Where we ask our neighbours: What do you know? It’s that time of year when the light is short and the natural world around is in its big rest, preparing for transformation. I feel particularly appreciate to be spending this season in this strange and tumultuous time, here on this island, surrounded by the natural world and by this community. Margaret Verschuur helped bring together the Cortes Island Deathcare Initiative and has served as a death doula on Cortes and Quadra Islands. In this episode she and Emma Tius, the new contact person for the Death-Care Collective, to discuss what community death care are and what natural burial looks like on Cortes and Quadra Islands.
“Truth-filled meditations about grace in the face of mortality.” @MargaretAtwood
By Francesca Gesualdi
“Learning to Die”: In this powerful little book, two leading intellectuals illuminate the truth about where our environmental crisis is taking us. Writing from an island on Canada’s Northwest coast, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky weigh in on the death of the planet versus the death of the individual. For Zwicky, awareness and humility are the foundation of the equanimity with which Socrates faced his death: he makes a good model when facing the death of the planet, as well as facing our own mortality. Bringhurst urges readers to tune their minds to the wild. The wild has healed the world before, and it is the only thing that stands any chance of healing the world now – though it is unlikely to save Homo sapiens in the process.
In our feature radio interview this morning, Francesca is talking to Joyce Baker of Way to Go, a group of Quadrites and Cortesians who have been exploring topics related to death and dying for over three years.
Why are we so afraid of death and how do we prepare for it? For something that’s inevitable we sure do our best to avoid it. Mercedes Grant takes us on a personal journey of grief and resolution.
In this episode Annie Rosenberg tells how decades after a nearly unspeakable family tragedy, family members gain insight from what appears to be a chance encounter, later revealing itself as an auspicious message.
