End of Life Coaching | Stillness Pathway Assembly

The Feast

by Silent • December 9, 2023

I've dined at Ereshkigal's table on more than one occasion.

Her hospitality is what you might expect of the Kur. The bounty is… large. It's… quiet. Everything is silent in the Queen's hall.

One dines at a long table with the other residents—endless meals in silence. No one looks up—the feast is cups of dust and platters of clay. There is the occasional offering of kispum, the arrival of a blessing from a loved one. The bounty is served over months or years. One doesn't know. One is just… there. Ereshkigal is seated at the head of the table and rarely speaks. The newly dead hang on hooks running the length of the throne room. They hang on walls for three days before being cut down to join the feast.

A dark Queen reigns over a silent land—little ever changes. The land is still; no birds darken the sky, and no creatures move across the land. Water does not flow in the rivers. All is still. Only the Queen and her seven judges travel across the land with purpose.

How I came to be in the land from which no traveler returns is its own story. I know that it was intentional, and it came as the result of endless grief. At the time, this one did not know whose intention it was. There were lessons to be learned and only one place to understand them.

Ereshkigal loves order and things to be… just so. However, she is not in stark contrast to her sister Inanna. She is a goddess of many moods and deep passions. When the mood strikes her, she is headstrong and moved to action. The Kur is a place of somber reflection, its mistress less so. Ereshkigal tends to her role as guardian of the land and the dead, its authority, and the dominion given to her. Nothing more. She is not a reflection of the land nor it of her. Like the inhabitants, she is just there.

When the meal is over, one wanders the land. Slowly and in silent procession. This is a place of eternal twilight that is very… still. There is no dawn, day, or sunset, a land of eternal half-light.

A single unending twilight. Nothing changes—endless stillness.

The air is a palpable thing crawling into your lungs and eyes. The dust creeps through you, staining you. The landscape is shades of red and grey. Other than that, it looks like any different countryside.

The land moves around one more than one moves across it. Months go by. The inhabitants do not speak to one another. Everyone passes in unblinking silence.

One is not sad; one is not unhappy. None mark the passage of time; one… exists. There is no "I" or sense of self. Entering the Kur strips, one of all that one is, and all one was. One has no identity, no sense of self, and limited awareness. From time to time, one finds oneself back in the throne room. There is a vague awareness of now. “Now” is a profound and grounding lesson.

How long this one dwelt in the land from which no traveler returns, one does not know. An hour is a month; a month is decades.

This one wandered the land, passing endless faces, never wondering, never recognizing, never knowing. This one was looking for a face one could not recognize or remember.

In the silence of Ereshkigal's realm, where time melded into a single, monochrome moment, one learned the depth of existence beyond the chatter of life. Every grain of dust, every slab of clay, was a time of unspoken knowledge taught by its mere being. This one was no exception to this rule of tacit education.

At some point, I began to dream. Waking dreams of sunlight and darkness. Music and a woman’s voice raised in prayer or song, I could almost see her face in the monochrome darkness. My feet slowed, and I felt the firmness of the land beneath me. I began to remember or perhaps dream of Stillness and the lessons Eris had taught me. The lessons of the Priest returned to me long before I recognized myself.

Eris taught me to embrace the Stillness in a limited fashion. I assumed that dusky land and the land had stopped moving. I found myself finding increasing resistance when trying to move.

Yet, as the endless twilight cradled my form, Eris's teachings wove through my consciousness, a tapestry threading through the veil of forgetfulness. Stillness, she whispered, was not the absence of motion but the essence of potential. Within it, within me, lay the roots of all movement, all change.

The Stillness held the keys to the all, the secret but ever-present pathways to all corners of existence. As I embraced this hush, the land ceased to shift beneath me, and the air grew dense with the weight of realization. My dreams became the bridge between the worlds, echoes of the sun's warmth and the dark's embrace.

With every step, the Priest's lessons resonated strongly, and I began to reclaim fragments of myself, piecing together the mosaic of my identity. I was not Inanna; my journey was not one of descent and ascent but of inward navigation, traversing the Stillness that connects.

The Stillness is a vast canvas, and I learned to paint my path across it, my essence leaving ripples across its tranquil surface. The Stillness was not an abyss but a foundation from which all things could rise. As I traveled south, guided by an innate compass, the world of the living blossomed into being once more.

And unlike Inanna, I did not ascend from the underworld and pass through the seven gates. I entered the Stillness. How long I wandered in the worlds between worlds, I do not know. The Stillness is vast, timeless, and endless, more far-reaching than the Kur; a boundless ocean, an unblinking sky, no sense of up or down. I forced myself to travel south. And then there was a word; “Onward.”

Once again, I found myself in a body, in the world of the living. I came to know my identity.

And there, amidst the cacophony of life, I found myself anew, with the Stillness as my eternal ally, the quiet teacher whose lessons were etched into the core of my being.

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Becoming Soil

By Silent • June 12, 2026

Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer. —Silent

We Know How to Honor the Dead. Do We Know How to Sit With the Dying?

By Silent • May 28, 2026

For the Pagan and Contemplative Community

You Are Already Grieving. No One Has Said So Yet.

By Silent • May 27, 2026

There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation. I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent