Entrevista a Sarafina Landis, Death doula
Este verano tuve la oportunidad de conocer en persona a Sarafina Landis, pasar tiempo con ella y entrevistarla. Sarafina vive en la península de Olympia en el estado de Washington. Un lugar al noroeste de Estados Unidos donde los densos bosques de coníferas se encuentran con una costa escarpada y rocosa salpicada de acantilados, bahías y fiordos que son el hogar de focas, ballenas grises y orcas.
La primera vez que vine a este lugar fue en 2018, un poco de casualidad. Viajaba a Montana para poder acompañar a mi amigo que estaba muy enfermo. Compré un vuelo barato que hacía escala en Seattle pero tenía que pasar 24 horas allí, así que sus amigas, Lex y Lindsey me acogieron durante una noche y un día.
Para llegar hasta su casa tuve que coger el ferry que va de Seattle a Port Haddock. Esa noche, mientras cenábamos verduras al horno recién cogidas de su huerto, me enseñaron en el móvil la foto de una madre orca que transportaba a su bebé muerto en el morro y que había estado dando círculos mostrando el cadáver de su hijo durante 17 días en la bahía de Seattle. Nuestra primera conversación giró en torno a la muerte, el duelo y la sabiduría de los animales no humanos.
Cuando me despedí de ellas, después de nuestro breve encuentro, sólo podía pensar en si las volvería a ver algún día. En ese momento no sabíamos todo lo que vendría después ni cómo de fuertes eran los hilos invisibles que estaban empezando a tejerse.
Cinco años más tarde, en julio de 2023 vuelvo a coger ese ferry, esta vez me quedo tres semanas en su casa, y tengo la inmensa suerte y placer de conocer a Sarafina, que vive con ellas, y trabaja en el acompañamiento al final de la vida, como death doula con especialización en la comunidad LGBTQ y activista por los funerales naturales y la ecología.
A continuación transcribo la primera parte de la entrevista grabada el sábado 22 de julio de 2023 en Irondel, Port Hadlock. Durante dos horas escuché fascinada a Sarafina cuya profunda sabiduría y conocimiento sobre la muerte viene tanto de su formación especializada como de experiencias vitales transformadoras. Conversamos sobre las particularidades del contexto estadounidense en relación a la cultura de la muerte. El movimiento de los “green burial” o funerales ecológicos, las condiciones para poder tener un entierro respetuoso con el medioambiente y las contradicciones del capitalismo verde.
Sarafina me habló también sobre la intrincada historia de las funerarias en EEUU, su nacimiento vinculado al uso del formaldehído durante la guerra civil, cuyo uso se extiende hasta nuestros días para tratar de disimular cualquier signo de decadencia en los cadáveres.
Sarafina traza una correlación entre el miedo a muerte y el proyecto colonizador blanco, y propone la otredad queer como medicina para este momento liminal en el que un sistema decae y se alumbra lo nuevo.
Clara: I have many questions, but to start, can we focus on green burials? How would you define them?
Sarafina: So there’s green burial and conservation burial, in the US at least. Green burial and natural burial are often used interchangeably. It’s not using chemicals and preservatives and harsh materials so that the burial itself is more organic and allowing for the body to decompose naturally. It typically involves avoiding preservatives, embalming fluids, non-biodegradable caskets, and concrete burial vaults. Instead, biodegradable materials are used for both the casket or shroud and the burial container. The goal is to allow the body to decompose naturally and contribute to the ecosystem without hindrance. Conservation burial is taking that a step further, and it’s actually a type of burial that lends itself to the thrival of the ecosystem. So a green burial is not using preservatives chemicals, and a conservation burial is actually the body is buried at a certain depth using mulched materials that maybe come from local fungi and are part of an ecosystem so that the burial contributes to the land and actually promotes the diversity of the forest.
Clara: Which are the regulations in the States for this kind of burial?
Sarafina: Well, there’s not a lot of regulation to be officially called a conservation burial. There’s some particular requirements, which are the amount of grave sites per square foot in a space, the depth, and the type of material used for the burial. For conservation burial, usually the mulch that’s being used is from a forest or it’s chipped material or soil that comes from the local region, so that all of the mycelium inside of it is local and can populate the grave site with the local fungi. And then there’s some requirements around tending to it, too. There has to be some oxygen, there has to be a little amount of water. The requirements for a green burial is just no chemicals. So green burial sometimes combines, there are hybrid cemeteries that you can choose if you want a regular burial or a green burial. However, a conservation burial is its own thing. For a cemetery to be conservation, there’s no hybrid. It’s just that style of.
Clara: So, if you own land is it possible to have a green burial at your property?
Sarafina: In the US it’s state by state, I tried to start a burial ground. When I first got interested in this it was with my friend Kimble, this hermit who lived in the woods with no electricity, no running water, off the grid in this kind of paradise that he created. He was in love with this place and so bonded to the spirits of the land and all the beings, so when he was terminal, we tried everything to figure out how we could bury him there. But here in Washington state, you have to have a legal cemetery to bury somebody. You can’t just bury someone in your backyard, and there are reasons for that, like runoff. If I buried somebody right there in the ground. The runoff of the burial would go into the creek. All of it is entwined with the funeral industry, because, really, if I just buried my body in this ground with no preservatives, and I buried it at a certain depth with all the things, it would actually contribute to the land, so there’s no reason not to. But the funeral homes make a lot of money off of their services.
Clara: What are the interests of funeral homes in using chemicals?
Sarafina: You probably know this, but the formaldehyde and all the chemicals came from a time of the civil war in the US, when people’s loved ones who were at the time, men who would fight in the war, they would die, and at the time, because they used horses if they had them, but otherwise, it was a very long journey to get from one place to another. The families would never see the bodies of their father, husband, whoever, who fought in the war. And these were hundreds of thousands of people dying in this ridiculously, brutal war. And so this doctor invented chemicals to use for the preservation so that they could bring home men who were fighting and died on the battlefield. They put the chemicals on them, and two weeks later, they are still preserved, and their families can see their bodies and bury them. And that was the creation of funeral homes. Because of that, people sneakily decided to capitalize off of it, and so they invented funeral home directors. It’s a very interesting history.
Clara: I’d love to hear more about this history.
Sarafina: So the funeral home industry was created during the civil war to preserve the bodies of people who died far away. And then it was capitalized upon by this industry, these people seeing it as a potential for making money. And simultaneously, people of the African diaspora who were here, who were enslaved or were part of movements for freedom, they also became funeral directors and created their own subversive movement as the rise of the funeral industry was happening. Black folks then used these cultural funeral processions as a way to transport people across state lines and basically as an underground railroad, as a method of moving enslaved people to freedom. It’s really interesting.
So there’s a history in black America of the funeral home industry, but it’s not so much as an industry, but as a freedom movement. So they would actually transport people in caskets, and they lead these processions through the streets. And when it came to death rituals, the society at the time, because death is so significant culturally, that was one thing that after African Americans were able to actually practice, because white folks didn’t want to touch the death rituals. And so that was actually a space in which they could organize not just organize socially, but also spiritually.
Clara: But were they allowed to do their own death rituals?
Sarafina: Well, it’s complex. They were, in a lot of cases, not allowed to do their rituals from their homelands but they found ways to do that because their rituals were so embedded in their language. Language is like the way they speak, the way they perceive their relationship to the land. But there was this relationship to the dead and to the ancestors that was really a major part of how people from the African diaspora in America were able to survive, because of their relationship to the dead. Because a grave site to them in their culture is like a portal to this other world, this better world. And so while they’re facing some of the most unimaginable, imaginable, brutal realities, cruel traumas, they still had this hope and they still had this connection to this better place. And they would visit these even if their burial spaces were they would find ways to mark the spaces and they had a lot of particular cultural rituals around that and it was also embedded in the songs they would sing while they would work and the forest labor they would do. And all of that was connecting them to this ancestral realm and this better place. And so it gave them hope and endurance and resilience.
And meanwhile, white America was capitalizing on death and creating the funeral home and turning it into an industry. And that was a turning point for how people related to death and decay and all of that’s happening at the same time as colonization. The colonization of this place by Europeans and Christian at the time. Christianity is very complex because there’s so many different cultural aspects, but the Christianity that was an impetus or like a major force behind colonization is very dichotomous between life and death, heaven and hell. Death is a place that is hierarchical and pretty much an extension of a feudal system that was Europe at the time. And so the Christian influence during the time of colonization and how it all played into this creation of whiteness and the creation of whiteness, ultimately, was assimilating people out of their culture and out of their relationship to land, out of their relationship to home, out of their relationship to collective belonging into this dangling of this privileged power.
And that was happening at the same time as capitalism started to become the birthright of America. And that’s when the funeral industry became possible because of a capitalist project. So all of that is about fear of death, basically. White people, as they gained this form of power and as they became more disconnected from the land and more disconnected from the spiritual and the collective, they became more afraid of death and more obsessed with youth and more obsessed with avoidance of decay and clinging to this superficial identity that’s based on power and not based on relationship. Because death is a relationship. And so yeah, it’s happening at the same time as these other movements in which enslaved people are subversively, working with their death rituals in order to survive and finding these really incredible and genius ways to use death rituals as organizing for freedom movements.
Clara: So there’s a strong historical and social background in the use of preservatives for the corpse.
Sarafina: Yeah, that’s the history of formaldehyde and the chemicals and stuff like that. So here we are today, and we use all these chemicals, and it’s complex now because I don’t judge anyone for using chemicals because there’s a lot of classism in green burial and conservation burial nowadays because historically poor people have been manipulated into participating in the project of whiteness and the project of power and privilege. They’re the ones that get picked on. So oftentimes it’s the wealthy people who are romanticizing green burial and romanticizing the green movement in general with climate change, which is bullshit because it is really beautiful, it is really important, so direly important.
Clara: Are green burials more expensive?
Sarafina Not necessarily. It depends. Ideally it’s less expensive. Some places are charging more because whether it’s an urban, it depends. A lot of times it’s not more expensive. It’s actually more expensive to buy like a fancy coffin casket. But the difference is more cultural because over time people who are more subjugated to being stepped on by the powers that be, by the wealthy, by the political system have been so indoctrinated into a way of life. But it’s not just that. It’s like what they have access to. Poor people tend to live in places where they only have access to foods with lots of chemicals, or they live by chemical plants. And so for a person of color, let’s say in America, they don’t get access to the beautiful spaces like the wealthier people, white people, they get more access to beautiful spaces. There are a lot of marginalized people and poor people who are not going to have their body sent to a green burial or conservation burial ground far away when they don’t know anyone there, and it’s all the white people buried there. Not everybody is going to want that. Some people do, but not everybody wants to be buried away from their community and their life. All that to say, it’s very complex. I say that holding the complexity. As someone who is in love with conservation burial. And there’s a lot more to it. I haven’t even talked about the indigenous people and how it’s on indigenous land and what does it mean to bury a person of settler descent on indigenous land and take up their land that now can no longer be used because there’s a gravesite.
Clara: This is because having people buried means that the land cannot be developed?
Sarafina: Yeah, once a body is buried in the ground, that piece of ground in perpetuity cannot be developed. So it is forever “protected”. So that can be an incredible way to conserve a wild place or a place with a really important ecosystem to prevent these big developers from coming in and trying to capitalize off of land. On the other hand, by putting a body in the ground, that piece of ground is no longer forever. According to our government rules, it is now illegal to use that land for anything. So recognizing that this is indigenous land, the original caretakers of this place, those people can’t use this land. Now, we’ve just made it even harder for indigenous people to have access to using the land for things by burying our people here. You know what I mean? And not only that, but it’s very contextual to place. And this comes from me spending a lot of time in burial grounds in different places. So in this state, there’s a lot of wild space, there’s a lot of old forests, and there’s a lot of effort to maintain the ecosystem and the diversity of the ecosystem. So there’s a lot of native species here. There’s a lot of self-sustaining forest here. And so by burying people here, it’s contributing to this ecosystem’s wildness in a way. On the other hand, this peninsula, this area, specifically Port Townsend, Quilcene, Port Hadlock, is so bereft of housing. It’s so in such a housing crisis, to the point where the healthcare system’s falling apart because nurses can’t afford to live here. Actually, they can afford to live here. There’s no housing. So we don’t have enough healthcare workers. We don’t have enough people that work in the mental health services. We don’t have enough people here that we need in our communities because we don’t have housing. Not only that, but there’s no access to property. And the only people who have access to property now are, like, the mega wealthy people. Oftentimes, they have second homes. They’re from the city because it’s so beautiful here. And so a burial ground here is an ethical consideration. Because if there’s some beautiful land, it’s that question of like do we conserve the land or do we give access for housing? Because once that land has become a burial ground, no one can live there.
Clara: But we could actually just bury the bodies and let the earth do their work and not keeping space for this, right? If the body disintegrates, then we don’t actually need space or we do?
Sarafina: Okay, so that is a very juicy question for many reasons. For one thing, the preciousness and sacredness of death ritual and burial space. It’s one of the few things that remains sanctimonious in our culture that has now turned everything into plastic and superficial and cheap. Everything’s been cheapened. It’s one of the few things that people take a lot of meaning and pause and space is the burial. And there’s a lot of beauty to that. But if they were sacrilegious about it, and it didn’t matter to the culture, then by now there would be all these places where there are these little burial grounds they would all be developed, all that space. There are spaces that still remain green because of burial grounds not being developed.
And there’s something really beautiful, and important about the emotional and spiritual aspect of that. People will actually go visit a cemetery, put away their phones, bring flowers, let themselves feel emotions, let themselves grieve, let themselves be vulnerable in a culture that is so technological and so fast-paced. It’s something really important about that.
Clara: What you’re saying is very interesting, and it reminds me of a very personal experience. When my grandma passed away at home, we held the wake there, and then we received her ashes. I don’t even have a dedicated space for them. There isn’t a sacred place where I can come to honor my grandma. I spreaded some of her ashes in the rice fields and I still have some of her ashes at my house, but since her passing, it has been challenging for me to find a sacred space in this material reality to honor her, but I found it inside me, everywhere I can connect with her through a meditative an conscious state. So my question is, to what extent do you think it’s important to have, as you mentioned, a burial ground, a yard, or a grave to honor our ancestors and the deceased?
Sarafina: It’s so personal. What you’re saying is also so complex. And that also begs the question about people of diaspora, people who are immigrants, people who are forced to leave their homes to put special importance on a place also is to demote people who are immigrants or who come from diaspora from connecting with the dead. Which is not, of course, there’s so much mystery. To me personally it’s like this endless journey to be curious about connecting with the other world. And I like what you said about finding those portals to the other world, to a portal to our dead, to our beloved dead. And those portals can be spaces internally, they can be spaces in the physical world, they can even be maybe a talisman, they can be an object, they can be an imaginary realm you enter into that you carve out of reality or something.
But yeah, it’s so complex because at the same time there are these ancient sacred sites around the world that to this day are so revered. Despite all of the brutal human wars and colonization, people still revere these ancient tombs and these ancient places of burial which there’s something about death, the realness of it, it’s like the one thing that we know will happen, there’s no escaping it’s.
There’s something about death that maintains its universal experience and it’s also something that as much as humans try to control it, it can never be controlled ultimately. And so there is a kind of universal experience of death that is maintained throughout history. Yeah, I know. It’s interesting to think about that people who live in really populated places and that’s something that I’m considering where I live because I live in a place with a lot of really beautiful wild space and that has its downsides. I don’t have access to a lot of things that people in cities have access to and I have to live a different way of life because of that. And also when the Land trust that I’m a part of this group working to create a conservation burial ground, we are considering the localness of it. Ultimately the dream is for there to be these spaces everywhere locally instead of spaces that take a ton of resources to create so that people can come from afar, but for there to be essentially community spaces everywhere. But because we have access to this space, people from the city don’t have that.
What do they do? What are the different ways that we can create? And maybe that’s more of a cultural shift to our relationship to the other world. Instead of relying on things like a fancy casket that we can physically touch and see and go to a gravesite and it looks the same as it did ten years ago, maybe it’s shifting a cultural awareness and relationship to the other world and to the ancestors and to death. So that the idea of burial itself is more of a spiritual concept. So no matter where you are, you have these portals too, just like people of African Diaspora did. They brought these portals with them to relate to their ancestors so they could have that connection and that hope and that resilience as they endured the life they.
Clara: In Spain as well, graveyards and death rituals were closely tied to the Catholic Church. This connection often led to people reacting by avoiding these rituals, as we hadn’t yet developed our own customs. We are on the cusp of creating new rituals that allow us to distance ourselves from the Christian traditions, as this is deeply rooted in our culture. The Catholic Church was associated with the dictatorship that held sway for many years, essentially constituting a Catholic fascism. Consequently, as a reaction, many, including my parents, rejected both fascism and Catholicism, opting for atheism, devoid of spirituality or belief in God. They embraced a very Cartesian, scientific mentality, viewing a dead body as merely a lifeless entity that didn’t warrant any special attention. However, in my generation, I sense a growing interest in spirituality, and we are actively seeking guidance to develop our own rituals and look for references.
Sarafina: The reference piece is so important and so complicated, right? Like that thing you just described is what it’s like the liminal place, it’s like the threshold place where you’re moving out of one world into another world. But those worlds are still not separate, they’re still connected. It’s like a birth canal. But you have this institution of Catholicism. And at the same time, that institution is woven into the cultural relationship to some of these symbols and these practices that are embedded in people’s way of life, which is not fascist in a lot of ways. And if you look at history, you see that there’s no unbroken thread. Like, it’s all woven together. So you have this pre Christian history where people had all these death rituals, right? And these rituals that were very animist and very connected to the land and being in relationship with the beings of the land and the ancestors and in a closeness with them. And a lot of those symbols and themes and very sacred ideas and relationships were then assimilated into Catholicism. And a lot of the themes and symbols and stuff of Catholicism were taken from that culture. So you can’t really separate all of it.
So it’s interesting to think about where’s the reference for rituals now? Because those rituals are there, but they’re just so mixed up with the oppression of the fascist institution. And so that’s what I’m really interested in, is how do we draw from our roots instead of just pull things out of thin air? Because I think what’s happening I don’t know if this I’m curious how this is happening in Spain, but in the US. In my perspective, there’s all this New Age appropriating indigenous practices, basically appropriating practices from elsewhere, coming from mostly white people, who don’t relate to having a culture. Like, they don’t relate to having their own rituals, which is devastating, I think, in the heart of it. That’s, like, such a devastating thing to not have belonging to not have belonging to a spiritual, cultural tradition drives people to do that. It’s so complex. But anyways, it can become very harmful to just pull these rituals from these other places without having a relationship with that thing. And I’m not someone who thinks you should never be inspired by other people’s rituals, because I think that’s what makes us who we are. We inspire each other. We are made of each other. Throughout all of the time, people move and travel and share. I love sharing rituals and cultures and arts and language but when power is mixed up with it, it can become very harmful. And also when it’s based upon this idea that someone has the total rejection, like you said, like going straight to atheism. To go from total rejection is almost like repeating a similar thing where it’s like, I don’t have a relationship with my own culture. Instead of being willing to sit with the nuance and complexity. And so there’s, like, a blending of the worlds. It’s like there needs to be new. Queerness, to me is that, queerness is like willingness to embody the world yet to be birthed. It’s like this newness, but it’s also this ancientness at the same time.
Clara: I’m very interested in how queerness affects your work as a doula.
Sarafina: Oh, definitely. I mean, to me, queerness is medicine of transformation and transition and thresholds because it’s doing the midwifeing of these structures of gender and sexuality, and it’s, like, midwifeing our world into a more relational world. And that’s how, for me, being a death doula, that’s what that is. It’s like a person has a whole identity centered around their life being a certain way, and when somebody dies, it completely unravels that world and that identity. Not only that, but we go through these deaths throughout our lives. So anyways, to go back to the piece about rituals, queerness is so tied up in all of this. I think we’re realizing that it’s not possible to just completely trash what we have been given by our ancestors. As much as we want to trash the terrible parts, I think we’re seeing now the consequences of that, that ultimately this world is relational and you cannot separate that relationship. And you look back throughout history and you see that these rituals, even in Catholicism, the singing, even the anointing, some of these things are actually influenced by these ancient practices, and they’ve been passed on all this time. So it’s all kind of like drawing from the roots into the new leaves of the tree.
And queerness is the medicine of doing that to me because it’s like an embodied practice of stepping into that new. It’s not just new. I’m trying to find a way to describe it because it’s like queerness is like the willingness to subject yourself to being perceived as other and less than and ugly and undesirable and vile, even these things that are very alive in our society today. It’s the willingness to be perceived that way in order to embody the change that needs to happen.
Because all of those things are actually people being terrified of death. That’s the connection I’m trying to make is that it all comes down to people being afraid of death, afraid of change, afraid of terror, of being alone. Because as a result of colonization and all these power structures, there’s this feeling that without power, you’re alone. That’s your grasp on what makes life happy is like grasping for these things like power and materialism and stuff. But really we know that’s not that’s superficial, what’s underneath that. And that’s what people are afraid of with their own mortality and this other world is that actually without their power, they’re alone. Queerness is like this willingness to live in relationship to the unknown and ultimately it’s liberatory and so connective and also very isolating, very isolating and lonely because so many people reject that in themselves and therefore reject queer people.