Hi there. Happy Tuesday to you reading this. I chose a video for today’s substack message… brought to you from where I call home in November 2024 in Venice, California. It’s been great to stay here and be in my neighborhood 10 10-minute walk from the Electric Lodge Theater where I’m putting up a play I wrote, produced, and have been playing Charlie Chaplin. While it is a return to acting for me, it is the culmination of all my favorite things: writing, producing, acting, and putting teams of people together who love to make art.
Things I mention in the video… including the link to get tickets to the play!
HIGHLIGHTS:
E=mc2 | Einsteins Meet Charlie Chaplin is in its second and final workshop weekend.
Want to see the play 11/22-24? TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Want to support? Contribute HERE
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
END OF LIFE | DEATH DOULA training in Ojai, California November 15-17, 2024
My teachers and guides in end-of-life care… Birgitta Kastenbaum and Cheserae Skala have been teaching and sharing these ancient rituals of death and dying for decades. This June I completed module 1 after having multiple deaths in my life, including but not limited to my High School mentor, Acting Coach, and Mother. Since that training, the death wave (as I now know it to be called) is at 13 in my life. Rest in peace and may your memories be a blessing: Gregory, James, Betsy, Sal, Heidi, John VH, Sakina, Jane, Richard, James M, Nelia… and anyone else who I love or have loved or have been loved by who is not listed here. For more information about the services provided or to learn more about the options that are available to you when your time is up… VISIT THEM HERE
AS FOR ME… well, I had seen only a few ‘dead bodies’ in my life when I met Birgitta that fateful day back in July 2021 when my Step-Mother, Linzee was given 4 weeks to live with stage 4 cancer in multiple places in her body. Birgitta and a friend of several years, Cathy Nadell… drove 30 miles south to San Pedro to make the initial house call. They would help us walk Linzee home over the next several weeks. Birgitta still checks in with my Dad and family from time to time. Upon seeing me serve my Dad and Linzee’s Mother through the grieving and paperwork that inevitably comes with death and dying and the business of completing a person’s human existence, she suggested I attend the training. I wanted to… I just didn’t take the action.
You know those things in your life where you say to yourself “yes! I’d love to do that…” and the voice in your head quickly chimes in to give you a list or reasons why you should either do it later, not do it now, or never do it at all? Yeah… so that happened. Then came my Mother in March of 2024.
Again, Birgitta answered the call and walked me through a few phone calls on how to be with my Mom, having lost her mind/any recognition of those around her. Her wisdom, experience, and suggestions were eerily on par with the experience I would have.
The third time is a charm as they say. It was when Richard, my mentor and friend of 20+ years was diagnosed with stomach cancer and given 6 months to live in November of 2022, that Birgitta answered the call again. The family chose to work with her and she was the guide who assisted Richard in the death of his vision. It was there I would participate in anointing, shrouding, and sitting with my first dead body. Richard was there, he was just not in his body… he never was his body… it was just a vessel to hold him while he came here to do his work. And he did, leaving a lasting legacy in countless people who are living their life fully, living a life they love, and living their calling.
Sometimes, we need to hear a message multiple times to ignore the voice in our head that argues for us to stay invisible, to be small, to not take that leap. Birgitta invited me a third time and even boldly suggested this wave of death could be a sign for me to do some healing around death and dying and that there was more work to do. It was as if she was reading my journals as I had written daily on trying to make sense of the pattern of losing so many people in such a short time.
My word for the year was INITIATION.
SO IT IS.
I am a death doula now.
And will be pursuing the certification to become a licensed Funeral Director in the state of California in the coming months and into 2025.
Pay attention to the rule of threes. For powers that are far greater than your mind and the ego’s megaphone inside it, are working on your behalf to get you to do your job:
OUR JOB IN THIS LIFE IS… TO CREATE. TO CREATE WITH AND IN THIS BODY WE WERE GIVEN THAT BREATHS US, THE HEART THAT BEATS US, TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT IS A BODY OF WORK LIVING BEYOND THE TIME WHEN THIS BODY VESSEL IS DONE. AND WE WILL DIE. WHEN WE DO, OUR JOB IS DONE WITH THE LEGACY AND BODY OF WORK WE LEAVE BEHIND. THE PART OF US THAT NEVER DIES AND LIVES ON IS OUR JOB.
Thank you, Birgitta and Cheserae for your devotion to the living in service of the dying and for passing on these sacred and timeless traditions so we can honor how people want to take their last breaths and reintroduce how it was done for thousands of years before the business of death became what we now call funerals and burials.
Game on until game over… and lastly, I share with you a poem I wrote for the zine I created for my cohort fellows in arms… the witches, sisters, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and females I humbly learned and served with this past weekend.
AS for the rest of this post… Know you will die. And when you do, the living will do what they think is best for you, what you may have wanted. If you do not leave a directive or notes or instructions… your death, your remains, and the celebration of your life will be left to wonder in the hands and hearts of those who will be there.
You don’t have to have all your T’s crossed or your I’s dotted. But it helps.
You don’t need a last will and testament… but the more property, valuables, money, and assets you have… the longer that stuff sits in the Government Probate Courts and out of the hands of the people who lie in wait to inherit your possesions that you may or may not want them to have right away.
You don’t need a master document to explain the way you want your remains disposed of.
But I will tell you, the most painful deaths to be around, is with the families and friends left behind who didn’t talk about it at all and had NO PLAN WHATSOEVER.
While it may seem odd to ignore a conversation about something we will all go through one day with the people who will be forced to handle the details of this event that we call THE END OF A LIFE… Not having it does the most damage and interrupts the inevitable process of grief and mourning that wants to happen as the living go on living long after the dying has died.
You cannot spell funeral without FUN.
I look forward to putting the fun back in funerals and empowering people around death and dying… just like my Mother did as one of the pioneers of Hospice Care in the 1970s-1990s.
Talk about death with your loved ones. Because it is coming for all of us, maybe not today or tomorrow. But it will come. When it does, you will be glad you did so you can focus on the real gift of dying… to opportunity to celebrate the life of the loved one who has transitioned. After life and after all… I believe that is what they really want.
That is what I want when I die. To have people dance and sing and tell jokes.
Not to go into crippling debt, to be mired with lawyers and courts, to have to sift through my belongings to find things they need to fill out paperwork and appease the modern systems of wrapping up the life of a human who is no longer among the living.
May you live well so you can die well. See you on the other side Mom. Until then, looks like I am going into the family business after all.
Now… let’s get busy living.
See you in the theatre this weekend and many of you in the world in the new year.
With friendly thoughts and divine gratitude,
Boise Thomas
Playwrite, Death Doula, Actor, Friend, Son, Brother, and Student of the Holy Spiritual Presence of the Almighty I choose to call God/Conscious Creator/Higher Power
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