Wakil
So thank you everyone for joining us today and thank you, especially Patty and Annalouiza. So good to see you again as always.
Yeah. So we are here again. Welcome to this episode of end-of-life conversations. And I'm the Reverend Wakil David Matthews.
Annalouiza
And I'm the Reverent Mother Annalouiza Armendariz. In this podcast, we'll be sharing our guest's experience with the end of life.
Wakil
Patty Bueno is a certified grief counselor, dying consciously teacher, and creator of the Amorté podcast on death and grief education.
She's currently training to become a somatic experiencing facilitator. Having accompanied three of her grandparents and later her mother through their dying process as a primary caregiver was an initiation and powerful call to serve and assist others in her community.
She's the mother of two beautiful men who are married and she just became a grandmother.
Annalouiza
She lives in Mexico City and has been supporting terminally ill patients and their families on their dying and grieving journey for the last fifteen years. She offers workshops, teaches Death Rites and offers one on one bereavement sessions.
Wakil
Well thanks so much for joining us for this conversation Patty. We are so glad to have you. So we usually start with this question that we talked about earlier, which is when did you first become aware of death?
Patty Bueno
Hello, Wakil. Hello, Annalouiza. It's so nice to be here with your audience speaking about this very important conversations around death and grief.
For me, my first experience and awareness around death was, I think I can't remember if I was 12 or 13, was living in Costa Rica at the time.
My mother's Costa Rican, my father's Mexican, my stepfather was American. I was born in the U.S. and have been living in Mexico for the last 35 years.
So I was between 12 and 13 and we were at this club that's in the mountains. It's called El Castillo and we were having a family picnic
An older gentleman at the table next to us, in the forest, they were having a barbecue as well.
We were all doing picnics. He had a heart attack and I remember an ambulance arriving, help arriving, and paramedics trying to save his life and he didn't make it.
He died. And there was a vial left behind. And I remember I was just so amazed and taken aback from how precious, I mean just in that moment, a little while before he was with his family enjoying his Sunday afternoon and how precious life is, how we don't know when it will be our last moment.
And I saved that vial for many, many years as a reminder of how fragile life is and how important death is as kind of like our ultimate spirit guide or, you know, of life, of living a full life. And then a couple of months after that, I started dating.
My first boyfriend had just lost his mother. He was 15, I was 13, and his mother had passed away about six months before we started dating.
And so I went through his grief journey with him, know, for, we dated for two years. I remember so much of my own grief coming up.
I hadn't lost a family member or anyone close to me, but to death. But, you know, how I had experienced so many other losses, and so many other deaths, even though they weren't physical deaths. And so from a very early age, I remember death being just like this very wise, and important teacher on my shoulder, just reminding me how precious life is.
Wakil
Really. Well said, well said.
Annalouiza
Wow, and it's so beautiful that at such a tender time in your life, you are already starting to have this awareness of the fragility of your life, fragility of all of our lives, right?
So based on that, Patty, how does that origin story create the thread of your life now and the work that you do?
How did you come all the way this direction?
Patty Bueno
Well, as I mentioned, it was about grief. For me, it was about grief and loss and many different, you know, many different ways of how that showed up in my life.
When I was very little, when I was a year old, I moved with my grandparents to Mexico. And so I was without my mother and father for like four years and then I returned to live with my mother in the US when I was about five.
And so first it was like being without my parents and being with my grandparents and the love I felt for them and then moving back with my mom and you know it's a different language kind of felt like an adoption like living without my grandparents and moving back with my mother who had remarried.
I had a sister who was three years younger than me that I only saw on vacations and she spoke English I spoke Spanish and so these these other you know embracing other cultures then moving to Costa Rica and immersing into Spanish again after you know speaking English at home and then moving to Mexico and when I was around I think probably my early 20s, yes, it was my early 20s, my parental grandfather became ill. He had cancer and he was like my father.
And I was very, very close with him and I accompanied him on his three-year journey with cancer until his terminal phase where, you know, he was basically put on morphine until his organs shut down and, you know, him not wanting to live anymore and trying to respect his, his decisions.
But at that time, it wasn't legal in Mexico because now it is. I don't know if you guys are aware that we have, we don't have euthanasia in Mexico, but there's, there's this thing called sedación paliativa which is palliative sedation I think you translate it, which is It's where when someone is in a lot of pain from a terminal illness, they prepare a cocktail and you're just medicated until your organs shut down, which is different from euthanasia.
I accompanied my grandfather through several surgeries and just a lot of pain and radiation and chemotherapy in the last part of his life.
We were able as a family because he went into this palliative sedation at the end of his life. He was able to say goodbye to all of us and how important all of that was.
What a difference it made to be able to say our goodbyes. And then my maternal grandparents had cancer at the same time and they died within a month difference.
And so they were ill for a, I think it was one or two years. And so I made many trips to Costa Rica with my mother, with my aunts, and accompanied them on their dying journey as well.
And then after that, my mother had ovarian cancer, and I was her primary caregiver for a year. we came to California with her sister and stayed at her house.
She died in this room actually where I'm here now. This is where she spent her last six months.
It was beautiful. She was in hospice care, and she had taken care of like all, you know, everything, her death wishes, how she wanted what she wanted to do after she died.
And we also, as a family, were able to say our goodbyes to her. And how important, how different it was for all of us to be able to really go through the dying process as a family made all the difference in the world.
And so when all of that happened and I went back to Mexico, I realized how important it was to have all of that support in hospice that we were offered here.
And so when I went back to Mexico, I decided to become a grief counselor because I had already accompanied several of my family members and seeing how important that work was and how you know how it transformed my life.
I wanted to offer it to other people. And that's kind of like the thread full circle of how all of that kind of came together and of course just adding on tools of how I can best serve and coach and help and accompany families and clients through their own grieving and end of life journey.
Wakil
Yeah.
Annalouiza
Oh, Patty, that's beautiful.
Wakil
Yeah, really appreciate that. That's such a beautiful story and the path has obviously been in front of you, right?
You've even been moving through that path. Annalouiza do you have something you can follow up with.
Annalouiza
Can you see me thinking? My cogs going?
So you went back to Mexico and you started this work in Mexico.
And I'm curious, I know as a Mexicana myself, how we as a culture have always invited death into our homes and honor with our Dia de los Muertos.
And we don't shy away from it. I mean, there's Cuanderes in Mexico who do this very sacred work.
My curiosity is around how was your training to go help do grief work? How was it received in Mexico?
Patty Bueno
That's a really good question, Annalouiza. And I think we come from such a mestizo culture in Mexico, and there are so many different ethnic groups, that honor, death, pre-Hispanic, and then with colonization and religion.
It's like the syncretism between Catholics and pre-Hispanic cultures and how they view death. I think it's really helpful the vision that they had how they held in pre-Hispanic cultures death, and then kind of like the weaving with Catholic religion and Christians, how they honored death and how they viewed it.
I think when religion is involved especially with Catholics, that's my upbringing, Catholic religion. And so I would say for Catholics it's not that easy to embrace death.
I know there's so much fear around death and so I think that going into these other cultures, means that really was the invitation for me like trying to find ways to talk about death, open these conversations, and learn from different cultures.
I visited India several times. I went to a Bakti training. I've done pua with Tibetan Buddhist approach, their maps towards death.
And sat with different tribes and learning from the Red Road and different traditions into how they embrace and hold death.
And for me, I think it's like what has really helped hold death and bring death closer is to embrace what I call spiritual humanity.
It's like I think so much of the fear around death is kind of like our... the things we didn't accomplish.
A lot of... of with terminally ill patients, we talk about bucket lists, right? And it's these things that we still haven't done or the forgiveness that we still need to do or the amends.
It's all about these things that need to be done before we die. That's why I think death is the greatest master to live a full rich life.
So yes, we have these altars and we have these ceremonies that are available to us and as Mexican people we see it.
But I think if we come from a different religious background and we are not from these ethnic groups, we grow up with other beliefs, then death is not something that we grew up seeing around us.
Then it's foreign to us. There's a lot of fear around it, especially if we don't have conversations and I think one of the you know the first modern pioneers to bring all of these subjects are for it was Elizabeth Kubler Ross, right talking about how natural it was before if we lived in farms or if we had if we lived with our family and have elders or children or you know at home and be part of these doulas or midwives as something natural that happened at home Or like burying an animal that died naturally or because it fell ill or because it got ran over.
I mean all of these practices of rituals and ceremonies are so important so that we can have like a mind frame and space as a container and as a tribe and as a way to hold death in our community. If we don't have that, there's just so much fear around it. Yeah. So it just depends on many things. I think.
Annalouiza
No, I hear you. I think that you've kind of pinpointed too. It's Catholicism as a culture, the colonists who came in, right?
And this fear of death because of everything you just talked about. And also hell because there's a huge component of the afterlife that's creating this fear.
And then if you have folks who are indigenously-minded and living, death is constant. And we're always talking about it and relating to it.
And the afterlife is just being consumed back by Mother Earth. There's no hell for us. And so it's fascinating because that is big work.
That is very big work for all of us, Christians, Catholics, or anybody who's who's worried about that afterlife component.
I think that's a huge, huge hurdle for our work.
Patty Bueno
And I think to prepare for end of life, a big, big, big work we can do in preparing for that is our small everyday grief, you know, how we're just surrounded by loss constantly.
And if we can make that part of our everyday living and become more aware, you know, be more conscious about it, it helps us expand our containers so that we can hold all of the grief around, you know, losing someone.
And so by being able to have this larger container and, holding our grief, you know, ending of relationships, moving, loss of a job, a friendship that's over, like everything that happens, like just even seasons, you know, like honoring those seasons, no?
And the syncretism also of Day of the Dead in Mexico, as you were talking about, you know, it's like the altars, you know, are for asking, like altars are usually, we place sacred objects on altars or sacred beings on altars.
And it's like asking for something. And then the difference of offering, which is kind of like the veils that come together with these pre-Columbian, pre-Hispanic tradition ethnic groups, where we're offering, we're offering to our dead, we're offering to our loved ones, we're offering to Mother Earth, you know, it's like us giving gratitude and offering something back in these places where it's this big feast where the veils, you know are, they collapse and we can have we can communion and party with our loved ones that are no longer here.
Yes, tend to them but also I think it's a place to you know with this mind frame from the other one of those, you know that we can do so many other things That help us prepare for her right for death or tend to death, right?
Wakil
Yeah Beautiful. Yeah, thank you good questions and thoughts can you kind of talk more about your work right now and You know what you're teaching how you're teaching.
Anything you know more about what you're doing at this time.
I'd love to hear more about it because It's amazing and important work.
Patty Bueno
I'm doing, I do one-on-one bereavement. So, the grief counseling one-on-one, mostly through Zoom. I offer workshops where we explore different topics around death and grief.
So, going through looking at different aspects of ourselves as a community or where there is grief that is unprocessed in our lives.
In many places where it's kind of hidden from us and we don't know about it. Then I also teach death rites.
So, I'm a dying consciously teacher. It's dyingconsciously.org. It's an organization that was created by Alberto Villoldo, who is a…
He's Cuban. He's an anthropologist. He did a study on the brain in the University of San Francisco for about 20 years.
And he started studying shamanism to kind of try and understand how important ceremony is for our brain to understand and to integrate different things that happen to us.
So he has a school called the Four Winds, and I went through a medicine wheel, which was about a year's training where you just, through ceremony, integrate many, many different experiences in your life.
So there are, he teaches death rites. So I became a death rites teacher, dying consciously teacher, and it's kind of like what go through towards the end of life to help yourself prepare. So like recapitulation, doing certain ceremonies, just going through all of the things, of like the bucket list of what's important for us so that we can go in peace.
And so again, it's a lot about closure, right, and preparing ourselves to go.
Wakil
Yeah, yeah. And I love that you've said a couple of times that this is that this preparing for dying and this working with death is a breath-by-breath kind of thing.
You know, we are dealing with death in every moment of our lives in many ways. And it's so important so that it doesn't just
Annalouiza
Surprise us.
Wakil
Yeah, and it doesn't just apply to that actual life leaving us or life, leaving our beloveds, but it's all those other ways that we...
die before we die, as they say in the Sufi world. Yeah. So that's, I think that's really important. And I love also that it does give us that kind of practice if you will, it helps us to be in that muscle memory or whatever that, you know, that we know, when we see it, we know what it is, and we know how to move through it.
And I guess, for me, the other piece that I'm interested in your thoughts on here, what kind of counsel do you give people who are trying to hold both of those - that are trying to hold the despair and the worry and the fear with the joy and the beauty and the, you know.
I mean, those are both going on all the time, right? So is there something specific that you've found is useful for working with people in that?
Patty Bueno
Let me see if I can remember the words. Okay. So grief are all of the feelings that come up with loss.
And it's like we never tell someone when they're happy, you know, it's time to get over that happiness, you know, it's like, it's gonna take how long it takes, you know, with sadness, with anxiety, with, with all of the feelings, you know, there might be guilt around it, there might be shame.
There's so many pieces that come up. And so mourning is the outside part we do with the grief we live.
So mourning is what's important so that we can move through the grief. And if we're grieving, and we don't have a space or community to express that grief, share how we feel without people telling us, many of the times people that love us and that want the very best for us and it's so hard for them to hold our grief because they've never dealt with their own. So that's mourning, you know, like having these mourning communities.
So it's like we have these maps and we have to just keep practicing them, practicing them with everything that arises in our life so that we can prepare.
By prepare, I don't mean in any way that if we lose a loved one, we won't be sad, we won't cry, we won't miss them, we won't have all of these feelings, and we won't go through the grief and mourning of losing a loved one.
That's just not possible, but that's why they go hand in hand and just preparing for that for that journey and for all of it is part of life knowing that that's part of what we're going to go through.
And we need community and loved ones to hold us through those difficult times where we sometimes can’t get out of bed or can't function on a day-to-day basis of going to the supermarket or having a clear mind.
There's so much confusion. There's so much especially if it's not an illness, it's an unexpected death or loss. Because I've had horrible loss that is not related to a physical death and how hard it has been to move through that has been just as difficult as a physical death of a loved one.
Wakil
Sure, yes.
Patty Bueno
Yeah.
Wakil
Makes sense.
Patty Bueno
I think it's all part of the same death education.
Annalouiza
So with your work, what are your biggest challenges?
Patty Bueno
The biggest challenges are starting the conversation. A lot of the times people don't want to visit a grief counselor because they just feel there's nothing is going to help.
I remember for a time I worked, I was doing some social work at an elders' home. And as a grief counselor, when I went by to see if anyone wanted to talk to me, everyone would be like, no, no, no, And if I said, I'm giving Reiki, if anybody would love a Reiki session, oh, loved it.
So then I'd give Reiki and during those Reiki sessions they'd open up to me and it'd be so much easier to have a conversation. So it's just having people open up to the conversation around death and death.
Yes. Yeah. That's one of the biggest challenges.
Annalouiza
I think that that's what we've all talked about. The challenges of that we know the need is there and the discomfort that people feel around exposing their yearning to talk about this.
But every single dinner party I have, there will death will eventually show up at the table and we sit around and talk about it.
Wakil
It might have something to do with you though.
Annalouiza
We do have a tendency to talk about death almost on a daily basis here at this household.
So yes, it's true.
Wakil
Yeah. The challenges? Yeah, those are often the case that just getting the conversation started. What kind of... things do you do you use to resource yourself as you're going through this work, you know, for your own practice?
Patty Bueno
Oh poetry, yes, stories, love it, altars, yeah, altars, ceremonies are just the best way for me to kind of get centered again and go back to, you know, when I'm working with something that's really heavy, a lot of somatic practices just with my senses grounding myself back in the here now, somatic practices are amazing for centering ourselves when we're working through heavy grief and loss.
Wakil
You said you were taking classes or learning more about somatic response at this point and I'd be interested to know more about that.
What does that look like?
Patty Bueno
I'm studying to become a somatic experiencing facilitator created by Dr. Peter Levine. And I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with Stephen Porges and Gabor Matte and Dr. Levine's work. Many other amazing doctors that have really brought this back into how to deal with trauma in the body.
And so it's kind of learning how to track what's going on in our body and our nervous system responses as to keeping us alive and how that translates and how we can become aware of how it's trapped in our body and how we can through different exercises help that stuck energy move through our bodies.
So we feel safe.
And this went, you know, Dr. Peter Levine started this, this system by studying animals and their responses in nature.
The shaking, yeah, fight and flight and the shaking and, and yeah. So it's an amazing tool for, for grief and loss as well.
Annalouiza
Yeah. I love, I love all these, like your tool case, your tool chart that you carry. It's, it's so beautiful.
I, I love that somatic piece because even though, so I've studied with Cuaranderes and there are somatics that automatically kind of just walked up through our practices.
And this weekend I had an opportunity to be with some students from Naropa and they're studying somatic and one of them said, it's becoming bigger and bigger.
And I, and I love that you're utilizing this tool in a grief and mourning, you know, situation with both folks have beautiful because nobody's going to come to us if you say let's do somatic therapy. But as soon as you show up and you want to do Reiki or do you want to have a cup of tea, want to have a want have a cup of tea.
Then it starts like opening it up and coming through.
Patty Bueno
Exactly.
Wakil
Yeah. that stuff.
Annalouiza
What frightens you about the end of life?
Patty Bueno
What frightens me about the end of life? What frightens?
Okay. Oh, Oh, okay. What frightens me about the end of life is pain.
That's what I'm most frightened about. Pain, I think, you know, if we have like medicine is so advanced, I mean, there's just, for me, there's no reason why anyone has to go through suffering, you know, the end of life. And I often say there's so many worse things I can think of.
There's so many things I can think of that are worse than dying, you know, and it's like living in pain with a prolonged illness and prolonging life when there's no quality in life.
So I think it's so important to work through those fears so that we can take well-informed decisions on what it is we want to do with terminal illnesses.
Because a lot of the times we're doing it because of that fear of dying, know. so it's like if you're just going to live six months or a year longer or two years longer, but with, you know, be in terrible pain, there's to-
For me, there's no point.
Right. that is completely different for so many other people. Right. to make that informed decision, I think you really have to have that education so that you can make the right decisions for you.
Wakil
Right.
Annalouiza
So I do Advanced Care Directive Planning. And when people ask me about this, they're like, is so far away.
I don't even know. I love that informed consent to your care. it has very little bearing on what everybody else is doing, but you can choose for yourself if you choose ahead of time.
And you can also change your mind. Like I like that that's a possibility. Like there's no one way that's going to stick with you forever.
It's like a living document and you're like the living, you know, motion of life, then you get to change your mind.
Patty Bueno
Of course, because I think, you know, the circumstances. the decisions you might make if you have young children versus the decisions you might take after your children have left home and you're in a different phase of life and they change.
And so yeah, we definitely need to like revise, you know, those decisions we have made, depending, know, every several years to see what's changed in our lives you know, like the people that are still in our lives, you know, maybe are not in our lives anymore.
Annalouiza
Or they've changed and would not really want to apply your values to your end of life, right?
Patty Bueno
That's like exactly.
Annalouiza
I always tell my kids that if I took a fall at the Target parking lot, you can call 911.
But if I'm like eight miles into a backcountry trail and I fall and hurt my head, just leave me alone.
Like, just don't do anything. Don't call!
Patty Bueno
Yeah, yeah, I can totally see why you would choose that.
Wakil
Yeah. I think something I read earlier was that they suggested having a death party once a year with all of your loved ones to sit around and talk about what decisions you had made and are they still make sense?
Just having that conversation, just having the opportunity to say, you know, here's where you can find my passwords and, you know, here's who's in charge or here's who I've chosen as my executor.
Is that person still willing to be the executor? Pass around the glass of wine,and, you know, have just a party for that reason, which is, I think, speaks to your point.
You know, this is something that is a dynamic dialogue that needs to continue and as life changes, these decisions can change.
I think that helps people because otherwise they get stuck. They think, oh, if I put this down now, it's going to be this way and I'm not sure that's really what I want and so I'm not going to put it down at all.
Annalouiza
And also, I find that folks who are suddenly find themselves in a terminal illness or just kind of an end of life that was not expected, and then you have to make these decisions.
It's too much for us to incorporate into our being at that moment, having never thought about the end of life, that, again, that brainwork that you talked about, you're just expanding that container slowly so that when you get confronted with something that is really important, you're able to metabolize that and bring it forth and have a clear understanding of what you really want.
So, yeah.
Wakil
Well, we really appreciate you. The work you're doing is just impressive. And thank you so much for being willing to come and participate with us and have this conversation and continue the work.
I really appreciate it. So we like to end with that poem you sent. Would you like to read it yourself?
Patty Bueno
I would love to read it. I would love to read it. And if you don't mind, I'd love to read it in Spanish and in English.
Annalouiza
Yes.
Patty Bueno
Okay.
Wakil
Perfect. Perfect.
Patty Bueno
Okay.
Annalouiza
So, you can read it in Spanish and I can read it in English because I have it here.
Patty Bueno
Okay. Wonderful. Wonderful. We'll do that then. Okay. Okay.
A veces el colibrí, a veces el cuervo. A veces los búhos vienen a decirnos cuándo es el momento de partir. Pero nosotros, Machica, no morimos.
Sólo nos mudamos a una nueva casa, a un nuevo cuerpo. Cada año volvemos a visitar nuestra antigua casa.
Annalouiza
Sometimes the hummingbird, sometimes the crow. Sometimes the owl come to tell us when it's our time to go. But we, Machica, do not die.
We only move to a new house, a new body. each year, we come back to visit our old home.
A Nuahtl poem. That makes me so happy.
Patty Bueno
Yeah.
Wakil
And we'll put that in our podcast notes along with the information you wrote after that for us about the, where that came from and the culture that comes from. That was really beautiful. Thank you so much again for being with us and sharing with us.
Annalouiza
I really hope to intersect with you again at some point and come see you.