Hospice care has become an important and meaningful transition for a loved one near death. Can we apply some of the same principles to Modernity as it now seems to be in a death process? Vanessa Andreotti, author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, invites us to contemplate how to accompany Modernity’s ways of thinking, being, and acting through to the end, when we do not know what lies beyond. This uncertainty that we face at this time is something that we can learn to embrace.
Vanessa Andreotti is offering us a new way to understand death—which changes our understanding of life. As she notes, indigenous peoples often say that you cannot have a well-lived life without a well-died death. The process of hospicing is a process of love and care in the face of the ultimate uncertainty. There is a profound, and necessary, learning that we can do as we attend to the dying of the familiar. “It is our responsibility to do that,” she said in an interview with evolve. “But often we understand responsibility as a burden, but
it is also an act of love – love as an act, not even as an emotion. It's being in the world and your life/death but grounded not in an identity that is a human construct, but in the umbilical cord that we have with the planet, with the land itself. Regardless of where we are in the world, we are still part of its metabolism.”
You are invited to join Vanessa Andreotti and Elizabeth Debold in an inquiry into how we can engage with the dying of the old. What can we learn from this process? How can we compost the dying to make way for new life? Together, we will explore questions like these. evolve Live events are a co-creation—you are part of the process through your responses and questions. They are not podcasts or “talking heads.” You are invited into meaningful dialogue both with Vanessa Andreotti and with each other in small groups.
