Sex & Death are Sisters

sex and death are sisters. Our desires and our sensations are ways we interface with the world; we experience reality with our bodies as much as with our minds - more perhaps.

In this Queer Death Salon we learn about sex within the experience of grief and practical skills and the knowledge we will need to offer compassionate care to the dying. When dealing with the need for sensual sexual or physical pleasure in a person experience grief from the end of their own life or the life of a loved one, it is important to assess their need as well as their desires for intimacy and help identify and explore what is available to them, everything from gentle touch to masturbation, sex to hugs, massage, somatic therapy, etc. We are reminded of our core values: we provide care from a place of non-judgment and holding fast to our assumptions of high regard and good intent. We are required to protect our own boundaries and we make this a promise

We say the rules aloud and to each other intentionally because this is how you do difficult things: intentionally. When we speak, it is with care, knowing the words we say will alter lives. This is always true, You can build worlds with your words and you can destroy them too - by acknowledging this in significant moments, we make ourselves more powerful and more compassionate.

We learned that despite the physical efforts of death it is very common for people to want sex and pleasure towards the end of their lives. It's also common for death to alter the sex lives of the people left behind. These impacts are almost always unexpected; people don't expect the death of their father to impact their libido or make them cry after orgasm, the don't expect their emotional responses to pleasure, vulnerability, or release to change drastically and sometimes overnight when they learn they are dying. Grief moves into us suddenly, and all our inner structures must shift around to make room, all of a sudden we have a new emotion to learn how to feel.

Grief lives in our bodies and so we need to feel grief with our bodies, and sex can be a really big part of that.  The vulnerability and intensity of these emotions have strange impacts on us and our desires - and almsot everyone, even grief and pleasure counsellors are surprised at how total and massive the changes can be, how deeply effected our most loving and tender aspects are by transformations of grief.

This is especially true with Queer folk because most Queer people experience something called "Disenfranchised Grief" and sorrow. Disenfranchised Grief refers to grief that goes unacknowledged or unvalidated by social norms, culture and community.

This means most Queer people have felt some form of Disenfranchised Grief or sorrow long before they experience the death of a loved one or themselves. Times of grief in life, like the end of a romantic relationship or anchor friendships, troubled relationships with family, being othered or stigmatised, suffering a loss that is socially considered "deserved" or "justified", are all harder within the Queer experience. Grief among Queer people is minimised into invisibility by culture at large and often from within Queer Community itself (social groups made of people who have experienced social othering and trauma will often repeat these patterns within their own community, on their own peers - our community others those around us who are in pain, emotionally abandoning them). Disenfranchised Grief it harder to process and work through; it can, at times, make grief traumatic - because people often go through it alone.

Our bodies are social animals and hold animals' emotions, older than us. They hold emotions that have existed longer than we can conceive. It feels necessary for an emotional experience to have a physical reaction. In the management of grief, regardless of its being disenfranchised, traumatic, or healthy, we need 3 things:

movement

sound

and a place to share the story

There were so many stories in the group, one person had a date for MAiD and wanted to know the ethics of consent for hiring a sex worker for their final days, one woman could only cry for the death of her parent after hard bondage and kinky sex.  One woman and her wife had the mantra 'fuck about it' as her wife died and while towards the end of her life this wasn't possible they did use masturbation until her last moments. We don't judge these paths to feeling grief. We embrace them in all their strangeness and we celebrate what they offer - togetherness in the face of life altering experiences.

These are core beliefs of these spaces. Where people talk about death, where people face the hardest things about themselves, we need non-judgment and the assumption of goodwill; they are the foundations of the spaces we need to be human. Death is Non-Consensual, even when we consent to it - there is a finality to the relationship with life that robs us of choice. Because ultimately this is dealing with a non-consensual experience these spaces of healing and growth are judgment-free. Its not that we don't make mistakes, but that they do not apply to our use of the space. If someone talks about missing their affair partner, their abuser, someone they abandoned or abused, it is not for us to do anything but share a breath of acknowledgement with them for their loss.

When it is healthy, Grief, like falling in love and giving birth, is a physiological process that happens to our bodies as much as our minds. I have fallen in love twice, I have almost died five or six or seven times, depending on how you count it, and almsot murdered once, I have miscarried a baby I'll never know and bled for months, I have held the person I married as they sobbed in their sleep, suicidal and unsure how to go on. I know loss and mostly what I know is that it will find you, no matter how familiar you think loss is, it will always surprise you, it will be so shocking it will take your breath away.

I used self-mutilation to cope with violence as a young person and remember clearly trying to explain to my mother and my doctors that this wasn't a muted grasp at death but a bloody bid for survival. it felt necessary. A biological drive. I remember looking up self-harm and learning that primates hurt themselves when they feel abandoned or shunned, that many religions have ceremonies where holy bleed and believers eat or drink their blood, literally or metaphorically.  Grief in many cultures is met with wailing, groaning, rocking, dancing, singing... our identities need to know our grief, our bodies need to feel us feeling it. Our minds need a physical reflection to match it's mental upheaval .

It is the nature of our minds to live within the interface of its ideas until we encounter something we never could have imagined, and to imagine it, we must become something new. It is not only reality that has changed, but us as well, suddenly altered within it. It is inevitable really that eventually in these hiding states have change and transformation, that we need to experience these things with our bodies.