About the experience of grief and the inevitability of death, from Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw:
Be extravagant and protracted and real in your grief. Don’t worry about doing it wrong. Labor over the preparation, exhaust yourself, show up. Make something by hand. Read stories to the beloved, allow yourself to go numb to it all. Fall asleep, get up, rinse and repeat. But don’t let a chance like this go by. This is a time outside of time, and extraordinary things can happen. The Other Place is much closer than you think. Dress better, as your old ones may be watching. Get a few gray hairs and don’t think about plucking them out. Derailment is mandatory, but not to be forced. Make sure people see the body if they possibly can. Don’t expect anything to be the same, even when folks stop dropping off pasta dishes at the door. You have entered a new, deepened world now. It has something to say to you.
I’ve always wanted a lot chucked in the ground with me when it’s time. Wagons, gold, great fanfare. We are ceremony people, we are story people, we are poetic people. Like a little bird we slip through the doors and get dragged into love affairs and peculiar ambitions and moments of charity, and suddenly we die, and we are back out into some kind of next adventure, as souls scattered into luminous fragments apart from our body, but without those dreadful knees and high blood pressure. I remember these things, turn them like my prayer rope, in the sour hours of my doubt.
That is writing.