EOLC dispatch - Walking Through Grief: The Buddhist Monk's Peace Walk Changing How We Talk About Death and Dying Artwork

End of Life Conversations: Normalizing Talk About Death, Dying, and Grief

Death touches us all, and yet our culture rarely makes space to talk about it openly. Why is it so hard to have honest conversations about death, dying, and loss with the people we love? What do we do with grief when it inevitably arrives?

End of Life Conversations is a podcast dedicated to normalizing these essential conversations. Hosts Reverent Mother Annalouiza Armendariz and Reverend Wakil David Matthews — both seasoned hospice chaplains and end-of-life companions — invite experts and everyday voices alike: funeral directors, death doulas, poets, researchers, grief counselors, and people who've walked right up to the edge of life and returned. Together, they explore what it means to prepare for death, sit with loss, and grieve in ways that are as individual as we are.

And weekly, we share a conversation with our friend Sam Zemke about something that is currently speaking to us.

Whether you're supporting a loved one through a terminal illness, searching for the right words to start a difficult conversation, or simply curious about what a more death-positive life might look like, this podcast meets you where you are. No question is too strange. No path looks the same.

Subscribe, reach out, and join the conversation. Because the time to talk about it is now.

endoflifeconvo@gmail.com | endoflifeconvos.substack.com

We want to thank our excellent editor, Sam Zemkee. We also acknowledge that we live and work on unceded indigenous peoples' lands. We thank them for their generations of stewardship, which continues to this day, and honor them by doing all we can to create a sustainable planet and support the flourishing of all life, both human and more-than-human.

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End of Life Conversations: Normalizing Talk About Death, Dying, and Grief

EOLC dispatch - Walking Through Grief: The Buddhist Monk's Peace Walk Changing How We Talk About Death and Dying

February 17, 2026 • Rev Annalouiza Armendariz & Rev Wakil David Matthews • Season 6 • Episode 4

0:00 | 16:32

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Grief touches all of us — but few of us know how to walk with it.
In this weekly dispatch episode, we explore how Buddhist monks who walk for peace are quietly changing our understanding of death, compassion, and collective healing.

Join us for a deeply human conversation about grief, loss, and the search for peace in a divided world.
You’ll hear how walking — something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other — can become a healing practice for individuals and entire communities.

Whether you’re a death doula, an artist, a caregiver, or simply someone learning to live with loss, this episode offers a calm and honest space to reflect on what it means to walk through grief instead of running from it.

What You’ll Learn:

Facing Grief Without Fear — how Buddhist wisdom reframes death and loss.
Walking as a Path to Healing — how the monk’s Peace Walk brings compassion into divided communities.
Finding Peace in a World That’s Hurting — practical reflections to help carry grief as part of your spiritual growth.

Why Listen / Watch:

You’re exploring grief, loss, or end-of-life work.
You’re drawn to Buddhist or mindfulness teachings.
You want to understand how spiritual practice can meet political and social suffering.
You believe death conversations can be sacred, creative, and healing.

Support the show

We very much want to hear your thoughts. Please join us on Substack for our community chat.

This podcast helps anyone dealing with loss. It can guide you with end-of-life planning and death-positive resources.

Check out our introductory episode to learn more about Annalouiza, Wakil, and our vision/mission to normalize and destigmatize conversations about death, dying, grief, and loss.

You can find us on SubStack, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and BlueSky. You are also invited to subscribe to support us financially. Anyone who supports us at any level will have access to Premium content, special online meet-ups, and one-on-one time with Annalouiza or Wakil.

And we would love your feedback and want to hear your stories. You can email us at endoflifeconvo@gmail.com.

We want to be transparent that we use AI tools to help us with titles, show notes, editing, and introductions.

...

Sam Lee Zemke (00:01.24)
Welcome to this week's edition of End of Life Conversations Current Events. I am the editor and other Sam Lee Zemke.

Wakil David Matthews (00:10.715)
I love it. The other. Yeah. And I'm Reverend Wakil David Matthews and we're really glad to have everybody back. We're going to talk about some current things going on and think about how they relate to our ongoing struggles with life, with grief and loss and death and dying and yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (00:11.467)
you

Annalouiza Armendariz (00:29.656)
Yep. And I am the Reverend Mother Ana Luisa Mendari and I invite you to pull up a chair with us and talk about what is going on currently and how that affects us in our grief cycles and our noticing of things that die around us. So I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Wakil David Matthews (00:51.675)
Yeah. So we thought we would start today. Go ahead, Sam. Did you want to do that? That's right. Go Sam, go.

Sam Lee Zemke (00:59.192)
Sure. I was volunteered for it. So I guess I'll go for it. We went through some of the things that are currently going on. And what jumped out for me was the recent Rock for Peace that the Buddhist monks from Texas, Fort Worth, Texas, recently finished.

Annalouiza Armendariz (00:59.904)
Yes.

Annalouiza Armendariz (01:23.138)
Fort Worth,

Sam Lee Zemke (01:26.886)
and how that relates to our world of grief and death and that in a both physical and non-physical sense.

Wakil David Matthews (01:43.067)
Yeah, they definitely had their suffering going on. One of the people was injured, I guess, in a car accident on the way up, and they were walking through some really cold places and probably had some people not so happy to see them too. Yeah, and I think it also speaks to this kind of feeling in all of us of this kind of lack of loss of control, know, and the grief that comes around the loss of control and not being able to.

Annalouiza Armendariz (01:49.432)
Yep, he got hit by a car.

Wakil David Matthews (02:09.997)
make peace in the world as many, many years as we've tried, as many ways we've tried, and to see these people working so hard and doing so much to just really put themselves out there. It was inspiring and at the same time for me anyway, a little bit sad just to think that we still have to do this stuff, right? And we haven't made really any progress in all of human time to speak of and actually creating peace.

Annalouiza Armendariz (02:39.756)
Yeah, and you know, it's I, I noticed it coming up through my newspapers that I read. And I remember that there have been times when there have been many walks for peace in the past. Like we've been doing, yeah, like you said, we've been doing it for a long time in our recent history. And, you know, people generally assume like it's a, it's a Buddhist thing. It's, you know, this, you know, their religious practice that calls them to do this. And

I would say they are bringing forth the awareness that something is terribly wrong and that they want to bring awareness to this. And does it work? Is it uncomfortable for people to see others taking that mantle of awareness almost? I was just struck by this.

Struck is my my word right now because that one monk that did get hit he was literally hit by a car a car went after him hit him and he lost his leg and You know they ended up trying to get a prosthetic for him and he joined them in Washington DC and I think about the loss that he encountered and Still continued to show up for us right like very much like the grief

Wakil David Matthews (03:54.821)
Well, yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (04:03.148)
that we are all holding the sadness that peace isn't available to us. I will continue in spite of everything that's happened. I am in awe of people who can do these things, right?

Wakil David Matthews (04:15.451)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (04:19.662)
And that piece of the story is particularly interesting. remember a detail where that particular monk was given the option of a long recovery process because of the damage that was done to his leg to be in rehab, to be in the long, long, potentially years long recovery process of that. And he made the choice.

Annalouiza Armendariz (04:45.528)
Converselli, yep.

Wakil David Matthews (04:47.29)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (04:49.55)
to amputate, to have that physical loss so that he could return to this pilgrimage. Chose that level of suffering and lifelong, different kind of suffering, because of how important it was to show up and give vision and presence to the awareness of suffering and grief and lack of peace that is going on that inspired that book.

Wakil David Matthews (04:51.127)
Mm, yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (05:16.793)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really inspiring, you're right. you know, again, it's to take on and to think about the his response and the ongoing response and everybody else around him, their response to seeing this accident happen or it was about purpose, I don't know what the story was, but to see that person be so badly harmed, that had to have been an effect on the entire group.

Annalouiza Armendariz (05:24.907)
Thank

Wakil David Matthews (05:47.163)
And they all must have been feeling that that fear and that, you know, are we going to be attacked as we go here? And is this worth it? I mean, it became and to some extent, I think part of my grief around it was it sort of became performative after a while because they were, you know, I don't think they intended for that to be the case. They did this, I really do believe from having read their stories, they really did this out of a sense of caring and wanting to do something.

Annalouiza Armendariz (05:48.386)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (06:17.415)
wanting to make an effort to bring peace to the world in whatever way they could and in a way that they had been taught was a good way to do it. And yet, you know, because of the way our world is social media gathered, you know, gathered it all up. And it suddenly became this kind of big performance, you know, and I wonder how they felt about that. I wonder if there was a sense of loss of control, you know, like, this wasn't really meant to be a big hoopla. And now suddenly we're rock stars, you know, you know.

Annalouiza Armendariz (06:39.96)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (06:43.586)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (06:47.276)
Well, having known Buddhists and practiced Buddhism for a while, I don't know that that actually probably entered into their brain sphere much. Like it is what it is. And it's what drew their heart drew them to this act. And

Wakil David Matthews (06:57.103)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's true.

Annalouiza Armendariz (07:07.286)
They have they know they have no control. They're not attached to any outcome. And so the outcome of becoming, you know, celebrities overnight probably doesn't faze any of them. I will. I want to tie this back to death and dying, though. And. You know, I've done the Camino de Santiago and. I met people who were doing that pilgrimage because of a loss of in their lives, you know, all kinds of losses like in you and I've talked about, you know.

Wakil David Matthews (07:12.665)
Yeah

Wakil David Matthews (07:31.098)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (07:36.077)
You can mourn the loss of a job, a friendship, a tree, a house, a loved one, right? So I did meet a lot of folks who were also on their pilgrimage. And I think about when somebody encounters a death close to their heart.

Oftentimes, I believe people want to do something like this and they don't want it to be performative, but it sometimes becomes performative. The wailing, the gnashing of teeth. You know, we've had like a history of people like shaving their eyebrows off, wearing all black. And, you know, I think they might have been told that they were doing performative actions as well. And yet it is it's it's a bomb for the soul when you can do nothing but that.

Wakil David Matthews (08:01.285)
care.

Mm-hmm.

You

Wakil David Matthews (08:22.683)
Right, really true. Yeah, really good point. Yeah, and it actually gives us something to recommend to our listeners, you know, as part of the ceremony, part of the ritual that you can consider, you know, if you're going through loss of any kind, that walking meditation is one of the really, is a really good one. and this, you know, walk, watching what they did and why they did it and how they did it, can be a good example of a way to

Annalouiza Armendariz (08:23.532)
You know?

Wakil David Matthews (08:52.431)
work through some of these things. So yeah, so they gave us a good example. I think it's worth noticing what they brought and that, you know, it is in the Buddhist world about life is suffering and this, right? Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (09:07.2)
You choose what you're going to suffer for, It's a choice.

Sam Lee Zemke (09:13.742)
Yeah, to speak sort of to what the monks reflections were about gaining so much attention and so much support, there have been some interviews and a

I remember one of them right after they arrived in DC. And the monk talked about how

It was both very heartening to see the amount of support and the amount of people that came out. And also it made him really, really sad because there were so many people who, like you're saying, didn't know what else to do or grieving what's going on in the world are and feel powerless to do anything. And so they see this action and some place to pour energy and support and

Wakil David Matthews (10:00.091)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (10:11.542)
and a way to engage and put energy behind something that they believe in, which is peace. And so it gained that momentum in that way, but to recognize the scale of the sorrow and the suffering that is going on that would call people out to that level. And the other thing relating to death that I would say about it is on a long pilgrimage,

Wakil David Matthews (10:17.519)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (10:28.812)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (10:32.766)
yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (10:33.321)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (10:42.242)
You're close to death. If it's you and the elements, they're walking across the country in the middle of winter. And there were courts of, you know, malnutrition. I think it was one of the lead monk had to take breaks or had to stop his walking because his body was physically dying. He was walking so much and you're cold. And, so

Wakil David Matthews (10:43.81)
Thank

Annalouiza Armendariz (10:47.468)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (10:48.922)
Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (11:06.511)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:12.206)
to be on the edge of life and death when on pilgrimage, I think about the people who accept that risk making pilgrimages to holy sites all over the world all the time. The amount of dead bodies on Everest or,

Wakil David Matthews (11:28.953)
Yeah.

Annalouiza Armendariz (11:29.524)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:36.51)
the reports of the pilgrimage to Mecca and how that is the last thing that a lot of people do and can be an intentional choice in that way too. I'm at the end, I'm gonna start walking this direction and I'll get as far as I get before my time comes.

Annalouiza Armendariz (11:36.673)
Right.

Annalouiza Armendariz (11:47.148)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (11:47.79)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (11:51.205)
haha

Annalouiza Armendariz (11:54.198)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (11:54.747)
Yeah, yeah, that's a really great thought too. Yeah, that acceptance that I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna accept the fact that, and it's something we try to be in state of acceptance of life and loss and death, but to be in that acceptance in a, I mean, in many indigenous cultures, when they know they're dying, they just walk away, right? And they walk out into the woods or into the desert or wherever. So that really is, it really is an amazing kind of,

overview of what we watched and how that relates to our acceptance of death and dying. Interesting way to kind of come around to that. Thank you.

Annalouiza Armendariz (12:38.72)
Yes. So I, yeah, I, I think it's just also a reminder for those of you who don't believe that death intersects with your personal life on a daily basis. It is actually very present moment to moment. And it just, it just is a moment of changing, like, you know, you you should do like the hot dog thing. It's like stare behind you and you can see the floating hot dog.

Wakil David Matthews (13:07.323)
All right.

Annalouiza Armendariz (13:08.728)
I feel like if you soften your gaze, you see death so close and you can become so comfortable when you start noticing it. I hope that if anyone out there listens to this and becomes curious about what does death look like, this will be the first step into that awareness.

Wakil David Matthews (13:31.139)
Yeah, I think, know, it's something, saying that, you know, it's true that you and I and Sam probably too, and been so exposed to this for a while, when you do have that, when you see the hot dog all the time, right? When you do have that perspective, you know, it's like, it's true. We start, we were talking at the beginning, you know, what current event is most upfront of mind and how does that relate to death and dying? And there's nothing that doesn't.

Annalouiza Armendariz (13:44.364)
The Floaty Hot Dog.

Wakil David Matthews (13:59.835)
We can always find a way, right? It always does, and probably more because of who we are and our perspective in the world. But to nurture that in ourselves and to encourage others to nurture that and to let people know that we're available, that Annalisa and I are both available as companions to talk about this as well, as something that we want to make sure we start noticing more and offering more. Soon Sam will be in that space too.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:01.41)
That's right.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:06.636)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:10.24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:23.106)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (14:29.019)
So we're all, you know, that's our work. That's our ministry. That's what we want to do is make sure people understand that we are living in this wonderful, beautiful life and death is part of it. And it's always part of it. And that's just another part of the beauty, another part of the experience.

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:42.134)
That's right. It's a continuum.

Wakil David Matthews (14:51.727)
Yeah, what else?

Annalouiza Armendariz (14:52.6)
Well, I think we should say goodbye for now. think this is a really good short little quip. You'll have to this out soon. Sorry.

Wakil David Matthews (14:58.393)
Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (15:02.779)
No, I agree. think we should, I think doing short ones is just fine. She actually mentioned that we can cut it out. She also mentioned, let me stop the recording real quick. Oh yeah, yeah, but let's say goodbye. So thank you so much for joining us today. I hope this was interesting and useful. We'd love to hear from you. We'd like to hear your ideas or if there's anything you wish we would talk about and we'd love to help in any way we can. So feel free to reach out.

Sam Lee Zemke (15:03.182)
So.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:06.764)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (15:11.426)
Really, let's let's yeah, we say goodbye first.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:11.721)
it says goodbye.

Annalouiza Armendariz (15:30.2)
That's right.

Sam Lee Zemke (15:31.062)
And if you haven't been exposed to the Buddhist monks walk for peace, it's walk for peace, US and, and they're all over social media. Highly recommend looking into those, not just for the performance and spectacle, but I've also seen many reports that it, the practices that they have offered and are archived have been a great ball for people to center.

and find quiet and space and peace within themselves during this time of immense conflict and tension.

Wakil David Matthews (16:00.539)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (16:08.987)
Yeah, yeah. There are some really good articles from people who have just been so inspired by it in different ways and have felt that sense of relief. like you said, and I don't know if somebody said just that, you know, this is something I can do. I can go stand there and watch them go by and honor them with food and love and whatever. And just sharing that community sense that we're all in this together. It's so important. It's an important thing that we can, one of the things we can do in this maelstrom to, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (16:35.47)
all the grief and suffering and sorrow together.

Annalouiza Armendariz (16:35.864)
That's right.

Wakil David Matthews (16:39.267)
Yep, exactly. It's the only way we're going to make it through.

Annalouiza Armendariz (16:40.704)
Well, that's exactly right. So soften your gaze and take a deep breath. So I'm going to offer.

Sam Lee Zemke (16:47.15)
and see the floating hot dog of death around you. Until next time, adios.

Wakil David Matthews (16:47.163)
Alright, Much love. Adios.

Annalouiza Armendariz (16:51.372)
I'm there with you, Adios.