Death and Living

the clear seeing of grief and a practice for being

Mar 26, 2025

On Friday February 14th of 2025 my half-brother John Ethan Burke, known by all who knew him well as Jeb (we are from the South on my Dad’s side), died after an illness was able to take hold via the cancer he had had for years. He died 26 years later and one week before the anniversary of our shared father’s death.

I don’t share much of my personal life on my various ‘social’ channels. As I have said in numerous ‘get to know me’ posts I don’t think the world needs more examples of white cis-hetero love nor do I feel like much in my personal life is related to the day to day of what I’m offering my clients, readers and greater community. Besides that I like to eat breakfast (and all regular meals) daily, and make time to do the things that nourish my body and soul, I don’t think you need to know who my friends are, what my apartment looks like, or the day to day of my work and domestic life. I do however, talk about things that I think relate to how I approach my work. If you’ve listened to my podcast, I often refer to my childhood challenges and trauma (not a word I use loosely) and my own evolution with my body and values.

Essentially my work is to help people better understand and care for themselves via the entry point of their bodies. A big part of learning to deeply do that care, is being able to do it when emotions are big and uncertainty and strain present and unavoidable. Otherwise you are only able to care for yourself when everything is going really well, is organized, and spirits are high. Given that hardly anyone exists in that space on a consistent basis, we can hone our ability to care for ourselves in times of strife, disorder and depression too.

I have been doing the work of deeply caring for myself for a long long time, so staying present with my emotions isn’t too scary for me. Some emotions, of course, are easier to stay present with than others, anger for instance is easy to feel, hard to really sit with, and stay present with, till its deeper wounds reveal (Anger is often surprisingly painfully vulnerable. We are never so hurting as our tantrum is loud.). Grief is not unfamiliar to me, so it’s easier for me to walk with.

Below, is my method for welcoming and staying present with the powerful sensation of grief. It can be a short or longterm strategy. Like our emotions and expressions, this way of engaging with grief is elastic and can grow to contain, or become taught, strong enough to move us through a challenging moment.

Move slowly and with intention. This means being methodical with actions and responses, activities and plans. Be like you are underwater, because you are. Allow voices, messages, calls and ideas to reach you with a large buffer of space. Consider them, respond in your own time. Let those around you know that you are slower now, and might be for an unknown amount of time. There is no expiration date on grieving.

This way of being will aid you in a very important step for being with, and moving through grief; removing unnecessary things. A lot of things become immediately unnecessary in the face of death and dying. I hope you allow yourself to realize and take action based on that. Texts with people you aren’t close to. The busywork of work. Do the work you need/it is fulfilling for you to do. Remove all work that you fiddle and toy with, which now is suddenly revealed to be an enormous waste of your time and energy. Cancel things. Feel into each new plan. Sense if it is doable rather than aspirational. We so often want to rush past the moments where we are neither here or there, but those moments are rich, don’t lose them.

We so often want to rush past the moments where we are neither here or there, but those moments are rich, don’t lose them.

The Friday he died I removed myself from screens and things that sought to pull me from the liminal space that was enveloping and emerging from me. (I am lucky that the life I have built as a business owner means I can pull away from work when I need to. I know not everyone has that flexibility.) I read poetry with my tears. Poetry is a wonderful translator for human suffering. It holds, and validates, and comforts, and you don’t even need to ‘know poetry’ or what kind of poetry you like. You can just start somewhere and I promise that the form itself will guide you. I read Charles Simic, a lot of people find Mary Oliver a gentle entry point. I read Thict Naht Hahn, who’ve I’ve discussed here before. He is a Buddhist teacher (my brother was passionate about all philosophy including and especially Buddhism) and reading his diaries as opposed to his more ‘help’ books, grounded me in his own words of longing, suffering, loss, even as he was a master teacher, to recognize he also suffered. To embrace that there is no way out of suffering.

I made chicken matzo ball soup. I walked the dogs in the sun and enjoyed their joy and the joy that is the sun and being outdoors and moving. The things that make us alive and living are so precious and become so crystal clear in grief. It is a gift to experience them freshly; cooking, eating, walking my dogs, which are all things I do every day and so these things can easily become rote and thereby missed, unexperienced.

In my brother’s honor I visited the Guggenheim and saw art because he was an artist and taught me so much seeing and creating. Art of all kinds is a very good thing to see and experience when you are in big emotions. Art contains what we can’t hold. Art translates what we can’t articulate. Someone else’s gesture makes clear what we are struggling to say.

I ate my favorite foods and walked my favorite streets of NYC because bearing witness to death means also appreciating your life and living. One is not without the other.

Every Sunday from late November to late April I do the most life-celebrating thing I can possibly do each week. I swim in the cold winter ocean with a bunch of artists and loonies who come out each week to jump in and out, or play and swim for minutes at a time. We don’t hold each other to time standards or do special breathing. We simply recognize that doing this hard and crazy-feeling thing makes us feel wild and free and alive and just better. We feel better when we do it.

The week of his death it was ridiculously windy and the waves were chaotic and high. Our stripped clothing kept trying to blow away. We were pelted by momentary hail horizontally blowing sand while we stood shivering and screaming in our bathing suits. We ran into the waves together. We laughed hysterically as they waves buffeted without regard. We scream-giggled in the freezing froth. One of us was mercilessly tossed by a wave, hair soaked, bathing suit full of sand, face popping up through the surf sputtering and laughing. We tried to pee still submerged, against all odds.

It is the most joyously silly thing that I do all week and I cherish it. I cherish the effect of this time and community on my heart and spirit.

photo by Riita Ikonen @seachanges_rockaways

I am grateful for the clear eyes that grief gives us so that joy is so much brighter and bullshit so much easier to toss aside. Grief lets us know deeply that our energy is finite and should not be wasted. Grief describes beauty that is suddenly everywhere because all source is love and love is where we are alive right now. Grief describes the love that our spirits get to return to, or get to become completely when we leave this present.

Do fun things that are strange and wonderful, not just distracting from the boredom that comes with the consistency of daily life.

Be with people. Move towards your community, however small.

Nurture your heart.

Stay with your needs and truth and stop judging their depths however little you’ve let them speak. They are so rich and you are so good.

The time you take to listen and be is your gift to yourself, every day.

Take care.