It reminds me of the rich legacies of community care and mutual aid that have helped our communities survive across generations. This everyday preparedness is an important strength to recognize and draw on as we gear up for the bigger disasters that might affect us in the future.
Read MoreLike LGBTQ2S+ people ourselves, our grief is powerful and sacred. I dream of a world where we feel equipped to take hold of its transformative potential, directing it to more revolutionary ends. I dream of a world where we all feel supported to embrace grief’s wild unruliness and myriad expressions and where no one asks us to deny it or box it in.
Read MoreMany LGBTQ2S+ people connect with ourselves and others through pleasure, eroticism, our bodies and our senses. We bring creativity, playfulness, ritual and sacredness to these experiences, which can be spaces of healing, discovery and enjoyment. While not everyone wants or needs to bring these facets of queerness to dying or mourning, for others they’re a vital part of imagining a fitting death or the process of moving through grief.
Read MoreWe know how to advocate for ourselves and each other in the face of systemic and institutional gaps, failures, barriers and harms and are skilled at building community-led alternatives to those systems and institutions, often with limited resources. My hope is for us to become more capable of intentionally applying these skills to death and dying as a means of enacting our self-determination, resisting oppression and caring for ourselves and each other.
Read MoreAs a community, LGBTQ2S+ people are skilled at understanding and articulating who we are and what we care about, navigating systems not designed for us, maximizing pleasure while reducing harm and forming networks of care and kinship to help us survive. These are all skills and knowledge that can be applied to end-of-life planning—even if you haven’t thought about this stuff before, you’re starting from a place of strength.
Read MoreWhen we queer death, dying and mourning, they become sites of creativity, self-determination, collective care and resisting oppression, creating opportunities to challenge dominant ideas, practices and narratives that limit our ability to express who we are at every stage of our lives, including when we die.
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