The Work of Hospicing (SSIR) (2024)

As we stand at the precipice of endings—of species, ecosystems, organizations, and systems themselves—the work of hospicing is to move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead with wisdom. To be stewards of this time, we must develop the practices and capacities to tend to these endings, not with urgency or control, but with a kind of stillness that invites the birth of new ways of being. Endings are not failures; they are part of a cycle that requires presence, reverence, and humility.

Our hyperfocus on growth and expansion has left us ill-prepared to sit with death—whether it be the death of industries or the biosphere—and this discomfort with grief prevents us from being fully alive in the present. How might we allow the crumbling of outdated structures without rushing to rebuild too quickly? How might we hold space for what is irreversibly changing, without rushing to save or fix it?

To envision a good death in this context is to reimagine how we relate to endings, not as catastrophic failures or moments to be avoided, but as natural processes that hold within them the seeds of renewal. A good death invites us to let go of the compulsion to control or extend the life of things that have outlived their purpose—be they industries, systems, or ways of being. Instead, we are asked to companion these endings with the same reverence and care that we might offer to a loved one in their final moments, knowing that the end of one cycle is the beginning of another.

In the following exchange, we discuss the practices and capacities required for hospice work.

Vanessa: We always have death, and we always have birth. I think about the roles that are needed for death and birth, especially supporting processes that are already in place. For example, there are so many organizations and institutions detached from reality that can’t articulate what they are and why they exist in a context that differs from the one in which they were created. They no longer work and now stand on ground that is shaking. The Leaning Tower of Pisa comes to mind! Many organizations and institutions face this predicament right now. If the leaning tower falls, it breaks, wastes resources, and causes harm and grief. But if it falls softly, it can become a nurse log for the ecosystem: A dead tree trunk that nurses new life as it decomposes, releasing the nutrients that once sustained it.

Stewarding and supporting organizations and institutions to fall softly is part of the work and part of the capacities we need. We are learning how to do this work.

Habiba: We are in the process of closing our organization. We have given ourselves five years to do this, so that we can fall gently, as you say, Vanessa. It’s not finished nor is it linear, and there are different views within the organization of how we do this and should we even do it. It’s messy. With that in mind, we are trying to hold onto the context we are in as humanity. Some people call it polycrisis, some call it climate breakdown, and others call it ecological collapse. It has many names. At its core, the context is about facing our separation from nature, from our beyond-human relatives, from others deemed unworthy, and from our own selves. It’s recognizing the magnitude, depth, and scale of this crisis. This means that we have no choice but to change, to transition, to let go, to face endings, and to end our organization. We are accepting that our organization was created in a different context, and we must now reshape it to tend to this context.

We need to be pulled out of personal preferences to enrich our identities. We are part of a larger metabolism and a larger temporality than our own bodies and lives.

This is not an easy place to be. Even if we all agree on the context, we are still dealing with fears, insecurities, projections, desire for control, for certainty, and for simplistic solutions. There is no blueprint for how we do this. One of our partners often reminds me of the words of Antonio Machado “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar,” which translates as “Walker, there is no road. The road is made as you walk.”

And who is the “we”? I feel the rage and grief of the “we.” People in the Global South didn’t cause this crisis. At the same time, I can’t escape my complicity. Almost everything I buy, use, and consume comes from exploitation of other people and land, predominately in the Global South.

As we turn toward closure, we are reshaping the organization. We are experimenting with embodied practice. We take inspiration from somatic practitioners Ng’ethe Maina and Staci K. Haines, who are intentional about practicing our commitments. We see the need for practice and capacities in our commitment to conscious closures, hospicing, and making good compost.

Vanessa: Thinking about capacities and practices, we need to move from narrow boundary intelligence, characterized by either/or and linear thinking, and forms of accountability that are defined in terms of single-goal optimization. Instead, we need wide-boundary intelligence that allows us to work with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

There are mindsets that need disrupting, including universalism and logocentrism. In fact, what we need is more like disinvestment than disruption. We need to disinvest from these certainties and invest in our capacities for complexity. Drawing on diffraction, a concept that was coined by the physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, we mean seeing different layers of a problem. If you diffract reality, you see that different people live in different realities, and yet all of them are present and moving all the time. This is work that requires wisdom, which is not the same as complexity. Wisdom is a commitment to the viability of the matter while retaining a sense of the mystery and movement of the whole existing beyond us. It is a different commitment, a different capacity. Wide-boundary intelligence, combined with wisdom, is the bare minimum we need to move forward with work in hospicing and deep transitions.

Habiba: I appreciate what you are saying, because cultivating our capacity to see different layers of a problem is a big part of the work. Yet many of us, including myself, don’t have the tools to do this. But we are not doing this alone. We also don’t think that some people know how to do this and others don’t. We are being intentional about creating spaces to be with each other in the inquiry of disinvesting from these certainties and dissolving separations. Currently we are finding this wisdom from some of our elders who have deep roots in social movements, embodied practice, grief tending, and land justice. Some of these elders are at the forefront of communities facing oppression, exploitation, and violence. We are creating space to (re)learn history, politics, and philosophy. The elders remind us of what they have been through and still going through. So, endings and death are a reality for them and their communities. We are trying to practice our way into the kind of wide-boundary intelligence you are talking about. We recognize the privilege of even being able to do this, while we have time and resources.

What is viable today will no longer be viable in the future, especially in the Global North. In the short pieces that follow, we see the emergence of a field of practice surrounding hospice work for organizations and institutions that confronts the uncomfortable truth that the shaky ground under us is here to stay.

Gesturing toward decolonial futures offers five ideas that are important for organizations and institutions to have in place for composting and grief processes:

1. The capacity and vocabulary to hold space for complexity. This is a space where people don’t only speak from trauma, a need to prove themselves, or a reified identity. Rather, it’s a capacity that dissolves rigid, reified identities so people can sit with contradictions and see wholeness beyond themselves.
2. Disinvest from universalizing descriptions and prescriptions, because reality is far beyond anything we can fathom. We need to sit with the heuristic nature of our narratives and see their limited, fragmentary nature. This capacity creates a form of elasticity, preventing people from becoming entrenched in an emotional state for too long.
3. Prioritizing inquiry over consensus, requiring us to be with one another and come together.
4. Building capacity to stay with difficulties and painful feelings without the usual response of overwhelm, immobilization, or a desire for rescue.
5. Finding ways to keep the work moving with compassion and accountability.

Within these processes, there is the idea of intergenerational responsibility: How to invest in a future world where our bodies won’t ever be. We need to be pulled out of personal preferences—that’s the wisdom bit—to enrich our identities. We are part of a larger metabolism and a larger temporality than our own bodies and lives.

This work is important. If we look toward the future, hospicing and composting will leave a landscape to refigure and recreate, and that’s exciting.

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Read more stories by Vanessa Andreotti & Habiba Nabatu.