Volume 19
Continue supporting the families of Wanbli Oyate Vigil, Meshay Melendez and Layla Stewart; On Giving Advice by Resham Mantri; blue collar Flo-rida covers.
ACTION ITEMS
Wanbli Vigil was last seen on 12/29/2022, reported missing 01/01/2023. Days following the first ever Missing Indigenous Persons Alert was sent out in Colorado. Our family has done everything to bring him home, from flyers, to searching, to reaching out to media. We waited anxiously for a safe return home. With a heavy heart I'm sadden to share that he was found, and passed away on 01/05/2023 at the age of 27. Just 3 days shy of his 28th birthday.
Wanbli Vigil was very kind hearted, generous person. He was always willing to help others from big to small. One thing he did do was live his life. He lived a very free spirited life. Always living in the moment. Anyone that has spent time with him knows just how goofy and funny he was. Always making jokes, always making people smile and laugh. This is what we'll miss most about him.
Due to the nature of his death and how sudden it was we are kindly asking for donations to help fund his burial and services. We greatly appreciate each and everyone of you who has helped in any way. If you are unable to donate please consider sharing his page.
Thank you,
Black Elk family
WANBLI’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING $12,247 IN AID.
SUPPORT WANBLI’S FAMILY HERE.
Meshay Melendez and her 7 year old daughter, Layla Stewart, were murdered by Meshay’s abusive ex-boyfriend. The two were missing for ten days before their bodies were found on March 22. Her ex had a history of violence and had previously broken a restraining order in an attempt to shoot Meshay. He was released on bail two days before she and Layla went missing. Meshay’s mother released a statement saying: “My babies were failed by the system.”
Meshay is remembered as as a loving mother. She and Layla were both “full of life.” Please join us in ensuring that their grieving loved ones are able to lay them to rest with the care they deserve. All funds raised will go towards funeral costs and legal fees as they seek justice for Meshay and Layla.
UPDATE: Meshay’s ex-boyfriend has been arrested on two counts of aggravated first-degree murder and one count of second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm.
MESHAY AND LAYLA’S FAMILY ARE STILL SEEKING $3,636 IN AID.
SUPPORT MESHAY AND LAYLA’S FAMILY HERE
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
On Giving Advice
by Resham Mantri
I read the recent weekend hardcopy edition of the NYTimes today because my artist residency homework called for a creation from a newspaper. I have not picked up a NYTimes paper in quite some time. I perused it, noticing what I was drawn to. The faces of people, frozen in various states of feeling. The animals. One article about the funeral home industry. One article about the behind the scenes production of my current reality show obsession, Love is Blind. And the advice column. I have always loved an advice column. The first question I read stopped me:
“My Brother Sexually Abused me. Once he’s dead, Do I tell His Children?” – this was the header of the column. Without getting into the details, the writer had been estranged from her brother, but maintained a relationship with his adult children, ranging now in their 40s and 50s. The writer wondered whether the kids would like to “know something troubling about their father once their father and I were both gone.”
The advice columnist, wrote a few things, but the jist of it was that the children were innocents, there was no easy or understandable purpose to telling them, either while the brother was alive or dead, if he was alive, he would likely discredit her, and perhaps the writer needed to process this further in therapy. One line stands out:
“You should ask yourself whether what motivates you is a yearning for justice beyond the grave, because what you’re contemplating would not deliver justice.”
Was that true? Who could know what would deliver justice for the writer? What is the shape of justice in a situation like this? Does it always come down to justice?
The question was fascinating, disturbing, and beyond my comprehension. I sat with it. I could not understand trying to answer such a question.
Yes, people will ask for advice, but should we give it?
Witnessing dying has allowed me to see how truly personal and inherently unknowable each individual person’s death journey really is. As I have understood it, our roles are not to advise, only to make enough space for people to make their own choices. Or not make their own choices. But essentially do what only they can do. The work of creating enough space for people is challenging enough. It can require helping to lift the load of the work of living so that contemplating death is possible (picking up food, reminders about appointments). Or creating actual moments of breath or silence to sit in when everything feels like it’s swirling. Creating space for others also demands a good amount of sitting with what comes up for me.
It can also entail being a sounding board for all the various advice given to the dying or caretakers of the dying. So much advice is given from doctors, nurses, hospice, family members, friends. Some of that advice is motivated by things like time, money, and general discomfort with the topic of death. Much of it is given with care and love in mind. Some advice is given because we do not know what else to do in these moments, so we talk.
The thing that struck me about the NYT question was that it seemed so specific. There was the question and what was written, but I also thought about what the advice columnist could not know. The unwritten words in the spaces in-between. Language is funny that way.
How to let things unfurl on their own time is what I’m thinking about. Patience. Time. We truly crave answers, advice, a sense of knowing, the difference between right and wrong, ethics.
When is it kinder to leave a question unanswered? To listen more than we talk? To trust that people know how to die? How do we allow for truths beyond our comprehension to exist alongside innate wisdom? To allow for all of it? When is it necessary to advise? How often is our own fear at play?
It is so hard to not tell people what I think they should do. My children train me in this all the time, and I take the lessons, hard as they are. I was raised on the highs of a certain moralistic, scientific upbringing. It had little to do with religion, or being a lawyer, or a specific sense of what education meant. It felt easier to move with clarity, perhaps even urgent, necessary.
Of course, there are moments where I have a sense that a potential decision someone is about to make may lead to some difficulty, for either the person I am working with or the people who will be impacted by their decision. Perhaps this is what the advice columnist felt towards the children in the above question. A sense or need to protect them from harm. I get it. We have experiences that we pull from and we want to help others with our sense of knowing. I think about how hard it is to sit with the sense of not knowing what is best. Either for ourselves or others. When the stakes are high, I orient myself towards making enough space for someone to consider outcomes, rather than trying to steer a person in one particular direction or another. It is long work, sitting-with work, a work of building trust.
The older I get, the stronger my intuition becomes while in another sense “knowing” becomes mushier. (I know that makes no sense, and yet here I write it.) A continual unknowing. That’s part of how I can call myself a death doula. Because I’ve unlearned enough to allow for mystery. To allow for answers I cannot yet or may never understand. Maybe those who are actively dying need people around them who can trust in a process they could never personally know.
Maybe we all need people like that. I’m actually not sure and maybe that’s okay too.
Not advice but things I found to have helped me through the past days/weeks:
There are things we can do on our own to move through our difficult feelings. Perhaps it’s best to start there. But sometimes we must speak the unspeakable things out loud accepting that things may crumble as a result. I don’t know why, but that seems to be how it has always been. Especially for those of us who are finding their voices after a long time.
OFFERINGS WE LOVE
As an offering this week, we invite you to explore the work of devynn emory - Lenape trans nurse and their public grieving altar practice : http://deadbird.land/altar
The art and public grieving practice coincided with the screening of their film, deadbird.
deadbird centers a cyclical duet between devynn and manny the mannequin in an object/abject relations reflection. devynn is an Indigenous and transgender person who has a long spiritual practice in bridging planes to the spirit world, finding a wild commonality and kinship with the medical mannequins used as the main teaching tool in nursing school. finding these mannequins as familiar in-between space, deadbird follows three characters who share their stories of near-death experiences and the afterlife, seeded in an amalgamation of patients passed, friends lost in queer community, and family taken by COVID-19.
SIMPLE PLEASURES
the real wisdom is in the body
baby gator ascends to a higher plane
Juliette de Baïracli Levi on the herbs she plants at every home