It appears that most of us are born into this world in a physically binary state as boy or girl from a sex anatomy perspective and then stuff happens on our journey to death.
Happiness, joy, sadness and upsets.
Overwhelm, underwhelm, interest, and boredom.
Sickness, malaise, OK-ness, and health.
Loss, gain, flowing, and failing.
It has often felt like a never-ending stream of this or that to me.
And yet the truth of this journey has been a much more complex bag of tricks for me. Happiness has often been a pick-and-mix of sticky jumbled-up-ness, and any unhappiness hasn’t always been absolute. The bag not entirely empty or pleasingly full. I’m not sick, but I’m not wholly healthy either. There are always glimmers of something else on the edges of awareness, even at times of acuteness in one direction or another. This does not appear to be a binary world beyond some of the physical manifestations. There are all the bits in between that make up my human experiences.
And so taking a turn on the journey away from staying safe in a job I’m good at but tired from has proved to be a complexity of turns, twists, smoothness, bumpiness, and a few long straights – much more than just this or that.
I stood in an uninviting room in 2020, which in memory has a feeling of plastic flowers, faded pink velvet, and too-bright wood, with a surprisingly freezing cold coffin touching the front of my body. In it lay my mother, also frozen, dressed in a white frilly gown up to her neck, nothing like anything she wore. Lifeless and stiff. Certainly dead.
As I spoke my words of farewell, dry-eyed, and encouraging of her soul’s leave-taking, I heard a very loud voice say “Soul-keeper” right in my inner ear. There was no mistaking it. And I had no idea what it meant.
I don’t ever play-up my tendency towards premonitions or clairaudience but it was definitely somewhere in that territory. And I sat with this curiousity…well what was it?…instruction? title? observation? Voice thing.
I had no idea what to make of it. I took it to workshops, dreamings, and shamanic journeys. I even pulled the Death card from the Archetype deck sitting on the cold wooden floor of a village hall in North Yorkshire during a beautiful soul-growing workshop, but still I didn’t twig.
At some point, my soul-companion team got a bit fed-up of waiting. They did their best, I mean they were really shouting but I can be a bit slow to catch up. So they sent me a messenger. An Ancestor turned up during a shamanic healing and, quite crossly, told me to “make a drum”. So in 2024 I went out into the woods, slept under oak and was visited by stag, and returned 2 days later to obediently make my drum from oak and stag. My woodland dreams and the drum sang to me about bridges and guiding between worlds. I saw ancients dancing alongside techies working banks of computers.
I heard endless traffic and the loudness of the woods and all its creatures playing in unison.
My drum-instructing Ancestor turned up again some months later after a dream about a bull, and she was pointedly dressed in buffalo skin get-up. After a bit of new-age Google-ing I landed on a beautiful museum archive of stories from the Lakota nation, that told me the story of White Calf Buffalo Woman and the seven sacred rites.
And here it was. The first sacred rite.
Keeping of the Soul.
A large coin dropped like a blast of cold wind up my spine.
The person who holds the ritual of seeing the dead person safely across the bridge, helping to purify and ensure the safe passage of their soul.
And here I am feeling my way into being the Soul Keeper, not just for my immediate family members, but also in a wider sense in my community, with my End of Life Doula Foundation completed I am now an End of Life Companion, and have arranged Death Cafe meetings for August and September.
The deaths of my family elders and the guidance from my ancestors and guides have brought me here gradually, step by step on a journey since my paternal aunt died in my 30s, my dad in my 40s, and my mum in my 50s. I intuitively talked to all of them at their passing, either just before or after death, encouraging them to move through to family and loved ones who were waiting. I am grateful for their teachings and their signs.
My journey to death is on-going. I’m somewhere on a path going in a directionless direction.
I’ve arrived and I’m just starting out – and I’m somewhere in the middle.
