Candida Baker grew up in the English country-side – and death was a frequent caller. But in a tiny village it was not so much the loss of humans that introduced her to the transient nature of the universe but the fairly constant death of animals around her…

Death was there with the Siamese cats my mother loved so dearly – overly-efficient hunting machines, killers of voles and moles, and rats and mice and birds, often laid out in the bath for us to admire if we’d gone away for a few days. They were masters of a death stalk – silencing their bells, or even, on occasion hunting a hapless victim together. It was there when yet another of my beloved guinea-pigs went to ‘heaven’, sent there by an overly-zealous Golden Retriever, or lost forever when they escaped, or even, on occasions, when tiny babies were eaten by their own parents. It was there, most extraordinarily, when Daisy, the only Jersey cow in a herd of Friesian milkers, got old and sick and on the night she died the entire herd surrounded her, keeping a vigil for her, so that when the farmer went to see how she was, she’d peacefully left this life surrounded by her friends.

Somehow though, I was lucky, I passed my childhood and early adulthood relatively unscathed by the loss of those close to me – I had sat with my grandmother when I was eight, and held her hand only a few days before she died. She’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak, and for some reason I found it not at all scary – it seemed natural to me, and I’ve always thanked my mother for giving me the chance to say goodbye to her mother.

Writing messages for our loved ones at the Crystal Castle ceremony

Local Byron Bay laughter therapist Ally Redding grew up without her Dad, and knows only too well how deep the well of loss can be. “My dad died of leukemia when I was four. My mum was left on her own to raise me and my three older siblings,” she says. “I didn’t fathom the enormity of that until I had my own husband and children. I never talked about my dad, I don’t remember him. My school friends never knew.   I felt embarrassed when I had to tell someone my dad was dead, I don’t know why.   I never saw my mum cry. We never talked or cried together as a family. I know mum did the best she could. That’s all we can ever do.”

For Redding, her mother was the rock of the family, for me, the reverse was true. Even though my mother had not died, I had lost her to alcohol by the time I was 14, although it wasn’t until I was myself in my 30’s that she died when she fell down the stairs three weeks before I was due to visit her, and then while I was in England for her funeral, my darling grandmother, my father’s mother, who had not been well, died before I could say good-bye, and I had loved her most dearly. Emotions in our family ran high for some time.

Mentor and business consultant Sonia Friedrich, who has recently experienced a family death, warns about the heightened reaction we can experience when someone dies. “Raw emotions rise around the passage of death. Feeling the love we hold for another person or another thing that is about to terminate can be too much to bear,” she explains. “In this heightened state, often accompanied by physical and emotional exhaustion, we may react rather than respond. It can occur in a manner we never knew existed or even felt before. In heightened states of passion we become a stranger to ourselves, no matter how prepared we’ve been for the on-coming death. It’s virtually impossible to interrupt this state once it has begun and it’s only after that we wonder, “what happened?” with time to reflect on the power of the emotions that overcame us. We hope nothing was destroyed along the way – in us or in another and for this reason it behoves us all never to grasp at the words that were spoken or what anyone says in these heightened states.”

“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

For me my mother and grand-mother’s death seemed to set in motion a small tsunami of death – my step-mother was diagnosed with cancer of the spine and died shortly after my first child was born, one uncle died suddenly of a massive stroke, another uncle died, my father and my second step-mother left this world not so much at peace with it I would say, and all of this was in England – while I was here, on the other side of the world.

At the same time in my immediate life I was coping with those other smaller losses we face – the death of a family cat, the death of our darling 17-year-old dog, the death of a young dog from a tick, (and not with me, alone at the vet’s) the disappearance of an adopted cat and more. I witnessed first-hand the understanding of animals of death when a beautiful horse contracted pneumonia. The vet told us to get Fox out of the stable because if he died in there we would have to have him sawn up. He pumped him full of antibiotics but it was too late, and Fox paced our fences, touching noses with each of the other horses in turn. I swore I would stay up all night but finally had to sleep in the early hours and when I woke, on Mother’s Day, there he was on the arena, and I’ve never been able to forget that he had no one with him when he crossed over.

Now, I’m lucky, and I know it. I did not experience the physical loss of a parent when I was a child, or the death of my children, or partners, or sisters – or even as yet very close friends. I cannot begin to imagine how hard it must be to continue to exist when those who are an integral part of a daily life are suddenly no longer there.

But what I had (somewhat belatedly some might say) worked out was that all the losses I had suffered had been accumulating in me somewhere, and despite my deeply-held belief that the departed have simply slipped through the veil of illusion that separates us from the other world, I was sad, simple as that.

As Sonia Friedrich says: “We have to feel to allow the process of healing to take place. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her profound work with death and dying has taught us about our natural and powerful responses and in the process she’s really made acceptable the five stages of grief that define much of our behaviour. We really have to travel through them – the denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. There is never any need to rush your passage of grief. There is only one way to do it and that is in your own time.”

If someone mentions the idea of the Day of The Dead what immediately springs to mind (or to my mind at least) is the idea of Mexico and a huge full-on ceremony full of colour and movement, and yet somehow at the same time the name is confronting isn’t it? It’s simple and stark, and a reminder that this is our word for the end. So it was curiosity that this year I decided for the first time to go to the Natural Death Care Centre’s Day of the Dead celebrations at the Crystal Castle, mc’d by NDCC founder Zenith Virago, on whom I’d written a story the week before.

It was while I was driving there, thinking about life, death, the universe and everything, that I also experienced a revelatory moment – it occurred to me that although of course the physical loss of someone from our world is the most obvious manifestation of loss, many of us are also in far more grief than we might realise about what you might call life’s losses. The loss of several close friendships often weighs heavily on my heart, and all of accumulate these losses and disappointments through the course of our lives: the breakdown of a marriage, the loss of a job or home, or a change in finances, a miscarriage, the ill-health of a loved one, or our own, or the sudden disappearance of someone from our lives – these things (and much more) can haunt us.

Strangely – although perhaps not so strangely for those that know me –  I remember when my father died only because our most beloved Shetland Pony, Sally-the-Boy, with whom we had shared family life for ten years, died one week short of a year later, of a brain tumour which had taken him in six months from the happiest little pony on the planet to a shadow of his former self. (But even towards the end Sally lived to eat – three times our vet came to put him down, and three times Sally, who could not by then even lift his head, had managed to get himself up and feeding again.)

Ally Redding married the man she started dating at the age of 18. In 2014 they separated, and as the initiator of the separation, Redding took on the feelings of responsibility. “I felt I should,” she says. “I felt I was responsible for the whole failed marriage thing. I thought I should be seen to be doing ok. But in the end even though it’s what I wanted, we are all grieving – all five of us – and other family members too, probably. We’re riding a roller coaster, and I hate those things!”

A psychologist told Redding she had ‘complicated grief’. “My response to that was like ‘No shit Sherlock’!” she says. “I have two special needs kids, and home-school one of them. One thing that had happened with me was that I’m not used to feeling pain – I’m an emotional eater from way back, from when my Dad died, in fact – and I’m having to learn to sit with the pain.”

Which begs the question what should we do with grief? Should we ‘put it all behind us’, ‘get on with it’, ‘pull ourselves together’ – or should we dwell on it, live with it, feel it, but in doing so perhaps allow it to affect our lives too much?

Everybody has their own journey through loss as we have our own journeys through life, but I think that the presence of ritual and ceremony can is a really vital part of a healing process, or as part of an ongoing acceptance of what we learn to live with.

The choir gathering to sing at the Crystal Castle

It took me a little while, once I’d arrived at the Castle, to drop into a quiet space – it was all so beautiful, tables with clay on to make small offerings for a natural altar, pieces of beautiful paper to write messages on and hang on a message line, a surprising amount of friends to catch up with and chat to, that it wasn’t until all these pleasant distractions were over, and I was sitting by myself that I could really begin to feel why I was there. I’d come, I realised, just simply to allow myself the time to think about my parents, my family members and my animals – and also to think about those other losses, just as final in their way.

When Zenith started the ceremony, and the choir sang, I began to appreciate the true beauty of the gathering – that everyone there had experienced a loss, everyone there was gathered to bless those losses. Invited to say the names of their loved ones into the microphone, almost every single person began their litany – some of them seeming unbearable – a mother, a sister and a daughter lost to one woman. As each person announced the names of their loved ones, a we formed a circle, and as we did, a curious thing happened – a communal strength began to emerge – a silent acknowledgement that we had all, young or old, walked through this particular fire. At the end when Zenith asked us to touch the earth, and then the sky, to give a ‘whoosh’ of love for those gone from us, and the release was palpable. At its most basic level, we had been allowed to say it hurt, that death sucks when those you love are gone, and at the same time acknowledge the power of a group all holding the same intention, and for me the subtle presence of a presence greater than us.

Acknowledging loss with Zenith Virago at the Natural Death Care Centre Day of the Dead ceremony

It wasn’t masks and Mexico and giant ceremonies, but to my mind it was better than that – it was quiet time, reflection, an expression of love, and a place, finally, to take those losses, big and small, human and animal, and honour them.

You can contact Zenith Virago and the Natural Death Care Centre on: naturaldeathcarecentre

Sonia Friedrich is a mentor to business executives who wish to change their life. She has recently released “11 Steps to Healing – For Multi-Millionaires & Business Owners”. soniafriedrich

There’s an organisation called the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement. You can find them at grief.org.au.

Laughter therapist and retreat owner Ally Redding can be contacted on allyredding

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To celebrate the Day of the Dead, the living, under the extraordinary guidance of Deathwalker Zenith Virago, will be gathering at the Crystal Castle on Sunday November 9 for a community event. Candida Baker spoke to Virago about her life’s work in death.

Death, according to Zenith Virago, holds the key to life.  And she should know.

Virago has been working with death and the dying for over twenty years now and during the past few years, she has, she says, reached an ever deeper understanding of her role on the planet as a ‘Deathwalker’.

“I made a decision last year that I would give up doing commercial weddings,” she says. “I did a vision quest in the US to look at what was the most useful way for me to be in the world and what came out of it was to take my death work even deeper.”

As the founder of the Natural Death Care Centre (https://www.naturaldeathcarecentre.org/) over the years Virago has helped hundreds of people to cope with the process of their own, or a loved one’s death and dying, but it seemed to her that the time had now come to share her knowledge with other Deathwalkers – in order that an increasing number of communities could have someone trained to walk the whole journey from illness to death.

“What I’ve realised in my work is that the best use of my time with the Death Care Centre, is to put the focus on educating people about death before there’s a need for it,” she says. “My aim is that there could be a person like me in every community who is resourced to travel that whole journey from illness, to palliative care, to death and dying and ceremony. In a sense it’s the position a midwife holds for birth – someone who is there to hold the process for everybody.”

We’re talking in the beautiful garden overlooking stunning views to the coast from her home in Tyagarah, ten minutes from Byron Bay – the town that drew her like a magnet when she was travelling in her early twenties.

“I’d left my life and family in the UK, and I’d been travelling through Europe and New Zealand, and then I came to Australia,” Virago says. “I was hitching from Sydney to Cairns and a guy who had picked me up in Grafton said to me that I ought to see Byron, so we drove in there at 8.00 am and the ocean was like glass. I thought to myself that’d I’d never seen anything as beautiful.”

Virago carried on with her journey, but somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she would come to live in Byron. There was, already, an inkling of her future direction. “I’d had a pretty normal life in England,” she says, “but when I was 14 my best friend had died, and ever since that time I’d lived with this idea that you could die at any time. It wasn’t that this scared me, more that it intrigued me, and I carried it with me all the time.”

All these years later she still occasionally wonders about the path that brought her to Byron and to her work. “It’s so much a chicken and egg situation,” she says. “Was it an inevitable path, or did I make it happen? It’s the constant mystery. Then some time later I chose to have a child with a close friend to have a baby for him to raise, and he lived just out of Byron, so while I was pregnant I came to live at Wategos, and Tane was born. I did a lot of travelling during his childhood and I saw them whenever I wanted to and Tane came to see me when he wanted, but we didn’t co-parent because that wasn’t the agreement.” But death made its presence felt again when Tane’s father died when he was 13, and Virago suddenly became a full-time parent. “It was a big shift for both of us,” she says. “But I am so blessed because he’s now married and I have a beautiful daughter-in-law and five-year-old grand-daughter.”

Zenith Virago and her son Tane in 2010. Courtesy the SMH.

The pivotal moment for Virago was when she was working as a paralegal in Byron when her best friend Sylvia died suddenly of a massive brain haemorrhage. Virago was sitting with Sylvia’s body in the morgue, stroking her friend’s head, when she suddenly experienced an energy release, witnessing a column of energy leaving from the crown of her friend’s head. Determined to do Sylvia and her family justice Virago decided to use her legal skills to organise the building of a coffin, all the legal paperwork and certificates, so there could be a vigil at home and an open coffin, and to undertake the funeral herself. With the aid of a supportive funeral director she managed all it, and the experience propelled her closer towards an understanding that her life’s work was in death.

“I don’t offer the idea of the spirit living beyond the body,” she says. “With Sylvia it happened, but it’s not part of the work I do. It’s the story of my life. Life offers something to me in a really big way one time and I take it on board. I’m certainly not about putting forward any beliefs, and that’s something we teach in the training. We simply open ourselves to listening and talking, it’s as simple as that.”

But whilst that sounds simple it’s not given to everyone to be able to stand as clear and strong as Virago. For the many of us who have been touched by her work over the years, or who know her personally she comes across, with her piercing blue eyes, and obvious inner strength and calm, as someone who not only accepts but welcomes the thin veil between life and death.  For Virago the anual Day of the Dead, is a celebration of that veil. Perhaps not yet fully accepted as an Australian tradition, many cultures around the world set aside a day for honouring and remembering the dead. In Mexico, the Dia de Muertos evolved from an ancient Aztec festival celebrating the deity, Mictecacihuatl, Queen of the Underworld, the dates coinciding with the European tradition of Allhallowtide which encompasses All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

A celebration of life and death. From the Natural Death Care Centre

The Deathwalker trainings cover such subjects as preparation for dying, advocacy, caring for or being with the dying, arranging the funeral, taking care of the body, and the final ceremony. Virago sees death as a great teacher. “It teaches people so much about how they want to live,” she says. “I see incredible things, no matter at what stage people are at when they embrace the idea of death, the immanence and the reality of it, it frees something up in them to live fully, even if it’s only for their last month on earth, or if it’s for their last 50 years.”

Part of the gift her work has given her personally is an enviable lack of fear around dying. “The only thing I’m concerned about is that I don’t want to miss my death,” she says. “I think fear of death is very limiting and you have to brush away what it’s covering up. Some people are afraid of pain, or of leaving their children, or the unknown or because they won’t be in control – some are afraid of all those things. You have to get them to break it down because really all of those amount to the same as being afraid of living.”

Dying, she says is an internal and external experience. “And so is life, which people can obviously acknowledge, but it’s much more difficult around death.”

Another reason to have Deathwalkers to help support people is that some deaths are harder to come to terms with than others. “There are a lot of emotionally complicated deaths,” she says. “Children, those that end their own lives, still-born babies, when the bodies are not there because they’ve been lost at sea or buried in avalanche, or it’s been a brutal death, it’s obvious to me people who are going through these things need support. I think that once there would have been support for them, but gradually we’ve become so detached from death that the idea of being actively involved in it in some way has become strange, when it should be natural.”

“I hope my friends say we’re sad she’s gone and we miss her but wow, she certainly lived that life.”

One of the many initiatives of the Natural Death Care Centre some years ago was to get people to design their own coffins – the cheerful crazy results of which found their way into various magazines, and certainly opened a window for many of us on the very idea that we could perhaps have say in our death. It’s been a long journey for Virago building up the Centre and basically running it as a one-person job but as synchronicity would have it, once she’d decided to stop doing commercial weddings the Vasudhara Foundation, a small philanthropic foundation, approached her.

“It’s really unheard of,” she says, even now smiling at the idea of it. “Someone rings you up out of the blue and says we’d like to support you with seed funding, and from that came the idea of formalizing the Deathwalker trainings into workshops, so that we could focus on death education.”

I wonder what she might want her friends to say about her when she’s gone?

“I’m in love with the mystery of death,” she says, as if she’s talking about the most beautiful thing in the world (and perhaps she is). “When you’re in love with the mystery it’s almost impossible to be fearful. I hope that when I die my friends will say, we’re sad she’s gone and we miss her, but wow, she certainly lived that life.”

Personally I think there’s absolutely no doubt about that.

The Crystal Castle will be hosting the 9^th Natural Death Care Centre Day of the Dead event in the Shambhala Gardens. The Crystal Castle will be offering free entry from 3.30 pm for the event which will include art, memento-making, message writing, a ceremony of remembrance at 5.00pm with Zenith Virago, and a candle light procession.

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