Mike Stolte of Nelson says we don’t talk about death enough, but when we do it opens up communication in a profound way.
He cites a recent conversation with a casual acquaintance who said his grandfather had just died.
“But you probably don’t want to hear about that,” the man said.
Stolte said yes, he did want to hear about it.
“We ended up having this great connected conversation where we shared a lot,” Stolte says, “and you don’t get that often enough, where you are sharing something meaningful. It allowed us to connect in a way that was well beyond any conversation we could have had. I found it cuts right to the heart of who people are.”
Stolte lost his partner to cancer in 2016. Last fall, for the Kalein Centre, he organized the Liminal Learning Lab, a multi- faceted conference in Nelson about what death can teach us about life.
“What I saw then was there is a big appetite for having conversations of this type,” he says. “We had no idea when we booked (international speaker) Frank Ostaseski at the Civic Theatre if anyone would show up, but we had 240 people and people lingered for an hour afterwards. I heard people talking about it for a week afterwards.”
Now he’s organizing a new event for Kalein entitled Woken Up: A Journey of Death, Grief and a Whole Lot of Living.
It runs during the week of May 28 and features speakers, music, a film festival, and a unique walking tour.
Stolte has dubbed the three-day film festival a “deathtival.”
He says it will focus on “living life fully, including death as part of that experience.”
There will be three films each day, all of them award-winning, including Babette’s Feast, Stand By Me, My Life as a Dog, Harold and Maude, Solaris, Dying at Grace, and Departures.
On Wednesday May 30 at the Old Church Hall, Stolte will present a talk entitled Grace, Grief and Gratitude, “about my own journey through grief, around the loss of my partner Fiona.”
Also speaking will be Becky Livingston who lost her daughter to a brain tumour and then travelled around the world scattering her ashes.
Related:
• The space between living and dying (Sept. 2017)
On May 31, participants can pick up a map at Touchstones and embark on a self-guided tour focused on grief and compassion.
One of the stops on the tour will be a place in an alley where someone overdosed. There is grafitti there celebrating that person’s life. And the building that houses the library and the police is on the tour because there was once a hotel on that site that burned down. A man rushed into the building hoping he could save his sister and he ended dying in the flames.
“We ask people to go to different places in the community and look at them in a different way,” says Stolte. “We ask people to go to a place where they feel a sense of gratitude or where there is a sense of grief in the downtown area.”
The tour ends at the United Church where participants will discuss their experience.
The fourth event is a songwriting workshop on June 1 by Dave Scanlan called Transforming Grief into Song.
“You don’t need musical experience,” Stolte says. “It costs $125 but we have scholarships for people who cannot afford it, and it is a way to explore grief and express gratitude.”
Stolte wants to make us more comfortable talking about death — our own or the death of loved ones. He thinks parents should talk about their own death with their kids, in advance, “to celebrate life.”
And he thinks we need to get over our awkwardness in responding to people who are grieving.
“I found that for me, if someone had lost a loved one I would not even go up to them because I was afraid of making them cry or saying the wrong thing. But this has really allowed me to connect in a more real way with people.”
He says we can learn something from other cultures.
“This is something that is universal, this is the human condition. We are going to die, and there are other cultures that seem to integrate it more fully in to their lives and as a result I think they live a much more full life rather than from a place of fear.”
bill.metcalfe@nelsonstar.com
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