Embracing bold new perspectives in preparing for a sacred death

“My departure flight is booked and paid for,” says K, who is 62 years old, “and they’ll give me a seat number soonish.” There is no clarity on his life expectancy. It could be two or six months, at most a year. His cancer has a furious metastatic rate.

“My health is being held together by gossamer threads and this is because of modern allopathic drugs, which happen to be working for me.”

K is a South African architect who was living and practising abroad in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, until recently, when he was no longer able to work. He plans to return for further treatment later this month.

But there is no reason, he says, to hide away from death, or cancer. They should be spoken about, outed on a grand scale.

He says the passage to death is an incredible adventure.

“I am faced with an illness that has spread throughout my body and it brings innumerable challenges in physical, mental and, not least, emotional realms. Yet I have developed the ability to separate the malady that my body is going through from what my consciousness is going through. This affords me the opportunity to savour and relish all the juiciness that life is. It shimmers. I’m experiencing a life now that I would never have otherwise been afforded.

“So how did this happen for me? One afternoon in Riyadh, while I was with a friend and my sister, I deteriorated very quickly into extreme emotional suffering. When they managed to resurrect me to some semblance of sanity, we unpacked the experience. A wisdom appeared.”

From what K calls that Beautiful-Brutal, Brutal-Beautiful afternoon, he says he has learnt to value people and the world with precision and importance. K says that it is because of his work with organic psychedelics, mainly Ayahuasca and San Pedro, that he has a perspective on death and believes both his body and soul are being called on to undergo the ultimate transformation.

K says the Tao Te Ching has taught him to accept an ecosystem of “real” reality as opposed to his perceived reality.

My friend K held what he calls an A-Wake, a wake for the living as opposed to the dying. He threw a party for his family and a hundred-plus friends, to honour the value they brought to his life and to say goodbye, because, as he says, there is no reason not to.

“Like why not say ‘Congratulations! You’re dying’ in the same way you say ‘Congratulations, it’s your birthday’?”

His mother was there, and his sister, who is his primary carer at this point, as well as his children and many, many friends. Fellow architects, movie people, professors, writers, doctors, poets, lovers, K’s death doula. Also known as an end-of-life doula, or soul midwife, she provides emotional and physical support around the dying process.

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To our ancestors, she says, death was no secret; they knew what dying looked like. Modern Western society seems to have forsaken the soul, leaving people to die alone without comfort or ritual.

The A-Wake crowd were mainly in their fifties and sixties; sharply dressed, fiesta-style, with hats and sunglasses. The party was held at a restaurant in Jozi which has a long association with the annual AfrikaBurn festival and its philosophy.

The day was sunny, the vibe Mediterranean. There were platters of food, ice buckets filled with wine, tequilas, flowers on the tables.

There was a leather-bound book doing the rounds. Everyone wrote a message for K in it — their love, their respects, their memory moments, their salutations. A belly dancer unveiled herself and shimmied her way in between the tables and chairs. Bubbles went around. There were Spanish dancers clicking castanets and doing fancy footwork. A bluegrass band played. The belly dancer had an asthma attack and one of the band members had an angina attack. Ambulances were called and went away empty.

People talked about K’s bravery in facing death, about how it shifted their own notions of dying. Why don’t we talk about it? Are we not missing something important about the mystery called death? It was a real soul party.

“This is a call to view death in a different light,” said K in his speech, which was read out by a dear friend. “This is not past tense. This is present tense. This is my A-Wake. A conscious point in my life, in our lives. This is not history, this is active. I am alive and at the same time I am dying”.

K is too weak to stand and talk for any length. The MC asked everyone not to hug him too tightly, to respect his space. He looked fabulous, though, and he found it invigorating to be surrounded by his tribe.

But finding the positives in the process of his body deteriorating isn’t easy. “When I slip it takes days for me to regain ground… I can’t type well any more; my short-term memory is lost before I even try recalling. My speech has returned and my ability to think in a logical stream has also returned to some degree… My knees are bearing the brunt now. Sometimes I’m completely crippled. This is apparently not referred pain, rather a distinct side effect from the lung cancer aspect…”

K brings spirituality, through presence and ritual, into the physical act of dying. In the morning, he takes Wonderment Walks, and has been able to do up to 10km a day.

“I greet and I am greeted by strangers on my morning walks. I have walking friends and street sweeper friends I see every morning. We embrace. It’s glorious. Before lunch, I swim. That’s about touch and the sensuality of water. In the evenings I have what I call the Terrapin Toddle. I spend time with terrapins that live in one of the small water features in my compound.”

K spent a weekend at the recent AfrikaBurn, which was a lesson in letting go, as people celebrated and edifices were burnt to the ground. “To be on the precipice of letting go,” says K, “I realise we constantly need to make space for the new. It’s a privilege for me to cut that path for myself.” DM