Nobody isn’t going there, nobody’s parents aren’t going there—and yet so many of us show up at the threshold surprised and unprepared.

Modernity seems at a loss when it comes to the dying process. Among the oldest evidence of human meaning making are artefacts to mark this passage, but today we often find ourselves without any conceptual frame that dying doesn’t break. It’s outside the event horizon.

Wolfgang Schmidt Ulm Dos Santos is a trained Death Doula. He’s done many other things - men’s fashion, startups - but it is in this work that he now finds joy. We’re old friends, and it was wonderful to hear him speak about this unexpected calling. Not entirely inappropriate in the run-up to Easter perhaps.

To see how an appreciation of mortality is at the root of both the contemplative and the poetic impulse, and maybe all true delight, here’s One Or Two Things by Mary Oliver. In the conversation, we touch briefly on Rilke’s Todeserfahrung.

1

Don’t bother me

I’ve justbeen born.

2

The butterfly’s loping flight

carries it through the country of the leaves

delicately, and well enough to get it

where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping

here and there to fuzzle the damp throats

of flowers and the black mud; up

and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly

lazy, riding motionless in the breeze of the soft stalk

of some ordinary flower

3

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things; I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice; now

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

4

which has nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof,

at the center of my mind.

5

One or two things are all you need

to travel over the blue pond, over the deep

roughage of the trees and through the stiff

flowers of lightning --- some deep

memory of pleasure, some cutting

knowledge of pain.

6

But to lift the hoof!

For that you needan idea.

7

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life. And then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.“

Don’t love your life

too much,” it said,

and vanished

into the world.”

― Mary Oliver

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