Wake Up, Human

Ep.25: Honoring the Death of Things: An Ode to Letting Go

• Shannon M. Wills

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Our modern world rushes past death and endings, urging us to "move on" before we've properly acknowledged what's been lost. But what if this cultural tendency keeps us subtly tethered to the past, preventing us from fully opening to what comes next?

Inspired by the death of the hawk on a busy urban street (and the woman who stopped to collect her body), this episode examines how cultural barriers like commodification, clock-time orientation, and death aversion block our natural grieving processes, and how pushing back against these norms allows us to reclaim our basic humanness. By following our "sacred compass" rather than cultural pressures, we create space not just for proper grieving, but for the new life waiting to emerge.

Honoring the death of things—whether relationships, dreams, hopes, or phases of our lives—is essential for genuine healing and growth. Rituals of acknowledgment, from earth altars to simple moments of prayer, can help us properly release what has ended.

As we enter the harvest season, a time traditionally associated with both abundance and the beginning of nature's dying cycle, it's a potent moment to consider: What in your life needs proper acknowledgment? What might be waiting to enter if you open your hands heart, and release what has already gone?

Shannon W.:

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 25 of the Wake Up Human podcast.

Shannon W.:

Episode 25 feels like a milestone. It is a milestone. I'm going to pat myself on the back for this. I'm your host, shannon Wills, and in this episode I'm going to be talking about something that potentially could be considered to be morbid, but it's not morbid at all in my opinion. Potentially could be considered to be morbid, but it's not morbid at all in my opinion. I'm going to be talking about honoring the death of things, and this is for the purpose not only of honoring death but also of honoring life, of letting things go that need to be released so that we can make room for the new and for the live to come back in, and to make room for rebirth and the spiraling around to the next chapters in our lives and things like that. I have a cold, I'm a little stuffy, but I think I'm going to just push through because this feels like the moment to have this conversation. So, if you are someone who interested or not shy, to explore some deep topics like death, but you also want to have those explorations be practical, like how do we actually approach the suffering or the death or the challenge or the hardships in our lives and use those as fodder for living more whole, connected and joyful lives. That's what I really also want to explore in this episode. So if that sounds good to you, please come on in and join me and I will see you on the inside.

Shannon W.:

Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode about honoring the death of things.

Shannon W.:

I was inspired to share this episode by a story I heard on Nextdoor or a story I read on Nextdoor. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Nextdoor, but it's an app, a neighborhood app, where people share stories or just posts about what is going on in their lives, what they need, lost and found questions, requests for support, offers of services and such. And there was a woman who posted on Nextdoor in my neighborhood and she posted about a hawk. It was a hawk that had been hit by a car and killed on a very busy street in our neighborhood and she posted to tell the story about how she had seen this hawk be hit. The hawk was on the sidewalk on the side of the road and was with her partner. There's a male and a female hawk that lived in this neighborhood and that were sort of beloved and that people watched and cared for. And this couple, this pair of hawks, had also hatched a hatchling, a baby hawk that was accompanying them. So there was this family of hawks the two parent hawks and the younger hawk. They would be seen sitting on the fences in the neighborhood and up on the power lines and trees and things like that power lines and trees and things like that.

Shannon W.:

So the hawks were on the side of the road and the male hawk and the female hawk took off from the side of the road, took flight, but the angle of the female hawk was such that she flew sort of into traffic. She didn't fly high up enough and she was more at an angle into traffic and she was hit by a car and the car that hit the hawk kept going and the woman behind that car who was driving the car behind saw the hawk get hit and she pulled over and she was hoping that she would see the hawk that was still alive. She was just hoping that maybe it had just barely been clipped but unfortunately the hawk had been killed, or possibly fortunately, if it may, have saved the hawk some suffering, but she had been killed on impact. And this woman who stopped was touched and saddened because she knew this hawk, she knew the hawk family and she said that the male hawk had flown above the road, above the street, and was up on a power line and was watching and was watching and was watching for quite a while as the woman pulled over, looked at the hawk. The fallen hawk was sitting there trying to decide what to do as the other hawk watched from above and she eventually she took the hawk and she took it back to her home, which apparently was just right around the corner, and she buried the hawk in her yard and she was posting on Nextdoor, she said, because she wanted to let people know in the neighborhood who might know that hawk. She wanted to let people know what had happened and she wanted to let them know what she had done as well in an attempt to honor this bird. She did not want to leave the bird lying in the road to get run over multiple times by other vehicles.

Shannon W.:

And as I read this post and I read through the comments on the post, there were a lot of comments and most of the comments were saying very supportive things, like you know. Thank you for caring enough to stop, thank you for checking on the hawk, thank you for taking her to a place that was a respectful, safe place to honor her and bury her. And there were a few critical posts on Next Door, which is not surprising because that's just what happens on posts of any type of social media. You're going to see critical posts usually, and I was looking at what the posts said. One of them said oh, you put her in a grave. How adorable Did you put up a gravestone and put her name on it, just sort of mocking her.

Shannon W.:

And there were several others who said you shouldn't have done that.

Shannon W.:

That might be illegal. You needed to call the authorities. That's a protected bird. And then there were also a couple that said wow, you have such a big ego that you're posting on Nextdoor. You want to let everybody know how much of a champion you are and what an amazing good thing you've done, so that people will just clap for you and cheer you on. And the woman responded to those posts and she just basically said look, I'm not going to worry about what you all are saying. I did what I felt was best in my heart at the moment when I saw this bird who had been killed, and I wanted to do the best possible thing that I could and I wanted to let the community know what happened to her and say what you will. But I made my best decision that I could at the time, and I was just touched by this post because I felt the woman's conviction to do what she thought was the best for the bird and, very specifically, to honor the bird, to give the bird an honorable burial, and what I thought was that she had been guided by her sacred compass.

Shannon W.:

This is an idea that I've been sitting with for the past several weeks, this concept of having a sacred compass to guide us in our lives, because life is so full and can be so busy for us. For us, and it's full of distractions, it's fragmented and we can be pulled back and forth by competing priorities in our world. And if we're moving really quickly especially, it can be hard to know what is the right thing to do in any given moment. And the compass of the modern world is driven or guided by speed, profit, greed, power, fear, often consumption, lack. There's a lot of what I would call unhealthy motivations. There's a lot of what I would call unhealthy motivations that are guiding the compass of our decisions in the modern world. And that compass actually is so strongly magnetized that even if we're very heart-centered people, we can get confused and we can get pulled by that very strong cultural compass as well.

Shannon W.:

And I think having what I'm calling a sacred compass can be a real gift. And that is what I mean by sacred is that it is honoring life, it is honoring the earth and it's honoring the value of other beings. So really letting ourselves and our lives be magnetized by or pulled back toward the heart, taking time to honor life amidst the speed and the hustle and the worry that we're all so steeped in right now. And so, regardless of what one might think about what this woman chose to do. I was really honoring that she had chosen to follow her own sacred compass.

Shannon W.:

In that moment, and as I was thinking about this and how she had wanted to honor the death of this hawk, I sat with that. I was struck by something because, you know, right now we're entering the fall in the northern hemisphere, the autumn season, and this is the harvest time. We've just passed the time in the Celtic year of Lunasa, the harvest festivals, and we're nearing the autumn equinox. We're right at the autumn equinox and one of the things that I sometimes ask at this time of year, and I hear others ask, is what am I harvesting at this time? What seeds did I sow in this past year? And then, what am I harvesting? What is the learning? What is the growth? What is the harvest from all that I have sown?

Shannon W.:

And when I was considering the story of the hawk, I had kind of an aha moment and I was considering death and I thought, yes, it's, it's a good question to ask what am I harvesting? It's good to look back on on the year and see what seeds I planted and what have grown from that. But I realized that I'm overlooking something with this question of what am I harvesting? And that is because I have gone through a year where there was a lot that actually died. There was especially my relationship, my relationship with my partner, which you have heard all about if you've been listening to this podcast. This year my relationship really died and I was thinking about, well, what have I harvested from the death of that relationship? What have I harvested from the end and the transformation?

Shannon W.:

And then something hit me with the story of the hawk and I thought wait a minute, I'm asking what I've harvested, but I haven't ever really honored the death of it in the first place. Now, I don't know how that sounds to you listening to it, but for me it was a shock to you listening to it, but for me it was a shock. I didn't really realize that I hadn't honored the death of it, because I have been looking at it for the whole year. I have fought it, I have talked about it, I have told the story of it, I have stood in my power around it, I've gone to therapy, I've shared it with friends and family, I traveled, I explored new depths, I built new relationships. I turned around and looked into my shadow and sort of reawoke some parts of me that had been sleeping, and then I was just down in the mud and the muck of things for a while, sort of digging for the pearls from that experience.

Shannon W.:

But none of that, none of what I did was actually stopping to look at that bird, you know, and to see the lifeless form of something that used to be alive and vibrant and now is gone, and to really look at that. And I thought you know all of this that I've been doing to fight and to heal and to discern and to contemplate. Yet I haven't even really really looked at it and I have been feeling still a bit tied, tied to the relationship, even as I move forward. I feel something sort of tying me to it and I thought I wonder if that is it, thought I wonder if that is it, that I haven't honored the death of it yet, and I wonder if you, listening, may have ever had a situation like this as well, where something was over and you moved on, but then you realized you were still holding on to it.

Shannon W.:

I think that's a really easy thing for us to do when there's a hurt, because we're also good at moving really quickly and onto the next thing that we need to do about it. But we're not trained in our culture and our lives to really look at the death of something unless it's literally right in front of our face like a hawk like a hawk. But when it's a death of a relationship it's easier to just kind of look at like how am I going to fix this, how am I going to fix the pain and heal the hurt? And the actual death just kind of gets stuck in our pocket while we work on all of our worksheets and meantime we haven't actually taken the time to stop and look at it and grieve it or feel the hurt of that loss or that ending and then let it go. And because we haven't, we're still somehow holding that.

Shannon W.:

And I was thinking again about the hawk hit by the car. And I have done what that woman did in different versions many times with cats or raccoons or squirrels or birds that have been hit by a car and killed. I've stopped my car, pulled over, picked up the animal and moved them from the road, and sometimes I've buried them and moved them from the road, and sometimes I've buried them, or sometimes I have set them aside and just moved them out of the way of the oncoming tires so that they could be returned to the earth in a way that's more respectful, so that they wouldn't be run over again and again. And there's an honoring in that there's actually taking the time to stop and pull over and honor that little life, that little spirit. And that's why I was kind of surprised when I realized, wow, I haven't even done that for my own relationship. I can look back on the year and I can see myself holding it together, keeping everything running, taking care of myself and my needs and the needs of others around me. And I've been tough and I've been scrappy and I've made a lot of forward movement. But it's so interesting that in all of this process of triage and repair, what I haven't done is really look at it and do what's needed to move it to the side of the road, to honor it, to bury it, to let it go, to let it go with respect and dignity.

Shannon W.:

And it feels good here to talk about why it's important to honor the death of something. For one reason it's important to honor the death of something For one reason it's important to honor the death of something out of respect for that thing itself, for the life that it had, for what it brought, for what it was, for their own sake and their own value and dignity. Second, it's important to honor the person we are. If we were in relationship to this being, to honor any parts of us that suffered or died along with that other being or with that relationship being severed. And third, it's important to honor the death of something in order to reconnect ourselves to our ancient wisdom, because honoring death is a very human part of us.

Shannon W.:

Sitting with death is something that is not done in our modern world, so commonly we often don't look at death hardly at all. In fact we make it a point not to look at it, to pretend it's not there again until it's right in front of us, if at all. But in our ancient past, and in our even not so ancient past, human beings have had a very close relationship with death and we have created many rituals and cultural practices in order to honor death. So when we honor the death of something, we reconnect to that part of us that is the ancient human who knows how to witness death and to be with it and not to just drive by, drive past and let it lie. And another reason to honor the death of something is what I alluded to in the introduction, which is that honoring the death of something allows us to let go of it, to release it to the universe and then to be held by universal intelligence. And when we do that, we open our hands to receive something new. So as long as we're holding on to something and we're not ready to let it go, we can't or won't let it go. There might be something waiting to come to us next, but if we're holding on to what's already died, our hands are not open. There's no space for the new to enter in. So when we honor the death of something, we can become free of it in that letting go, not in the way that we don't care about it or that we forget it, but in a way that it's no longer. We're no longer holding us and it's no longer holding us. We can honor that thing that we loved or appreciated or valued and we can let it take a place in our hearts. But then we open ourselves to what life is asking of us next. So we witness it, we grieve it, we give it a place in our hearts, if that's where we want it to be, or we bury it, we honor it and then we continue on.

Shannon W.:

Sometimes we may want someone else to honor the death. So, for example, I wanted so much for my partner to do what I thought he should do to honor the death. So, for example, I wanted so much for my partner to do what I thought he should do to honor the death of our relationship. I wanted him to apologize, I wanted him to take accountability, I wanted him to see me and hear my pain, I wanted him to respond and to validate my perspectives, and that just didn't happen. And the thing is we can't expect that that will happen. Honoring the death doesn't mean we're waiting for someone else to honor that. For us, honoring the death of something so that we can move on, it's a personal practice. It's something that we can do regardless of the actions of others.

Shannon W.:

The woman who buried the hawk regardless of the actions of others the woman who buried the hawk. She came onto Nextdoor, I believe, because she wanted to share her pain. She did want it to be seen and she wanted her love of the hawk and other people's love of the hawk to also have an opportunity to be shared there. But she didn't go onto Nextdoor and wait for people to validate her, the hurt that she felt before she buried the bird. She actually followed her intuition to decide what she felt was best and then she did the honoring. She did the burying, she made the ritual of it and then the being held happened afterward. But that's not why she did it. She did it because it was the natural and the human and the respectful honoring thing to do.

Shannon W.:

So, just taking it back to ourselves that we have the power to honor losses, deaths, separations, severances, that we don't need someone else to do it for us, we don't need anyone else to validate that for us, for us to do it. It's really nice if we can have it, it's really nice if we can be held and embraced and supported and seen and witnessed. But if we cannot, that death still needs to be honored and I just want to name that. This can be for the death of a relationship. It can be for the death of a person, an animal, a bird, like the hawk. It can be the death of something like the past that never was, or the dream that didn't come true, or the hopes that we hoped. It can be for a sacred place that was destroyed, or for a community or people who were displaced or killed. It can be for past grievances. It can be for circumstances that unfolded long, long ago and were never grieved and were never honored ancestral grievances, ancestral traumas that were never healed. It can be for a tree that was cut down to make a space for a parking lot. It can be for anything that needs to be seen and to be grieved.

Shannon W.:

So what are some ways to do this, to honor the death of things? The most important thing is to actually stop, to do this, actually stop. Do not rush by, you know. Don't let our culture of speed and fear stop us. We're so busy that we just go by, and whether it's driving past a hawk on the sidewalk that's been hit, or whether it's charging full force forward toward our healing when something has died, we need to stop long enough to recognize that honoring the death of things is a thing and that it's important, and that what's being asked of us is not to turn away from it, but actually to really see it and to honor it. To honor that transition and that death For the hawk or for the animal in the road.

Shannon W.:

We might move it off the road and we can cover it with flowers or leaves or put it safely, place it safely in the pines or the junipers or the sagebrush. We can bury it if we can, but whatever we do, we can give it space to allow its spirit a dignified home so it can compost into the earth and its spirit can be free. And with a relationship we can do this as well. We can stop, we can give ourselves the gift of slowing down long enough to look at it, to look at the death of it, and in our own way, we can set it aside and create a space for it to compost and for its spirit to also rise. So, if it's a relationship, if it's a hurt, if it's a transgression, creating an earth altar for this is a wonderful ritual where we can gather items that reflect or symbolize a relationship or whatever it is that we're wanting to honor the death of. We can carry them and place them in a space where we can sit with them, we can consider, we can grieve, we can hold them and tangibly release them, leaving them to compost into the earth and to become something new, for the spirit of that thing to die and to rise again. And of course, when I talk about gathering these items and using them in our earth altars and leaving them to compost. I'm talking about items that can compost or that are already part of the earth, so stones or pine cones or leaves or sticks or branches, flowers, bones or other items that can be put together to symbolize something that we're letting go of and honoring the death of. And it can also be that if we have something that's not compostable, we still place that on our altar and then we just bring that back in with us when we're done and maybe we give that away or maybe we keep it, but it holds a new energy now that it's been part of that transformative ritual of release.

Shannon W.:

Now it's not always possible to create an earth altar or to have a place to bury something, or to stop and take an animal out of the road, for that matter. Sometimes we're literally really in a hurry or we're surrounded by concrete and buildings and we just do not have the opportunity to really honor something the way that we would like, the way that we're called, and, in that case, even just offering a prayer, stopping to offer a prayer, taking a breath, letting ourselves drop into our hearts for a moment and be present to the death of something, be present to the honoring of something. Even if we're driving down the road, even if we're going up an escalator, even if we're getting on a plane, we can always internally create a space within our hearts to offer a prayer, to offer a bow to something that has died. When we hear a story in the news and we're struck by that a person who has passed something really painful that has happened we can stop and just give it a moment and wish some loving, respectful, honoring energy to those entities or those beings. Even that, that shift in our energy is so much more than what most of the world is doing right now, and it's not only healing for whatever situation we're sending the energy to. It's healing for us as well, because when we stop to honor something like that, again we connect back into our original humanity and that is a healing act for us. It's a gift to ourselves to grieve and to breathe. It feeds our soul and it feeds our spirit, even if it's just in the time of an in-breath and an out-breath. And now, because we gave ourselves that gift, we're going to show up as more of a healing presence in our relationships and the community around us.

Shannon W.:

So just to close on this, I want to say a few last points around our culture, because we have cultural norms in our society that may actually keep us from being able to honor death in the ways that we would like to, despite our best intentions, like the hawk. Life and death are majestic and sacred, but our culture has commodified life and death in so many ways, just like it has commodified almost everything In our industrial culture. Life and death and health and sickness have become industries, and industries run on profit margins and thus they become commodified. So they're now commodified but they're no longer sacred, because when we commodify something we use money as the compass to determine its value. And when we determine value by money, by profit, that something can make, value by money, by profit that something can make, then we completely miss whatever value it may have to our heart, soul and spirit. So I'm not saying we don't take into account monetary value of things. We need to do that in this culture because our culture is so centered around that and we need that for our survival. But what I am suggesting is that we set aside the question of monetary value until we've had a chance to check in with those soul level valuations right? What really matters to life? What is the sacred compass guide us toward? What does the sacred compass guide us toward? And then we can ask about the very real considerations around money.

Shannon W.:

Another cultural model that guides our decisions very strongly in this modern world is the model of clock time that our lives are scheduled and calendared and run by clock time rather than running by what we could call sacred time, the time that our ancestors would have lived by. That is a way of living that honors what is needed in the moment rather than what is posted on our calendar. So if something arises that needs our attention, then we're able to put our attention to that in the moment instead of doing a quick calculation and deciding whether we have time for it. But our culture has us running so fast that even if we want to stop and honor the death of something, even if we do recognize it as sacred and have an intention to be able to prioritize it, that way we can be rushing past it so quickly that we don't feel we have time to stop. It's like the traffic going so fast on the boulevard it would have been very easy for that woman to just drive by because she didn't have time to stop All of us people coming and going in our lives and not honoring what's happening, the births and the deaths, and we just keep on going and we don't have time to take a breath.

Shannon W.:

I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I am saying that this is a cultural construct that we're all living by and that it has manipulated our sense of what is important. And our culture is also very death averse. We see death in our linear, mechanistic, in our linear mechanistic Western industrial culture, as we see death as an end rather than part of a cycle of ending and beginning. We don't want to look at it and we don't want to talk about it because it feels so painful when we consider it as the end of something. But most cultures consider death and birth part of the spiral of life, a continuation, an ongoing continuation of life that doesn't end but just transforms.

Shannon W.:

And I speak for my own self when I say it can be very hard to shift that perspective from the linear programming we've received to actually shifting into a different, more indigenous type of worldview that sees death as continuation and also honors the interrelationship of those who are living and those who have passed, the ancestors, the spirit beings and the ways that we as the current living generations are the manifestations of all that has come before, that what came before didn't just die and disappear, but what came before transformed itself into us now. By honoring the death of things and having reverence for what is past, we keep the portal of relationship open, we keep the breeze blowing through the windows, we keep the spirit alive. So, by pushing back on some of these cultural norms and honoring the death of things, we're reclaiming our basic humanness, we're refusing to allow our lives to be commodified and we're refusing for our lives to be sacrificed to that machine. And finally, I would say, like the woman who posted on next door about the hawk, when we are called to honor the death of something, we can't worry about what other people might say, whether they might mock us or question our motives or project their own fears on us or tell us they don't like what we did, for whatever reason. Like what we did for whatever reason. What we need to do is trust that sacred compass and to follow where our hearts and our intuition are guiding us, and to trust that, not to be distracted by the compass of the world, the speed and the greed and the fragmentation, and the greed and the fragmentation, but to allow ourselves to feel into the compass of the heart, in that timeless space that honors life and death. It's a space out of time and when we do that we are, oh my gosh. It's such a good thing we're doing for ourselves, because we're reclaiming the art of living, the art of living slowly in a frantic world, the art of honoring what is needed in the moment. We need this, our families and friends need this, our communities need this, our world needs this, our world needs me and our world needs you. So let's do it. Final note I've talked about the ending of my relationship a number of times on this podcast over the past year and it's just been a central focus of my life as I've been healing and transitioning from that space.

Shannon W.:

At this point, I have taken some time to ask myself what is needed to honor the death of this relationship and then do my own practices to help me honor and move through and set aside and let go and open to what's next. And I'm not going to say that I've completely honored this or completely grieved this, but something has definitely shifted and moved. I don't imagine I'm going to be talking about this much more on the podcast. We'll see but it feels like time for something new, as though I've honored the death, I've honored the mystery. I've let go, I've said I don't know. I've tried to laugh and bow and move on, and there have been so very many gifts along the way. So let's see what happens.

Shannon W.:

I'm curious to see where I'll be a year from now and I want to ask you what awaits you next. Is there any death or loss in your life that you haven't yet fully honored, that you haven't yet fully grieved? Is there anything you possibly need to let go of in order to receive what's coming for you next? And, of course, what are you harvesting at this harvest time, while also recognizing that the harvest is also a death, that what we sow is what we reap and what we reap is also what we sow? What is your hawk? What is your relationship that no longer serves? What is the gift that's waiting for you when you honor, release and open to receive honor, to be here with you every step of the way?

Shannon W.:

If you liked this episode and you know someone who you think might benefit or enjoy it, please share this with them. It is as it has been for 25 episodes. This is a labor of love for me and I'm thrilled if it can be a benefit to someone else. If you would like to learn more about me and my work, you can find me at shannonwillscom and if you like my work, I would be so grateful if you would leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform Apple probably and give me a review on there. Give me some stars, because I have a lot of listeners, I have a lot of downloads, but I don't have very many reviews, and I know that having some more nice reviews would help me to get the word out about my podcast and reach more people that it could really serve. So thank you for considering that. Thank you for being here. I'm so grateful for you and I will see you on the next episode. Bye for now, thank you.