Genocide continues, love continues.
A book on death and dying, a hello
A brief emergence from a necessary pause. Forgive the pause, time was needed.
I’m grateful to all who are here. To all who keep showing up to this space despite its pause. Please know this project continues. In different forms. I’m thinking all the time about community deathcare and what that requires of us, especially now during a genocide. Sending the deepest of care and love to all those in this incredibly heart-breaking moment when we learn of atrocities of the worst kind in Rafah. Praying you find what you need to steady yourself in love to not look away. This moment requires deathworkers who do not look away, it is perhaps us who can show others how it is done. To not turn away from death. To insist on dignity for all in death. This is my hope and deep prayer.
- Resham
A brief re-emergence to share this work from Resham Mantri:
I made a thing. The chapbook I made, titled ‘you are capable of dying and helping your loved ones die’ is now available for pre-order through my website, which you can access here. This is my deathy love letter to you. A highly practical poetic little art book on dying. It’s now available for pre-order on my website. It’s available at 3 different price points ($25, $35, $45) right now, and all proceeds of this book will be going to my Palestinian friend Sanaa’s Gofundme and I trust people to purchase this work at price points that feel possible to them.
In making a book about dying, during a time of mass genocide as a death doula, I sit with the nuance, the complexity, the discomfort and privileges that I acknowledge for myself and those who even get the opportunity to die in hospitals that remain standing, thinking about death as a concept.
It’s this exact terrible heart-breaking global genocidal moment that pushed me to get over myself and put this work that I deeply believe in out into the world. It’s what I deeply wished I had in my hands when my own father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2019. It’s what I tell all my clients, friends, strangers anywhere if someone shows interest in death and dying. It’s my death manifesto. It’s what I wish we didn’t have to know but you really really should know.
It’s become so clear to me that there are deep connections between an activist, community-oriented end-of-life framework and many of the same activist spaces contending with other forms of oppression, colonialism and destructive capitalism we see plaguing our modern world more generally.
To me, the work of insisting on dying with dignity and the work of insisting on life with dignity are inextricably linked. Dying with dignity involves questioning, dismantling, community care, resisting capitalism’s forces at the very end of life. Many of the forces that negatively affect our individual deaths or the deaths of our loved ones, whether they be in hospital settings or elsewhere, are connected to those that create the conditions for genocide, oppression, mass murder both in the U.S. and abroad in places like Gaza, Condo, Sudan and elsewhere. These struggles for dignity are connected.
I write online mostly. And I wanted to create a physical object for people to hold, because death is an intensely physical experience. This book is not long. It is not overly wordy. It contains a lot of white space, imagery, poems, and moves through grief and humor. It can be read in one sitting. You can keep coming back to it. You can pass it along. It is intensely practical, and is a good thing to gift to someone who just told you their loved one received a terminal diagnosis. It’s an even better thing to read if you have never really thought about death and dying. It’s for my death doula community. It’s a resource to be used however makes sense.
This is also a book to takes notes in, what your doctor said, what that tree reminded you of, random memories with your loved one, your wildest desires.
All proceeds of this chapbook, minus production costs, will go towards the Gofundme of my friend Sanaa, until it is fully funded. Sanaa, her family, and Palestinians in Gaza are fighting for life right now. They are showing us what is most important in life and death.
This will be a pre-order purchase, which will both help Sanaa right now to get funds she and her family so desperately need, as well as help me with planning of production costs. All attempts will be made to get the books to you as soon as they are ready.
These are my grandmother Sunita’s hands making garlands. During the last years of her life, she did this faithfully every single day. Like a prayer. She is the one who taught me so much during her life and death. The one who keeps teaching me.
