Teaching artists are humans with interpersonal relationships—friendships, families, lovers, peers, and mentors—whom they grieve. This blog post offers practical advice around philosophies and steps to process and transmute death and grief, both solo and in collaboration with others.
There are questions waiting – questions that ask us to consider the making or unmaking of life. Some of us have the choice and privilege to prepare our answers.
The night before my dad died in July 2025, I was in a Zoom discussion with artists who make work about their relationship with care, dementia, and death. A couple months later, Dante Fuoco sent an invite to “Blue Seal, Blue Sea”, a queer archival performance navigating the death of an estranged father. About a month after that, ashley sparks hosted “9 Pictures” in apartments across the U.S., a show blending facilitation, family photos and stories (from ashley and the audience) about death, grief, politics and race. It was also about a dead dad! Every audience member leaves with a “STARTER FOR YOUR DEATH FILE”.
Who do you need to talk to about your own death and dying? And how?
I’m an artist. I work with people over the age of 55. People in the care industry who deal with death and dying, and activists who witness the birth of new relationships, opportunities for reconciliation, and cultural possibilities taking shape through the labor of collective care. I’m uniquely involved with death.
Still, I want to get closer to it as a creative practice; as a certainty worth planning for.
My dad died at sixty-three. Human lives every year in my neighborhood and worldwide are being disappeared, genocided, and femicided. A life beyond so-called retirement age is not promised.
Let’s choose to encounter death–our own and others.
I want to accompany you for a little while.
Around five years ago, my dad invited me to lunch to apologize for some of the damage he acknowledged he had done. I responded with the only word I could release: “Ok”. He seethed. “Ok?” Mood shift. Face contort. Eyes wild. Mouth fixed. I almost became thirteen again, but I held myself with the care of all the people who have loved me better (read: with different attention than what he was capable of).
He expected me to forgive in that moment. He never brought it up again or took steps to enact his apology through repair or changed behavior. He was not able to hold multiple truths.
Death–individual or collective–propels us into difference. Into strangeness. Into other than. It invites us to hold many things at once: desire and time, and violence and its roots.
A whole new landscape opens as the last vestiges of our routines are broken: one that makes grief evident and peculiar. Awkward and particular. Expansive, if we allow ourselves to expand. To experience what is new.
In the midst of rapid death and disappearance, how are you tending to grief as a personal and global experience?
How are you tending to the grief the U.S. produces?
Who do you need to talk to about their death and dying?
An unexpected death happens, and it’s an invitation to reckon with the person, your relationship to them, and your experience of your life. It’s an opportunity to stop.
If you’re one of the more than 140 million people in the U.S. living at or below the poverty line, living above the line due to a partner, one health crisis away from financial ruin, or necessarily living beyond all of these systems already, you may already feel a call toward reciprocity. I think this is key to navigating death – that we don’t do it alone. That we get through it together.
What is one get-through-it-together practice you can incorporate into your week? I’m not talking about anything grand. I’m talking about the one call you can make. The one gift you can give. As subtle as a shoulder shifting.
Here’s a recent moment from my world.
Hello, a conversation game for living and dying well, was on my couch when Rita Liu, my co-conspirator in many things, arrived. Her response was “this is so hard”.
What got us unstuck was the idea of planning our funeral. A bouncy house. Ping pong tables. A new wave or Japanese city pop inspired dance party, with a hired dance instructor, and hype people. Someone teaching a new skill that we’ve been practicing. Conversation cards.
For everyone to have this privilege, we’d need a world without systems of abandonment, austerity, violence, patriarchy, dominance, punishment, and surveillance. How do we do that?
Everything is waiting for us, in the worlds we imagine with each other. I am reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin, writing in her sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness, “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” I think it is possible to build with each other, and to make freedom, without solving. As abolitionist organizers say, we need one million experiments.
If our future in the U.S. can not depend on employment or the promise of social safety nets, sharing is a survival value. So too are local relationships. Let’s take cues from two organizers that are guiding lights for me and many. The late Grace Lee Boggs said “How can you understand change when you’re always on the move? The most radical thing I ever did was stay put.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her 2008 text, Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning, shared that freedom is “not only what people do but also how all of us think about ourselves and our time and place”. Stay put. Create ecosystems of care – in person or online. Linger in the questions.
Become a disciple of change.
What are your practice grounds for exercising mutuality? Maybe it’s a group of friends, a drop-in space held by someone you respect, or the media you consume? To be clear, the road to mutuality isn’t peachy like a Fresh Prince episode. It can be as messy as that long fight scene between Rod and Frank in John Carpenter’s film They Live.
Summer 2025.
I’m teaching a short online course called “Stories Toward a Beloved Community” with The Creative Center at University Settlement. They develop supportive programs with caregivers, survivors, healthcare staff, and people living with cancer and chronic illnesses. The group is beautiful, giving. One woman echoes to the group that though she doesn’t know anyone intimately, she wants to be their friend.
My work experiences are often like this. Precious and ineffable. We’re doing something radically different with each other in a group setting; I help to instigate these often creative, emotionally developmental experiences. I’m always impacted by what unfolds.
Humanitarian clown Patch Adams, MD, has a famously stunning line: “Clowning is a trick to bring love close”.
In the work I do, we are a group of people bringing love close by diving into unanswerable – perhaps impossible – questions. Or, as Superhero Clubhouse describes it, “paradoxes that become harder to answer the more they are explored”. The intimacy of being close to death. The complications of authoring experiences we may not have full consent to share. The joy and hardship of recreating one’s life. The dangers of working to expose contested truths.
Whether I’m working with a group of people in a healthcare context, facilitating meetings with community groups trying to make space for stories targeted by policies of erasure, or leading a strategic planning session, I’m making gentle invitations to do life (to perform!) differently. If only once. If only now.
What does all of this have to do with teaching artistry?
Maybe everything.
Teaching artists are chameleons. We’re artists, yes, and we work to shape our practices to serve wide-ranging communities. To maintain our livelihoods and, hopefully, for as long as we do it, because socially-oriented work is a calling.
Teaching artists have a role to play in this death-and-life-navigation thing. The feedback Sara Zatz and I received from the 100 or so nursing students we worked with last summer is that it was the first time they laughed together.
We need environments like that. We need you. We need your laughter.
My dad loved to dance. He’d flip his feet, shift, and twirl, with the swirl of disco and eclectic rock. Village People, Abba, Kool & the Gang, the Bee Gees, and Queen…a cultural movement that found its way into his Italian, Polish, and Lithuanian-American shoes.
Freddie Mercury cuts in:
I want to break free from your lies
You’re so self-satisfied
I don’t need you
I’ve got to break free
God knows, God knows I want to break free
In the 2010’s, right around the time I started dancing in 80’s underground clubs, where Queen, Fields of the Nephilim, the Cure, and Depeche Mode transported us, I largely stopped talking to my dad. In the last years of our life together, I referred to him by his first name.
God knows
My father contributed to the abuse I grew up in.
God knows I want to break free.
I am trying to see grief as a friend. To seek the opposite of momentum. To practice something prefigurative – to imagine beforehand. Maybe that’s how we can get closer to death: as an imaginative affair.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
And you. And you.
And us.
Additional Resources for Collective Grief and Relief:
- The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige
- Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
- “Keep Going Song” by The Bengsons
