People are often surprised by how comfortable I am in discussing life experiences in which a close family member during my lifetime, my parents lifetimes, or their parents lifetimes were a deaths door. While many made it through in that moment, others did not. The life of a human is temporary on this earth. I was taught from birth the importance of recognizing and embracing this, not as nihilism but as celebration of who we are as one human within a community of human and more-than-human people. From early on I was also mentored in the ways of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of Francis of Assisi, of Gandhi, of John Lewis, and also of local leaders of revolutionary change. This included leaders of the underground railroad in our area and leaders of the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi. Beyond people within my own faith community I met people from other faiths in school and broader geographic area. I connected with members of the Amish community and the House of David. I got to know members from the Nation of Islam, family members who spent part of the year in Southwest Michigan before returning to their family homes in Mexico. I came to know Palestinians and people of the Jewish faith. And across these many extended interactions I came to understand the importance of revolution through movements across difference and the urgency of conversation in ways that do not cancel us.

Death as but one part of life is a consistent narrative not only within my family conversations but with so many other people who have lived through the horrors of violence carried on by one group of people against another group because they are different. I am not arguing we should embrace the deaths that may be immediately ahead within a moment. But neither am I saying we should deny its reality. For in accepting it, we can also seek ways to shape, both with an objective to not do so needlessly and also with the objective of making the time of life before death meaningful.

What I learned from my mentors, friends, and associates was that such meaning best came in community, with community, and for community in partnership with other communities within a web of unity as we take on the local issues of most relevance. Life does not need to be lived within a zero-sum game when reciprocity is exercised within a gift economy. Nor can growth be the exclusive objective but needs to be kept in balance with all parts of the body, physically and metaphorically. In this way extractive forms of death of objects and subjects are replaced by more harmonizing relationships. The earth has survived as long as it has precisely because of the primacy of harmonizing relationships that existed prior to disharmonizing human dominance that emerged at the start of industrialization and the socio-political and economic practices in which it was birthed. Such extractive exercising of life has led to wholesale deaths of humans, other people, and of materials of earth. Shaping life shapes death. Shaping death can also shape life.

Remembrance is essential when working through the grief of loss. Remembrance is also deeply meaningful in the days that follow to celebrate the many positives that occurred during a momentary corporeal existence within the rich diversity of species of planet Earth. It also becomes an opportunity for reflection that can lead towards subsequent actions as we carry on the causes of those who were here before us, and to imagine new actions for us to take on now. And it serves as an important reminder that our time, too, is temporary and it is thus important we set a meaningful runway for those who have just arrived in human form on this planet or who will arrive in the weeks, months, and years to come. Change is the only constant. We each are shaping that change within our own ways. While death is one part of life, life is also one part of death. The cycles continue.

May the 6th of November be a day of remembrance of the many deaths around us–to many of them needlessly through hate and through extraction. But may it also lead in the days to come to new works of visioning and enacting new life, life that restores us who are human to pathways which are more harmonizing with all the other people around us. This narrative has never been lost even as the stock narrative become one of banning and destroying that narrative. Today and tomorrow and for a bit more beyond, grieve. But from grief lets move to works of counterstorytelling, of re-remembering, of truth telling, of healing, of reconciliation, of a radical revolution of values.