Annalouiza Armendariz (00:01.954)
Welcome back listeners. This is the Reverent Mother Annalouiza Armendariz here with End of Life Conversations. And my dear friends and I, I've decided that we are going to start talking about end-of-life conversations as it pertains to our daily lives and all the things that are dying constantly around us, be it trees and birds, end of dreams, and currently end of a lot of people's lives in our country. So

Current events, stay tuned every single week. We will be here to talk about what is happening in the death realm.

Wakil David Matthews (00:37.798)
And I am Reverend Wakil David Matthews. And we really thought this was a fun idea. And we talked to our friend and editor and asked him to join us because we always have such wonderful conversations with him. So welcome, Sam.

Sam Lee Zemke (00:51.751)
Yep. I am Sam Lee Zempke, editor for this podcast and minister and grief counselor in training. Happy to be here.

Annalouiza Armendariz (00:59.842)
That's right.

Wakil David Matthews (01:00.278)
Great, Yeah. So we're looking at, course, the current things that, the first thing that comes to all of us when we think about current events is murder. Because there's been really, really two very upsetting murders and actually many more that we don't hear as much about that we're going to mention later as well. And so we thought we would just have a conversation between the three of us, share our conversation with all of you.

and invite you to think about what you'd like to talk about in this regard. We are going to begin a paid subscriber conversation on our sub stack. So consider joining that. Going forward, we'll have chat, an ongoing chat for paid subscribers and probably a monthly gathering as well. So that's to be determined. But just to begin, I'd love to hear anybody.

Take it up. What's on your heart right now?

Annalouiza Armendariz (02:01.016)
Well, I'm going to jump into this frame because it's been really present with me, the state induced grief that we're all living through. It is a thing. People can Google it. There are papers written about state induced trauma. And this is not the first time that a community at large, a nation is moving through difficult times where the state becomes

the perpetrator of death amongst us, whether it be in dreams of living safely or dreams of not being terrorized by bullets in yourself. But I wanted to talk about this because I found a quote by C.S. Lewis and he writes, no one ever told me that grief felt like fear. And I think that right now our collectiveness has encountered such intense fear and

We don't know how to talk about it again. Like, you know, a death has happened. A lot of us are in mourning. How do we talk to each other in this time as a community at large?

Wakil David Matthews (02:59.936)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (03:09.59)
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned earlier when we were talking about this that one of the losses, one of the deaths that's going on is a loss of connection to people because people sometimes don't want to talk about this or they have different opinions about it. And sometimes it can be really hard to even open up the conversation because it feels like there's another death right there. You want to say, I feel so horrible about this. And they say, well, know, it wasn't really the fault of the police or whatever.

Annalouiza Armendariz (03:35.009)
You're right.

Wakil David Matthews (03:37.135)
And that just right away, there's a loss right there that really we need to acknowledge and acknowledge the grief. Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (03:41.519)
That's right. Yeah. So I was, I was thinking about how we, we talk about the death of a loved one in our, on our podcast. And it's been for four seasons. That's what we have talked about. And yet I want to invite people to hold this spot. Now that we always invite people to have a conversation with their loved ones or their community. This is the time.

This is one of the many times. And I recognize how difficult it is. And we were mentioning that it's like, I've noticed this even amongst my friends. Some people have a narrative that is different from my narrative of what we see in our news. And there becomes like a big bit of a, of a break in our connection, which I felt a lot of grief around that because

as I watch people be terrorized, how is it that my brothers and sisters in my community are not seeing what I'm seeing and feeling what I'm feeling? So that is something to hold space for.

Wakil David Matthews (04:52.288)
Yeah, exactly.

Sam Lee Zemke (04:54.015)
we mentioned in our conversation, the larger grief, and I think this has been ongoing for a long time, and at least, you know, I think we experienced it in 2020 as well, and the increased polarization of the grieving, the death of a shared reality. And maybe it's an illusion of a shared reality, but there's a death that we are waking up to.

Annalouiza Armendariz (05:16.044)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (05:16.106)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (05:24.387)
that we may live in a vastly different world, awareness of the world, than our neighbors and community members.

Annalouiza Armendariz (05:34.287)
That's right. As an aside for our listeners who don't know me, but I've suddenly become very interested in watching horror films. And this is not something I've never wanted to do this because I've always felt they were too scary for me. And yet a week ago I watched Midsummer, which had come out a few years ago. And it's a very powerful movie and spoiler alert, if you don't want to hear about it, you know, turn it off for a few seconds.

Wakil David Matthews (05:45.465)
Hahaha.

Wakil David Matthews (06:02.751)
You

Annalouiza Armendariz (06:03.094)
But there is a moment when the main character is watching people in a house who are going to be burned alive. And she's watching their whole community outside of it, just very quietly meditating, watching, bearing witness. They're not turning away. They're just standing there. And when the flames engulf the building and they know the people who are in there, they collectively start sobbing.

They start gnashing their teeth and tears are flowing and they're all doing it individually and collectively at once. And I thought that was the most powerful image because when we are in state induced trauma, like we are currently experiencing, we feel like as we mourn the death of Alex and Renee from just in the last few weeks, right?

It's, we can't turn around and just cry. We can't turn around and grieve and let ourselves be seen by other people. And so I, my new call to action is be okay with crying collectively, be okay to show up, be okay to all those memorials that are happening around the country and hold them, hold those peoples in their tears. Just watch them. It's so important.

Wakil David Matthews (07:26.612)
Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I just went to an event yesterday that they had a, it was an activist fair, if you will, and they had all sorts of different groups. There are a lot of immigration support groups. And so I really recommend that everybody check your neighborhood. There's a lot of this going on all over the country now, immigration support or just local mutual aid groups.

that are really gathering up to just be hyper local in connecting with each other and with helping each other and being there to support your loved ones and your family and your neighbors. Find out who in your neighborhood, if there isn't one there already, find out who in your neighborhood needs support, elderly or immigrant or whatever, and create a group yourself. it's a way to, what they were talking about yesterday was this, it's a way to really...

be supportive, get support for yourself and support others. And one of the main things that I was kind of a little surprised to hear was that one of the things these groups are now doing is offering mental health support. Not only are they offering accompaniment and legal support and different things like that, and of course the rapid response groups that are going out and doing this filming, but they're also offering mental health support. And so, Anna-Louise and...

and Sam and I have talked about, maybe there should also be as part of that grief support. And if not, that's something you all can think about and offer. it's really important, I think, as Annalisa just said, to get to collectively recognize the grief that we're going through and acknowledge it with no like sobbing together, which I, you know, I'm not. And I also think real quickly that it's a good idea.

for us to name, not just the two folks that are so in the news these days. Somebody yesterday said, that's a privilege that we know their names. And I think, yeah, the two white middle-class people, both 37 years old, I found that was really interesting too. That we, obviously it really hit hard. But it may be one of the things they said was this has been going on for decades.

Wakil David Matthews (09:45.779)
And people have been disappeared for decades and they've been murdered for decades by the the state. And so just in the last since January, we can name, I think, nine different people or something like that. I don't have that in front of me, but maybe we should just take a pause and and name the other people that we know of who have died in the custody. And of course, we, you know,

They say every time that it was natural causes or something, but we've already learned that at least one of those was killed by asphyxiation. So I think we can name them all with the thought that they've died in the hands of our government. And whether or not it was because they had a heart attack or drug addicts or whatever, they've all been lost. And it's a death for everybody.

Again, this morning that we're talking about this grief isn't just about people who have literally died, but it's also about all those people have been disappeared. Families, know, parents, children, kids, you know, friends, brothers and sisters, siblings. Yeah. That have just been disappeared and they're out of your lives. And we don't, in many cases, have no idea where they're, where they've been taken or if they're even in the country anymore. So does somebody have that list? We could just go take a pause and read through the.

Annalouiza Armendariz (10:55.342)
everybody.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:07.967)
I have that list. I can start the...

Wakil David Matthews (11:09.684)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (11:12.6)
Just read the whole list.

Wakil David Matthews (11:15.274)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:15.423)
Yeah, I'll start the six deaths that have been reported in ICE detention facilities since the start of this year. Giraldo Lunas Campos, 55 from Cuba, died January 3rd at Camp East, Montana, Texas. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, 42 from Honduras, died January 5th at the Joe Corley Processing Center in Texas.

Luis Beltran Yanez Cruz, 68 from Honduras, died January 6 after being transported from Imperial Regional Detention Center in California. Paradee La, 46 from Cambodia, died January 9, Philadelphia.

Victor Manuel Diaz, 34, 36, from Nicaragua, died January 14th, also at Camp East Montana, Texas. Ber Sanchez Dominguez, 34, from Mexico, died January 14th, Robert A. Dayton Detention Facility in Georgia.

Annalouiza Armendariz (12:45.07)
So those names may be new to so many of our listeners. And it's OK if you haven't heard those names. You've heard them today. And we acknowledge that they were somebody's family, children, dads. And it is part of this collective trauma that we're experiencing that I wanted to just remind people that

Wakil David Matthews (12:55.316)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (13:12.898)
You know, some of the ways that collective trauma can manifest in ourselves and in our community is we start with a loss of connection with each other, not understanding who knows what, who believes what, who values whom. You sometimes feel like you're starting to cut yourself off from certain people, and that is a loss. That is a small death that you have just entered into. You might feel heightened anxiety.

Even after we know the dangers that are going on in our communities, there's still a sense that you're not safe. you know, as a Latina, a woman in brown skin, I have felt that for my entire life. And the fact that, you know, white people have started coming up and saying, feels very, very real to me now. It's, know, I'm glad that you're suddenly understanding the weight of

Wakil David Matthews (14:04.022)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:10.274)
the anxiety that so many of us have had to endure for our whole lives. It'll be difficult to rebuild trust. It's really hard because right now we're also, we've lost the trust of our community politicians, our governors, our senators, our congresspeople. And to a large degree, our policemen, right? Like we don't know whose side they're.

Wakil David Matthews (14:28.467)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:39.586)
they're on and that is very, that's very scary and it's something to mourn, like not feeling safe with people who are supposed to be there for us.

Wakil David Matthews (14:47.552)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (14:51.123)
And the realization, I think, as the veil drops some, that there is a new, I think, new grief as we watch the institutions that we've been.

raised or reinforced or told to trust our entire lives, voting, know, decorum rule of law, you know, that the foundational structures are resilient in a way that we are seeing they are not. And there's a grieving of like status quo of just the fabric, the fabric of our nation, of our government.

Wakil David Matthews (15:14.484)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:14.542)
Right. Right.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:31.5)
night.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:38.935)
Yes, and that fabric is also our collective history. I know that I've been watching as signs have come down from national parks related to Indigenous peoples, Chicano communities across the country. mean, know, slavery signs have come down. That, they're killing our history.

There is a death that is occurring there when we cannot say, wait a minute, that is part of my, the lineage of my stories that have come down for us. But it's also something that is going to be deeply wounding to all of our souls. We can acknowledge it or not.

Wakil David Matthews (16:04.309)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (16:19.754)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, this whole loss of the rule of law and the fact that it no longer matters to at least a portion of our government, quote unquote, is just a huge loss. as was spoken to yesterday, so many people now are literally not

comfortable leaving their homes. so one of the things that's being done, one of the things I encourage you to look into is supporting them by bringing them food or taking them to doctor's appointments or things like that. So the accompaniment stuff. that in itself is just a huge loss and grief that we should have to be living in a world and in a country that no longer believes in our constitution, for God's sake. That doesn't matter to the...

people in charge and that they're willing to totally break those rules is, yeah, it's hard to even be in this world. then, you know, as you said, it's collapsing around us. And also there's that reality. I think the other part that's a loss and a grief for many of us white middle class folks is that, you we had this sort of illusion that's been broken and been dissolved and that we, you know, are

Annalouiza Armendariz (17:39.436)
of safety.

Sam Lee Zemke (17:39.903)
Great.

Wakil David Matthews (17:43.927)
our people of color, our friends and siblings of color have known for a long time was a real. And now for us, it's like, okay, that was never real, fuck, you know, that's not, that's a real big eye opening loss, I think.

Sam Lee Zemke (17:48.467)
Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (17:53.983)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (17:59.68)
Thank you for speaking to that, Wikile. I was just thinking about that. especially, I mean, the, who was it? Was it Canadian prime minister or something this last week spoke to that, that there was an illusion that everybody bought into for a long time of like US hegemony or, you know, Western dominance. And everybody put their sign in the window and said, yeah, we'll do this. And we know, we know the damage it's doing. We know the dark realities of it. And not everybody did.

Wakil David Matthews (18:02.44)
Heh.

Wakil David Matthews (18:10.037)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (18:30.463)
But the grief of that veil dropping and realizing the illusory nature of it and that, know, oh my God, I can feel it now. How real this is and how, know, in many ways it was a lie told to keep me in line, keep me as a white skinned individual, us as white skinned individuals comfortable and complicit in this system.

Wakil David Matthews (18:48.438)
Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (18:56.49)
Absolutely.

Annalouiza Armendariz (18:59.266)
Yeah, I'm mostly to read a Brene Brown quote because, you know, she is the goddess of resilience and, yeah, so right. You know, getting over the shame and the pieces that make us, that hinder us from fully growing into our most amazing selves. And she says, an experience of collective pain does not deliver us from grief or sadness. It is a ministry of presence.

Sam Lee Zemke (19:06.547)
Hehehehehe

Wakil David Matthews (19:06.986)
Yeah, trauma, yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (19:26.572)
These moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness and that our broken heart is connected to every heart that has known pain since the beginning of time. And so, you know, I mentioned the pieces that you might be experiencing with this grief cycle that's going on right now collectively, but there's hope. We can just think about all of these hearts that are available to bear witness, to share in the

Wakil David Matthews (19:36.136)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (19:57.975)
in the collective mourning that we're experiencing. But I wanted to say, you know, as somebody who works with a lot of folks with grief and loss, I, I acknowledge the pain, I acknowledge the sorrow. And we're here to breathe together, taking a breath every day, every moment, right? Drink some water. Focus on those close to you. Connect as much as you can to others. Don't be afraid to have the conversations.

Wakil David Matthews (20:14.314)
Yeah,

Wakil David Matthews (20:27.904)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (20:28.974)
You might find some people are very uncomfortable, this is a conversation about an end And it's okay. There's there are plenty of us who are open to having those conversations Connect with someone who sees you and can hold that space because we can't do it alone. We have to be Constantly finding each other to connect and if you can create a ritual find

Wakil David Matthews (20:46.206)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (20:53.535)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (20:55.118)
She says here, rituals provide a structure and meaning in times of chaos. If it means lighting a candle, if it means drawing a hot bath with some Epsom salts, if it means reading your favorite kids book to remind you of the sweet times that you've had, do anything over and over again to just remember and have your body not be in fight or flight constantly.

Wakil David Matthews (21:18.452)
Yeah, yeah. And I think getting into the forest or into nature in any way you can. And one of the things I really enjoy or like that I was taught a while back was when you walk into a nature spot to stop and pause at the entrance and recognize that it's a threshold, that you're stepping into this beautiful, yeah, that you're stepping into this

Annalouiza Armendariz (21:43.118)
safe route.

Wakil David Matthews (21:45.995)
beautiful collection, that's a community that can support you and that you can feel and connect to the trees, the soil, the bugs, the mycelia, be breathed by the forest and by the trees and by the nature that's around us. That's another community that you can go to for comfort.

Sam Lee Zemke (22:10.815)
And speaking of community, as the resident not quite professional death worker, I want to encourage people, as we say, like, reach out to people, do this in community, find the places in your community that might be doing grief work. And if there aren't, do it yourself. You don't have to be a professional to do it. All of these actions for processing this grief

Wakil David Matthews (22:17.683)
Hehe.

Wakil David Matthews (22:34.986)
Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (22:40.551)
If you have friends, if you have people in your community that are feeling the same kind of thing, have a potluck or go on a hike together and do these ritual things together. And you can process through that either alone or cooperatively and in a communal way, in a very ad hoc DIY punk rock way.

Wakil David Matthews (22:55.497)
Yeah, yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (23:03.781)
You

Annalouiza Armendariz (23:05.23)
Absolutely, and you that's when the mutual aid groups are really important and you could find those folks around your community I'm also going to share that years ago a healer I worked with Mentioned when you're going through really dark times rather than Internalizing and staying too still sometimes the best medicine is to go out and serve others So if you're feeling like isolated, maybe you don't have a community to connect with because perhaps your community

sees the world very differently and you're feeling very abandoned. The one thing you can do is go out and help somebody else. mean, even though there might not be frontline workers around you, there are still people who are have sick kids. There are still people who are elderly and shut in. you can give yourself to someone else's plight and that is also a form of connecting during your dark times.

Wakil David Matthews (24:01.258)
Yeah, beautiful. We actually, know a woman who one day was walking in her little town and again, sort of felt like she was isolated. She was an older woman and she didn't really have community around her, but she was walking and she saw a homeless man and she had a sandwich in her bag and she gave him the sandwich. And then she got so inspired that she started making sandwiches and going around passing them out. And she got to the point where she was making literally hundreds of sandwiches every week.

And it just became her ministry to make a bunch of sandwiches and take them out and pass them around to people who needed them. And so that just is an example, I think, of anybody anywhere can just look for. I've set that intention that my intention for the day is to be of service to somebody somewhere. And you will be guided to that service. That's been my experience.

Annalouiza Armendariz (24:32.183)
video.

Annalouiza Armendariz (24:52.43)
Right. That's right. oh, go ahead, Sam.

Sam Lee Zemke (24:56.607)
I often find also, let's see, community co-op, like food co-ops, bulletin boards have a lot of opportunities for service. Senior centers are a really great place to go and look for opportunities to be in service. And personally, sometimes I struggle with the current state of protest, but going to protest,

Annalouiza Armendariz (25:05.23)
That's

Wakil David Matthews (25:21.27)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (25:25.287)
protests, even if you're not like, I guess my struggle is like, why am I yelling at deaf ears? You know, they're not listening, they don't care. But there are often, you know, similar to the activist for the what Kiel was talking about, there are tables, there are people who are offering community support trainings, and will have resources for how to support your community in times like that.

Wakil David Matthews (25:32.822)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (25:50.804)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (25:50.831)
That's right. That's right. Well, and I serve meals and for food, bombs. And so we don't get in and yell. What we do is set up a table and we make a couple hundred burritos and we're like, even activists need to eat. so they're passing out food whenever we can. And I'm going say, you know, in your, in your times of grief, you don't have to have a thing to give away either. of yourself to

Wakil David Matthews (26:05.748)
You

Annalouiza Armendariz (26:18.582)
Strangers looking them in the eye and saying hello. Walking past a person with a really cool hat or a pin saying, hey, that looks super cool. People's eyes light up with just a human sound going towards them. My practice in the morning is seeing people who have slept on the street and just saying good morning to them. And it's not about the thing. It's about you being in service to the community in this time of

Wakil David Matthews (26:40.64)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (26:48.238)
grief and longing, because we're all longing. And there's a lot of work to do in giving. I have a friend who volunteers for animal shelters and walking their dogs. Like, if you really can't stand the state of politics, but it's still affecting you, there are lots of animals who would love to have your presence.

Wakil David Matthews (26:50.966)
Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (27:08.893)
Very good, very good. Well, we're kind of close to the time we wanted to chair. And I do want to mention that we are changing things up a bit and we will be having our next episode. Actually, we're going to air on the weekends from now on. And so if please tune in, our next episode will be just on a Luis and I were talking about the how to get these conversations started, really. And we have in that, I really hope you can join us. We'll be talking about like.

things about how you can get the conversation started, but also specific things like conversations about planning for end of life or films or books and things like that. And I think that's gonna be a really interesting episode. I hope you'll join us for that.

Sam Lee Zemke (27:55.763)
be. Give some really good practical solutions. And Wakil, you do the substack plug again here at the end?

Wakil David Matthews (28:04.926)
Yes, definitely. will be, you can find in our podcast notes a link to our sub stack page. And we have, and you can also find it just by going to sub stack and looking for end of life conversations. But we will have a, or we do have a paid version of our subscriptions. You can also just subscribe and get notices from us whenever we're doing a new episode, et cetera. But if you pay, we are going to start doing a,

conversation together, get online gathering. It might just be a conversation, it might be a book or movie conversation, and we'll have a chat group that we can start, the community can start using to start really having this kind of keep this conversation going. So really would love to have more people join us for that and we would appreciate it. it doesn't have to be expensive, but whatever you can afford will help us keep doing this work and we really appreciate that.

Annalouiza Armendariz (28:41.533)
Connection.

Annalouiza Armendariz (29:01.794)
Yes, we do. Thank you so much.

Wakil David Matthews (29:04.372)
So much gratitude to, of course, my dear friends, Sam and Ana Luisa, and to all of you. Please continue to subscribe and like and, yeah, Care for your hearts, yeah. Much love, take care. Adios.

Annalouiza Armendariz (29:15.862)
and do the good work of talking about death and dying.

Sam Lee Zemke (29:19.711)
care for your hearts.

Sam Lee Zemke (29:25.151)
Adios.

Annalouiza Armendariz (29:25.868)
Adios!