Writer, grief coach, and death care worker Laura Sullivan Cassidy on asking to go slower

You were working in fashion journalism when we met in 2010, and today you work in death care. What was your creative journey and how did you get to where you are?

The year 2019 was a big shifting time for me. I had been moving out of a career that I really loved. I had worked in regional journalism and had this very sweet opportunity to be a voice and a mirror in our scene. I later had a small creative studio doing brand and content direction. But I realized I wanted something different. I said aloud that I wished the work that we [my collaborator Jessa Carter and I] were doing was more personal, that we were working with people more personally. In the same moment I said aloud, “I should get certification in personal coaching.” And a couple months later, the pandemic came along. So I had some time and space to make some changes.

A friend suggested [grief coaching] because they knew I had my own frustrations in accessing grief work when I really needed it. So I ended up studying it along with death doula training. I was also working in a traditional funeral home for about a year. During that time, I would pause and think, “What am I doing and what do I want to do more of?” I would always feel in those moments that I wanted to be with people more—as much as I could during their times of loss and grief.

When I realized that that was something I wanted to do, I reached out to Recompose. They are Seattle-based inventors and pioneers of human composting, which is a radical form of environmental death care. And I’ve now been there for three years, doing outreach as well as client care. My grief and doula work is both separate and interconnected with that full-time work.

You’ve used the term “Griefmapping.” Can you explain what you mean by that and how it became a part of your work?

The part of my journey where I was studying grief work was as frustrating as trying to access grief work when I was actively grieving. I felt like everything out there was [something like], “Here’s the formula that you use to get better from grief.” And I didn’t want to learn any of those methods.

Grief is so personal and nonlinear. So I had this period of bringing in the resources that did resonate for me and Venn-diagramming what was not about recovering or absolving, and instead about integrating and bringing grief into your life in a meaningful way. An example of that Venn diagram was author Clarissa Pinkola Estés; her word for it from her native language is descansos, which translates to this idea that when you build little roadside monuments for somebody who has died in a car crash along the highway, it’s marking this place where this loss happened. She has a whole idea around conceptualizing that and expanding it. It was clear to me that that nugget of hers was foundational to where a lot of grief work starts, but in my view, so many others muck it up from there. So I just stuck with that and went into that idea of understanding, where has your grief been?

One of the things I think is universal about grief is that it aggregates itself. When there is a fresh grief in your life, it can often go back in time, pick up all these other griefs and bring them up to the surface. And so for me, it’s like, let’s look at all of those things together and see where they take us… There is a pattern to how Griefmapping works. In my mind, it’s almost more of a game board than a method. It’s a pathway that, after several weeks of sessions and reflection, comes around to a place of creativity and creation. For example, there was a person I worked with who created a beautiful book of a story of her and her father in this very abstract, multimedia way. Another client hosted a dinner party which was something their mom was beautiful at. What does a person feel drawn to create and put back out into the world, share with others, or do for themselves, to begin to make meaning out of the grief that they’ve identified, and that they’ll be living with forever?

I find that many of your creations over the years have been legacy work. Do you think of [Griefmapping] as transition into legacy work?

I appreciate you calling that out because it’s actually right there, but I haven’t quite looked at it in that way. Even some of the collected writing and self-publishing I’ve done, I would say almost everything has been in some way related to a loss. It’s all bound up in personal narratives. How we tell our stories.

I think that’s been in the background of just about everything. Looking back at the Vignettes Marquee two-channel projection from 2016—”What feels most true,” which was about my dad, and loss—it was using his photographs, his old Kodachrome slides, found images. That was a huge time of loss culturally: the first Trump election era. I wanted to help us find our way home.

To me, your work is about being a professional collaborator. Can you speak to this?

I’ve always seen such a beautiful benefit in, [saying,] “You bring your people, I’ll bring my people, and we’ll all get exponentially energized.” Cross-pollination is one of my favorite images of what you can do when you work with others. Across so many different situations, I’ve seen how well that works and what cool things could happen when we bring people together in a room. And it’s just in me to be social; what matters so much to me is connecting with other people in meaningful ways and bouncing ideas off of each other, creating together. I always took the idea of DIY as, “Let’s all do it by ourselves, together.”

You’ve spoken about the physicality of the experience of illness. I would like to know more about this.

I am currently very much in the soup of something I’m calling Altered Anatomy. I think it’s the first time I’ve been able to go into writing about, talking about, sharing about a huge part of my life, which is physical illness—lots of surgery and a rearranged inner working of my [bodily systems]. I’m bringing that out as a zine with a bunch of collage. For a long time I felt like, oh, I don’t think anybody wants to know about how sick I’ve been. Who would want to read about my surgeries and my illness? It’s blood and guts, literally. And more and more, I’ve just thought, wow, I don’t know but I need to write it. So here we go.

The zine format is something I’ve enjoyed in your work since the beginning. Can you speak to your love for the medium?

I’m Gen X, babe. It’s what we do. Photocopying is in our blood. I love the quality of color photocopies and I love being able to just touch all the parts. There’s something thrilling about folding the pages together, and stapling them, and getting them ready to give away or sell. I guess it’s that hyper-decentralized kind of thing that feels so good and is a part of everything that seeped into me as a child of the ’80s and ’90s.

I want to ask about your home. I remember the first time I was invited over for the Write On series you hosted, and it was a very inspiring place to be in. Would you talk about some of the objects that live in it with you?

What a fortune it is to share and facilitate a place that feels so inspiring to other people. Aside from most of the furniture, basically everything in our home was either made by my partner [Erin] or I, or a friend, or came into our lives via the passing on of objects that happens within a family. Which is weird because we don’t have kids and we’re a dead end. Where’s it going to go from here?

But we just love old artifacts and objects. Textiles, books, dishes, clothes. Everything gets incorporated into an at-home collage. Along with collaboration, I guess the other keyword for me is collage. It affects everything I do. And because we don’t have kids, the house is just a big studio. Erin mostly works downstairs. I mostly work upstairs, and we’re actively creating all the time. I think you can feel all of that when you’re here.

It’s true. Each room can harness something else. And you have rituals that align with the seasons?

We’re both really into the rose bushes we inherited when we first moved here. I remember [at first] I was like, oh, roses I’m not so into roses. But that just faded almost right away because I was like, look at these beautiful things with these thorny legs to them and [the story of this] blossom that goes on and then dies. The whole life cycle of the roses and the other flowers around our home is very much a part of our lives, and the seasons are really, really important to me.

One of the ways I mark that is in our fireplace. As soon as the flowers start coming out, a cycle [begins]. There are certain places in our house where I do my little flower arranging, then when the blooms start to droop and die and decompose, eventually they get stacked into the fireplace, which during spring, summer, early fall is not being used. I end up filling the belly of the fireplace with dried and spent flowers and by the end of the [warm] seasons, there’s just this full to bursting pile of dried foliage. Then the first fire usually comes mid-October and gets ignited… It’s a small but important ceremony. And every year it seems like it means more to me than the year before.

The Pacific Northwest is your birth land; you are of it. How does its landscape inform and inspire you?

For me, it’s about the water. I grew up on an island and my dad was a marine biologist, and we were on the water all the time. So to me, what is primary about the Pacific Northwest is this very specific cold saltwater environment, then right next to that is the evergreens and the mountains and the [geographic] separation. Going back in time, you had to work hard to get to the upper left-hand corner of the country. And then you got here and probably didn’t have a lot of visitors. You don’t pass through a place that is its own corner. When I first was in journalism, I was a music writer. I would interview bands, and I remember talking to some old-school Seattle bands who would talk about that separation; you had to make your own scene. And so there’s something about that opportunity of being a place that is so rich and beautiful, but also a secret in a certain way.

Do you feel the same way today?

The Northwest has been discovered. But it’s still in there for me. It’s like being a little sister, which is something I really identify with; you fly under the radar and you get to take certain liberties because you’re maybe not the main focus.

I can relate to that. What have you struggled with in your creative process or within your life? Do you look at anything as a failure?

I am somebody that experiences a lot of regret, both capital R and little r, and I am very self-critical. Like, oh, you could have done that a little better and then you would have X, Y, and Z. I feel like this is a period in my life when I’m trying to understand all the things that happened that didn’t get their moment, or didn’t get the right treatment, or I wasn’t able to go slow enough to understand. The underlying [thing] of all the little regrets is I just have moved really quickly a lot in my life.

I’m trying to learn to go slow and to stop when I need to stop. It means asking others to slow down for me or with me. It means on a daily basis walking into the woods and talking to the moss: “How do I move the way you’re moving?” It’s a hard thing to learn. I have to write it on Post-It notes. That’s probably my favorite thing: I can finally see where the lessons of getting older have in some ways been incorporated, and I’ll just keep going forward with that.

How do you see your work in the worlds of grief and death intersecting tomorrow?

I want to continue doing death awareness work. There are just so many people that can’t quite come into contact with—let alone conversation with—the inevitability of death. And I just know how much it gives your life to be in conversation with the fact that life will end for all of us.

What story would you like to leave behind?

I hope what will remain of me in others is just a very organic and true sense of curiosity and a knowing that it is okay to ask questions. More often than not, people want to be asked and they want to be heard and they want to be listened to.

The perfect thing to leave for all of us.

It’s so nice to be asked because I’m almost always asking and I love that, but it’s both instructive and really nourishing and sweet to be on the other side.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sierra Stinson.