We can be highly visible in the world and be hiding at the same time. But the thing I love the most about working with death and dying is it just rips away all the crap.Victoria Spence
LISTEN TO
Victoria Spence: Death doula and funeral business owner on a mission to bring deaths back to the personal
SBS Audio
35:39
Credits
Host: Yumi Stynes
Producers: Laura Brierley Newton, Olivia O'Flynn
Sound Design and Mix: Ravi Gupta
Executive Producer: Kate Montague and Lorna Clarkson
Theme Music: Yeo
Art: Evi O Studios
SBS Team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford and special thanks to Caroline Gates
Original concept by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Transcript
(Music)
YUMI STYNES: What's a really bad funeral look like?
VICTORIA SPENCE: A really bad funeral looks like something that's rushed, where it doesn't represent the person who has died. Or if it's got a very McFuneral formulaic feel, that it's just the person who has the privilege of leading the funeral doesn't really connect in and really reflect a sense of affinity that they know or they care or they've taken time to find out about who the person is.
(Theme music)
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): I'm Yumi Stynes and thanks for joining me for this season’s final episode of SEEN.
In this season I've talked with older women about living with purpose, building resilience through adversity, and finding new ways to feel, and be seen.
From World Champion surfer Pauline Menczer, we’ve learned what it feels like to have to wait for the world to catch up - so you can be seen.
From legendary artist Lindy Lee we were given insight into the urgent need to follow you artistic purpose.
Community cook Duang Trentriat showed us that community is everything - and yes, when you show up in a new place, you can create your own.
Indigenous drag queen Crystal Love Johnson has faced terrible adversity but always tried to look out for those worse off than her.
And athlete and personal trainer Kerryn Harvey continued to be a hunter and gatherer of people even when surviving a devastating amputation.
Najla Turk showed us that a hunger for growth and continual learning keeps the mind spry and delighted.
While Hadia Haikal Mukhtar doesn’t want to be seen - at least not in the way we mean it. She wants us to understand that we are all part of an interconnected whole and - everyone belongs.
But there's a place we haven’t gone: death. What about death? Does getting old mean we need to confront the infinite void of our post-life non-existence?
And considering how terrifying death is, how do we prepare for it… and face our final hours with grace?
We start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we record... the Gamaragal [Cammeraygal] people and Gadigal people, and their elders past and present.
One thing you’ll enjoy if you listen to every episode of SEEN is that there are a few things the guests all do. For instance, they all to some degree, have a community, a sense of belonging.
And they all live with a strong sense of purpose.
Perhaps none more so than funeral director, counsellor and death doula Victoria Spence. She found her purpose sitting within the unavoidable life event that many of us want to pretend will never happen to us: And that unavoidable life event is…. death.
SPENCE: The dying part I think many people have a lot of fear around and I understand that because it's a big thing to leave your body, but I'm not afraid of it, now. And when I first started this practice, I was.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): In Western Culture, dying is the last great taboo.
It’s so unfathomable and, frankly, frightening, that many of us have taken the strategy of just Pretending It’s Not Happening.
As the founder and director of a holistic funeral service group called Life Rites, Victoria understands the power of preparation.
Because she's an expert in all things death.
SPENCE: I really understand death as an opportunity to be free. to really have an ongoing dialogue with myself and the people I love about how I'm living. And what's important to me and them, about how they're living,
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): In recent years I have been trying to bring up the idea of a funeral with my mother Yoshiko. She’s kind of brushing the conversation away, as though by talking about it - or acknowledging her death *might* happen, I’m somehow willing it into reality.
So I wanted to ask Victoria Spence - What is the opportunity to be had in knowing that you will die?
SPENCE: I think the opportunity is many fold. The first one is practical. So, if we don't understand that we too are going to die, then we don't begin conversations about what's important to us. So the practical aspect of knowing we're going to die is, do I have a will? Have I thought about what I'm going to leave to key people?
Who are the key people in my life that might be able to advocate for me when I can't do that? What's important to me about my health care if, as I age or as I am unwell?
So all these conversations that we need to have with ourselves first. Before we feel able to have them with other people, who are going to survive our death, who are tasked with managing our affairs or organising our funeral. I know for a fact, on a practical level, that you don't have to go and prepay your funeral and shore up every single choice, the choice of flowers, what colour coffin - but to leave some sense of, these are the operating principles, you know. Of course we assume that the people that are going to be organising our funerals know us and can advocate for us and are going to make choices for us and them, but to be able to leave people something as a roadmap is an incredibly beautiful baton change
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): For Victoria, the death of her father and what followed planted the seeds of her future.
SPENCE: So my father In 1994, was diagnosed with late onset leukaemia.
He'd lived a full, incredible life. And he was a really great man, my dad. And he was a doctor and was very clear that he didn't want to die in hospital. That he'd spent his life in them and he was wanting to die at home with the dogs and the cats and the kids on the bed.
(Music)
And so that's what we did. My mother had been a nurse and I came home and my mother and I and the local palliative care nurses took turns in being able to care for my dad. And it was an incredible thing to watch this man let go of his personhood, his subjecthood, go from vertical to horizontal.
And my mum would often do the day times and I'd do the nights. And we really went to some amazing places at night time, particularly as the morphine was kicking in for him and he was sort of time travelling back through his memories.
And so when he took his last breath, in his bed with all the dogs, and I mean dogs, two, three dogs and a lot of cats and five kids all around him, in this beautiful scene of absolute family connection and love. It was an incredible thing for me to see, this last breath.
And not long after that, and maybe it was a few hours. I had been a bit scared of how my dad looked. He had one eye open and one eye closed and a pupil a little bit back in his head. And I thought to myself, I can't be scared here. This is my dad. And so intuitively, I just sort of, went to the local shops, which weren’t that far away, and I bought, for some unknown reason, oranges, incense, candles and chocolate.
And I thought, I just need to sit with him, because I've been so intimately connected in his dying, and I just had an intuitive sense that I needed time.
And by the time I'd got back from the shops, and maybe it was a number of hours after he died, I walked up the stairs to his bedroom to the zip and the rustle of a body bag being closed. And the funeral directors had been called by my mum, they had come and they were about to cart him away. And I remember just going, No, don't do that. It's not time. You know, he's only just died. And he really laboured to his death, my dad, a lot of that chain stokes breathing, he was like a massive locomotive that just, and I'd watched it for days. And I was thinking, or we all were, How can you keep going? And I just really thought, he needs a bit of time. He wanted to die at home and where are you going so quickly and why?
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): From the incredible transition of one beloved human soul from this mortal coil toward the mysteries that follow - to the abrupt snapping of latex gloves and the zipping of a body bag - the rushed and unceremonious removal of her father’s body was the first introduction into what Victoria calls 'the farce' of the funeral industry.
SPENCE: We had some dodgy funeral director - and I'm a funeral director now so I can say that, that there are some dodgy ones. We had a celebrant that showed up the night before. It just was a farce and it seemed so incongruous to this person's life and to the process of grace that we had been able to offer him as his life came to its completion.
And then suddenly it was like we were all on speed and adrenaline. And No one knew what we were doing. Or, why? What? Why? What, what's this time meant to give us? We just sort of barreled into the 40 minute ceremony at the local crematorium.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): The next time they saw Victoria's dad, was in a coffin at the funeral.
SPENCE: The celebrant got my dad's name wrong. His middle name was Walton, and the celebrant was calling his middle name Walter. So my mother's in the front of the chapel going, Walton! Walton! Walton! And my sister had said to me, cause my dad was really tall, and she was looking at the coffin going, What have they done to his legs? He's not in there! He doesn't fit in there!
And I'm just thinking, What is this? This is like a cookie cutter body disposal process with some sort of pretend ceremony, in inverted commas, and of course I'd come from 15 years of creating things and I just thought, on a production level on a business level creative level. This is ridiculous so -
STYNES: Where's the director? This is rubbish!
SPENCE: Who's running this gig?
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): At this time of Victoria's life, she was working as an experimental queer performance artist. It was part of the cool but rarely lucrative theatre world where a performer’s self-expression is intricately calibrated to factor in the audience’s experience.
SPENCE: Through that time, we're talking late 80s into the 90s. It was also a time where HIV and AIDS was a huge thing in Sydney and Australia and the world. And I'm a part of the LGBTQI plus community.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): The AIDs epidemic killed thousands of men and women in Australia, and millions worldwide. The vast number of people who died were gay men - taking out a large proportion of that generation of the queer community
And so, during those years I had a disproportionate exposure to death and dying and funerals. And I was often asked to MC people's funerals. And other times I was just in the field of the dying process, either connected to the person who was dying or the people who would survive the death. And I really started to see that the things that did or didn't happen at the time of death, and particularly in that handover from the medical model and dying into the funeral industry, if people weren't honoured in a way that was truthful and reflective to them, then the people who loved them didn't grieve.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): This is big. Because if we’re so afraid of death that we can’t look at a funeral front on, then how are we gonna make it real? And honest?
SPENCE: If it's not an authentic reflection of the person who died that is then witnessed by the person, the people who loved that person -
STYNES: Who loved them and knew them.
SPENCE: And knew them, then that funeral absolutely fails at its core purpose, which is to honour the person who's died, to support the grieving of the people who still live, who love them by distilling the core sense of who they are, and that's what people take with them to lay the foundation for healthy grieving.
And if you're in one of those crematorium chapels, nothing wrong with them, but if you're rushed in and you're rushed out and the next people are lining up behind you, then it just feels like a deep disrespect to the incredible gift of life.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): In the early 2000s, with the experience of many funerals behind her, the demands of juggling her performance career and a new daughter prompted Victoria to start thinking about what else she could do.
SPENCE: I sort of understood then it's hard to be on stage at eight o'clock with a child, and I maybe needed to rethink what have I been doing in the arts for the last 15 years.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): She could see that the skills she had as a performer closely aligned to the skills you needed to run a funeral.
Victoria had already MC’d many of her friends' funerals, but it was when she read a eulogy at her mothers funeral, and MC’d a close friend's funeral around the same time, that her purpose arrived.
(Music)
SPENCE: So those two dyings and those two deaths were really my sort of apprenticeship and it was after those experiences and the funerals someone came up to me after and said, you really should do this. And it was like one of those, Oh, duh. Yeah, I should.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): So Victoria became a funeral celebrant. And she was really good at it!
But it didn't take long for her to realise that she wasn’t having the impact she desired.
SPENCE: I realised that if I wanted to change funeral rites, and if I came in as a celebrant, in the way the industry was then structured, I was too far down the food chain.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): By the time Victoria became involved in the funeral, at this stage everything was already organised - the date, the time, the duration and the location of the funeral ceremony.
SPENCE: And so what routinely happened was, when people are coming out of the death process, whether expected or sudden, everybody experiences the death of the body of the person they love as a threat to their own survival in this deep prehistoric nervous system level.
And most people go, take in this breath. And when that breath is taken in, all this adrenaline and cortisol is running through the system. People just call the funeral directors, they're dazed, they're confused, they're constricted, they talk to that first person. They don't think with how they're feeling in that first phone call they could possibly speak at the funeral.
And I still haven't let out that breath I just took in before. And that's often how people barrel through. And so by the time that I would walk in the door as a celebrant, 24, 36 hours later, they've made their arrangements, which is often - if it's secular - 45 minutes at the local creme because there's a booking slot of time.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): But once Victoria eventually arrived to speak to the family, they'd had time, they'd exhaled that breath and realised they do want to speak, they do want a visual tribute and some music to be played.
SPENCE: All the things that should happen, but families had routinely been given 45 minutes.
So that's when I went, right, I can't be an instrument of this, we need to be able to lead with ceremony, with family choices.
We need to hand this back, and the whole industrial model of funerals needs an overhaul.
And very naively, I set about with my little David and Goliath pickaxe, attempting to do that.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Victoria started Life Rites, a funeral service. And she made it their mission to lead people more gently down the path of grief... and death.
SPENCE: The first thing we do is demonstrate and talk through that shock piece. The whack of the death, the breath in or the breath out, the cortisol and the adrenaline.
And we go, if their culture and faith allows it, you have time. There's no rush. And once you frame it like that and just say to people, we will guide and follow you on equal measure. This is yours. We call that death literacy. Most people come to organising a funeral once or twice in their lives, so no one's an expert. And if your funeral rites are taken out of your hands on your one or two practice runs to build something and make something that you're proud of, that honours your person and that your senses and mind and body can yield into, then death doesn't do its job, which is to, really allow all of us to understand that we take a first and last breath.
And death is my organising principle of my life. So am I living the way I want to live?
STYNES: So what I'm getting from you, Victoria, that I didn't expect is, because this podcast is about being seen, and I love that you stepped into your, I guess, most formidable power when you started leading funerals.
SPENCE: Yes, indeed.
STYNES: But you're also seeing. The person who's passed away.
SPENCE: Yes.
STYNES: And you're seeing their families.
SPENCE: Yes.
STYNES: And really allowing them to be embodied and to be their witness. And that is so huge for
SPENCE: Mm hmm.
STYNES: Isn't that what we crave so much? To be seen?
SPENCE: Absolutely. And to be seen and witnessed. So I think this sense of witnessing is the most powerful version of being seen.
We can be highly visible in the world and be hiding at the same time. But the thing I love the most about working with death and dying is it just rips away all the crap. And to be able to make that safe enough for people who come to us to be seen, to feel seen and to say on all sorts of practical levels, There's no part of this process that's off limits to you.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): But even helping people organise their loved ones' funerals still didn't feel like enough for Victoria. She still felt like there was a missing link.
This led her to becoming what's known as a death doula.
SPENCE: So doula is a word that's often used now for people who accompany the dying and who build relationships with people as they're living with a significant illness or they're about to head into treatment.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Victoria's doula work is with both the dying and their family or carers.
For the dying, it can start any time - it might be years before, as they begin the process, or it might be just a few weeks beforehand. She'll spend time with them, talk through what's happening, or simply sit and be with them.
She also counsels the families, supports them and encourages discussions about what they want to happen, and how they wish to farewell and honour their loved ones.
This idea of having someone come and help facilitate these heavy conversations within the family really interests me.
My own mother is now 82 years old, and while she's still living on her own, hosting weekly mahjong parties, travelling back to Japan and generally being a tiny, wizened party animal - she absolutely refuses to discuss her death and her funeral with anyone in our family.
It's a tricky conversation to have - ah mum how would you like your funeral to run? And more importantly, what will matter to you when you're dying?
(Music)
It's confronting, but it's important.
In 2017 Victoria's prismatic relationship with death acquired another facet when she became seriously unwell. What is it like for someone with so much experience of death, to face her own?
SPENCE: When I myself was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, it was these women that I had sat at their kitchen tables with them, when they received the news that there was no more treatment, or I'd been in intimate conversation with them as they were literally heading into their active dying. It was these people and their courage and their vulnerability and the way that they just met their mortality and the reality and inevitability of their death. It was them that I really turned to in those really dark, quiet moments.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Victoria describes facing her own mortality as not just a psychological and emotional challenge, but also as a challenge of her very identity.
SPENCE: I feel like we sort of shed skins in our lives. And the way I relate to my mortality is not like this one event, but like a process that I'm in relationship to.
I am recalibrating radically my sense of who I am. So I was an athlete as a kid and then a physical performer and I have, in the past, you know, been tall and strong and very capable and very physical and very embodied. And my cancer was in my tonsil. So what that means is massive radiotherapy to my throat and a feeding tube and an inability to eat, talk and swallow for a very, very long time.
So coming out of my cancer, I was absolutely stripped bare. I lost an enormous amount of weight and I lost a lot of muscle and I came out with quite chronic osteoporosis. And so, that was all seven years ago now, seven years post cancer. And so my body is radically different and there was enormous amounts of grief attached to that, the loss of a capacity to taste, a loss of saliva, how that impacted myself and my self esteem and my identity as a sexual being. And a much softer, smaller frame.
And so the way I meet myself now is with deep gentleness and real respect and I let myself be in my 59 year old body. And the way I relate to my mortality is not like this one event, but like a process that I'm in relationship to. So I keep shedding, I keep yielding to what I used to be able to do. And I have to pay more attention to certain, I have to pay attention to uneven pavements now. Like, I'm like, oh, okay, I'm going to be in my feet if I'm walking. I've got dodgy bones. I can't fall. If I am going to fall, things could go badly wrong. All right. so I don't then give myself an identity as an old woman. I'm just like, Oh, you need to take care here.
And you can be just as fierce and radical in a different way, but not in the ways in which you used to engage your physicality. So I'm practising letting go of this fleshy envelope as I age, which is the mortality principle I'm talking about.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): They say that a near-death experience can give your remaining life a brightness.
SPENCE: I don't know how I'm going to die, but I do know that having experienced cancer, that it could be that that's one face of my death. And so I just live with that now, in my body. And what that gives me is a real sense where I often say to myself, Are you making the choices you want to make now, cause now might be all you've got.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): When it comes to death, people often talk about their 'legacy'. What am I leaving behind?
SPENCE: I'm now sort of taking a different view of my life, which is, what do I want to outlive me?
(Music)
And it doesn't mean I'm now going to do wonderful things, it might mean I take more rest and appreciate the simple things and just, draw the world in through my senses and be really grateful for, with all the complexity and inequality that we live with, it, it's a pretty amazing thing to be alive.
I got up really early this morning. I knew I was coming here in peak hour traffic and I wanted to give myself good time. So I got up really early and I live near a river in the inner west and I watched the sunrise and I watched the light come and I had this great cup of tea and I've got two silly dogs and I was just so in the passage of time and in the world and you know, I think I'm just sort of meet each day as it comes.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Victoria is well loved and respected within the queer community and in the funeral industry she's a little David, standing looking up at Goliath, stone in hand.
In her third act, she's very visible. And that visibility is important to her.
SPENCE: I have a daughter in her early twenties and I think it's important for younger women to see a woman in her late fifties heading into her sixties, who is meeting the culture as it changes and is practising yielding and practising learning new things and also refining and clarifying what I feel is important to share.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): I've got my own kids, two of them are in their 20s and I often think about how they see me, whether I'm setting a good example to them.
Maybe I need to think more about "yielding" - which I think from Victoria means conceding. Not just space to younger generations, but also conceding to their wisdom - that they are smart, they have new pathways and we can learn from them.
STYNES: What does it mean to be a visible, older queer woman holding this space, not just in the funeral industry and in the queer community, but just as a person in their power.
SPENCE: And it's a fascinating time. I'm 59 and I am simultaneously highly visible and on some levels, totally invisible. And that combination is fascinating to me and fantastic. In the sense that my relationship to power and presence is stronger in one way and diminished in another. My visibility is really in my capacity to listen and to yield. And as I age, and also because I am in this dance with my own mortality, and I've taken on that as a dance partner, I know I'm going to die, and I want to die however it's going to happen, but I really want to be able to express and be present, not just in power, but in the power of vulnerability.
Because I find that as I age, certain capacities just aren't there now, you know. But what comes in their place, I think, is more powerful.
I sort of just have none of the insecurities that I had as a younger person. I just, I don't give a fuck really about how I look or what other people think of me. But I really feel like I'm in my third act and it's time to speak now and I'm just going to do it.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): The cliche is, “Live every day like it could be your last!” But Victoria’s advice is kinder. If we understand that we take a first and last breath - we need to ask ourselves. Am I living the way I want to live?
It’s our one wild and precious life. We don’t get a sequel!
So, are we taking in the sunrise? Connecting with people, animals and nature - in ways that make us feel glad? Are we listening to the call of our purpose?
As mentioned my mum has been unwavering in her refusal to discuss her own death and what she wants for her funeral.
But after my chat with Victoria I decided to give her a call.
(Sound of phone ringing and picking up)
YOSHIKO: Moshi moshi.
STYNES: Hi Yoshiko.
YOSHIKO: Hi, how are you going?
STYNES: Good, how are you?
YOSHIKO: Yeah, good thank you.
STYNES: Can you hear me okay?
YOSHIKO: Yeah, I can.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): At first Mum thought I wanted to talk about my own death and that was not easy.
YOSHIKO: I say that's unimaginable, and there's no word I can say before it. If any of my kids die before parents, it's, it's worst nightmare. It's just can't imagine. It's terrible thing to think even. To, to create words or think about words to a child who died before me.
STYNES: Yeah, that's probably fair enough. Do you have a thought about your own funeral?
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): A few months before this chat Mum had gone to Japan, where she caught up with her brother Michihiro. He’s a Buddhist priest and oversees the family crypt at his own temple.
YOSHIKO: My own funeral - I have been thinking, Michihiro did offer my ashes can go, part of my ashes can go to his temple, family grave.
STYNES: Yeah.
YOSHIKO: But I don't mind, I really, I have been living here for nearly 60 years, most of my life here anyway.
STYNES: Yeah, so you don't want your ashes mingling with your ancestors in the temple?
YOSHIKO: I don't think so, I don't think that, I, I want to.
STYNES: Yeah. Well, see, I never knew, I did not know that until right now.
YOSHIKO: No, it's only we talked last month with Michihiro.
STYNES: Yeah.
YOSHIKO: Yeah. So, I did say to Rei, you can play music for me.
STYNES: Yeah.
YOSHIKO: And she said yes.
STYNES: Okay. That's the whole entire ceremony is Rei.
YOSHIKO: It’s simple.
STYNES: I like it.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): So that’s my niece, Rei, who is a theatre kid in high school and would have everyone falling over sobbing if she sang a sad song at Yoshiko’s funeral.
STYNES: I think, you know, every time I've been to a funeral, obviously I haven't been to as many as you, but they always play the Lord's Prayer. You know that song? The Lord's my shepherd.
YOSHIKO: I know that's so sad. I don't want kind of thing.
STYNES: Well that's’ another thing I didn’t know, ok, so there you go we’re getting some detail, we’re getting some shape now.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): Finding out these details required some digging and some persistence but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. My Mum just wants a chill funeral with some low-key crying, a few not too corny or God-y songs and for all the people she gave birth to not want to murder each other.
STYNES: And what about your ashes? Like, you know, dad did say clearly and it made so much sense - Cradle Mountain in Tasmania and Robe in South Australia. What about you? Where would your ashes make sense to go?
YOSHIKO: Oh just sprinkled in Geelong.
STYNES: In Geelong?
YOSHIKO: You are not allowed to do that these days. You've got to have permission.
STYNES: Yeah.
YOSHIKO: Yeah. So I think you can just put ashes in a little box.
YUMI STYNES (Voiceover): During the phone call my mum really emphasised that after her death she wanted it to be easy for people to go and honour her. Her older sister’s husband wanted his ashes to be interred miles from Tokyo and it’s meant that if she ever wants to go say hi it’s more than a day-long mission. With that in mind, I’m not sure about Geelong, like Geelong Yoshiko? Geelong, why?!
And if it does transpire that her ashes end up in Geelong, well I guess I will laugh my ass off the whole schlep there, and the whole long schlep back.
(Theme music)
This chat made me think about how personal death is. For my mum Yoshiko, it’s something that doesn't require a lot of fanfare.
For me, and for today’s guest Victoria Spence, it’s understanding that death is here, and it will come for us. That doesn’t have to be a scary reality that we turn our backs on. Acknowledging death’s presence can help us shed our nonsense and our petty grievances and live more fully - right now.
Pretty cool, huh.
This has been SEEN, hosted by me, Yumi Stynes, and produced by Audiocraft in collaboration with SBS.
From Audiocraft, Season 3 of SEEN was produced by Laura Brierley Newton and Olivia O'Flynn.
Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta and Executive Producer is Lorna Clarkson and Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Joel Supple and Max Gosford with special thanks to Caroline Gates.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi-O Studios.
And music is by Yeo.
SEEN’s original concept was by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn.
