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Medicine Stories

Reclaiming the Ancient Human Way of Death - Cari & Richard Leversee

Medicine Stories

Amber Magnolia Hill

Alternative Health, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2017

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Six days before leaving her body, Cari Leversee and her husband Richard spoke with me about their journey together unto death. Cari died the way she had lived- with curiosity and grace, exploring, learning, and teaching every day. Our conversation is both profound and beautiful, and I am honored to have been a conduit through which Cari's wisdom, in her time of dying, can reach a wider audience.

In the intro:

  • How some people become exalted beings in their time of dying

In the interview:

  • Dying out loud + creating a living funeral

  • Approaching death with wonder, & finding love in the face of terror

  • Mushrooms & microbes as honored elders / Cari's experience microdosing on psilocybin during the dying process  / Mushrooms teach us to lead with soul consciousness, show us how to die, and greatly reduce fear in terminal patients

  • Bringing together the love and life and grief and pain and agony of death is where the healing happens

  • Grief and love are not different emotions- the depth of love equals the depth of grief

  • Home funerals: ecstasy, healing, and community / Alternative options for body disposal- deep sea burial, alkaline hydrolosis (or water cremation), green burial / Casket art

  • "I want to go into my death with my arms open"

  • What it is like to watch your beloved life partner die, "I have no intention of getting over my grief."

  • How our culture gets grief wrong

  • I ask Cari if she's afraid

  • In death, you recognize the true source of self

In the Outro:

  • Cari's passing
  • We die how we lived
  • More about microdosing

Links:

Cari Leversee

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

As anyone who works around death and with the dying will tell you there are some people who in their time of dying become exalted

0:16.2

beings their presence grace and wisdom magnify extend well beyond the bounds of their bodies as their spirit starts to come loose from its physical confines,

0:29.0

and this touches everyone around them in the deepest of ways. My friend Carrie was such a person.

0:36.7

She died six days after we recorded this interview and I am beyond honored and so grateful that she and her husband Richard were willing to have this conversation with me.

0:48.0

This will touch you to your core and if any part of you is considering turning this off right now, finding something lighter to listen to,

0:56.0

I encourage you to stop, to tamp that impulse down.

1:01.0

You probably need to hear this. We all need to be having conversations like this and it will serve you, if not now at some point in the future, to have heard the words of a person on their deathbed.

1:14.0

Carrie and Richard and I met in 2013 through a shared interest in home funerals

1:21.0

and it was through meeting Carrie that I ended up, co-founding an organization here where I live in the Nevada City, Grass Valley area of Northern California, called the Full Circle Living and Dying Collective.

1:34.1

If you're interested in just knowing more about how to support people at the end of

1:39.2

their lives, more about home funerals, all sorts of things related to reclaiming the ancient human way of death.

1:46.7

I encourage you to Google that and look up this group, Full Circle Living and dying collective.

1:52.8

Carrie gave us the idea for the name.

1:55.3

And I'm no longer a part of it.

1:56.8

I stepped away a couple years ago

1:58.2

to focus on mothering and my business,

2:01.3

but the women I started it with are still out there doing it and it's

2:05.9

really amazing. So Carrie was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor in December of 2011,

2:15.0

vestibular swanoma, very large cystic mass

2:19.0

on the vestibular nerve just after it exited the brain stem, and she had surgery to remove this tumor in November of 2014.

2:28.6

So I met her and Richard and knew them and was working with them. We hosted some death cafes here in this area and

2:38.1

taught some classes on home funerals. This was all in between her diagnosis and the brain surgery.

...

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