCA), and Ann, the main cemetery manager. They’ve all been wonderfully supportive. There are now natural burial sections in each of these two cemeteries. This gives people another choice. One that both stays in the community and is environmentally respectful. That is one of our goals, not to promote any one choice but to make another choice available.
With the DeathCaring Collective volunteer group, another choice has become available, because if people want to do the death-related tasks themselves – do the tasks funeral homes now do – that’s not a real choice for most people without help. In days past everyone was more familiar with taking care of their own at death, and there were people in the neighbourhood who would help, but not only have we lost the knowledge, the paperwork has also become more complicated – but I think instinctually this does feel right for some people. This isn’t what everyone would choose, and that’s okay, but with the volunteer group it has become a real choice in the community.
For the Collective there has been a lot of learning – we’ve had a lot of firsts – the first time we’ve helped with this or that – but in 2022 it wasn’t all new – we feel more competent in our own knowledge and skills. The families that we’ve helped have been very grateful, which gives us more confidence to tell people – consider this as a choice. Consider going back to an older way of being with death – in community, caring for the body, sharing, doing things yourself in ways that are personal and meaningful to you. As I look back I’d say 2022 was a year of building confidence.
Thanks to Sally Houghton, Quadra’s new notary public, we have a new website called islanddeathcare.ca. Now anyone can see information about the upcoming meetings and training sessions, and there is an extensive list of resources. There are people in the community – such as Mercedes Grant – who have written articles published in magazines. People from the community have been interviewed in podcasts and on the radio. We’ve been putting death education articles on the Tideline for almost a year and all of these are on the website.
At the end of 2022 the DeathCaring Collective had a planning meeting. We talked about the Collective – how we started, what we’ve learned along the way, and where we want to go from here. Now that we have a few years of learning behind us, we are in the process of coming up with a new vision and mission statement to guide us in the coming while. We’ve been working with the Cortes Island Foundation, who have encouraged us to become a BC Society, which Ayton Novak has just helped become a reality this past month. What this means is we can apply for grants, and we can accept donations. The DeathCaring Collective has been completely grassroots, but now we are seeing ways it could become more of a service to the community, and we’d like it to be sustainable. We are realizing that having money available for training, for coordinating the volunteers, for taking care of the vehicle expenses for the volunteers – these things could be useful for us all. We’ve had families who have said – we’d like to contribute – and collaborating with CI Foundations can simplify this process. We are also grateful to the Cortes Island Seniors Society, who have taken us under their wing.
Looking Ahead to 2023
As we look ahead to 2023, we’d like to expand and solidify the training. We’ve learned a lot by doing, but this means a few people have been learning a lot. In the coming months we’d like to take the knowledge gained and the knowledge already in the community, and create a training program specific to Cortes. We’d like to be able to offer more support to families, for a longer period of time, similar to what the Campbell River Hospice Society does in Campbell River. Cortes is technically in their area, but they don’t have the resources to train volunteers on Cortes, for Cortes, and coordinate them. If we’d like a service such as theirs on Cortes, we need to create it ourselves and, given resources, we can. We are looking at a grant application for this now.
As we look behind at 2022, we’ve solidified some learning and grown in confidence, and been embraced by the Cortes community. As we look ahead to 2023, we’d like to have more shared leadership, a clear vision for our objectives and goals in moving forward, a solid and comprehensive training program for the volunteers, more volunteers working in the community, and a person paid to support and coordinate the volunteers. Cortes is a wonderful community to be a part of. We’d like to set things up so that the DeathCaring Collective can continue to be a part of it into the future.