… When You Die?

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of preparedness for your unconventional spiritual practice, whether your practice supports others or it doesn’t. I talked about any significant disruption to that relationship needs to be tended.  Whether it’s managing subscriptions and payment portals, or telling the neighbors and tidying altars, it’s challenging to organize those things in a way that someone else knows what to do with them.

When you die, these things become perhaps more challenging, because your people are managing grief while making decisions about your spiritual practice. That single element makes it even more important that you’ve had these conversations beforehand, and that you’ve written them down so that no one has to remember the details under duress.

And these conversations aren’t easy, even when your people are trustworthy. If they don’t, these conversations can range from stressful to unsafe.

Yet those are often the easier parts of spiritual practice preparedness. The deeper questions underlying that organization are:

• Who knows what your altar means?
• Who knows which objects are sacred?
• Who knows what should happen to your runes?
• Who tells your community?
• Who tends your animals?
• Who knows about your relationship with the land?
• Who tells the beings with whom you’ve been in relationship that you’re gone?

More telling, what happens to those relationships when the person
who has been the bridge between them disappears?

Do you know?

This is the point that spiritual practice preparedness becomes something more than planning. If your practice is relational, then your death is a change in those relationships. That change needs to be acknowledged. As a result of it, something may need to be released, returned, entrusted, or continued. Likewise, some relationships may need tending, some may need a goodbye.

You may not be the person who gets to do that.

That doesn’t mean you have to script what happens after you. It means begin the conversation now.  

Considerations:

• Do you have a successor
• If so, cultivate a transference ritual with them.
• If not, who should deathwalk your practice?
• Who should be present for that deathwalk?

This dialogue is the heart of No Loose Ends: The Practice After You, my 2026 deathwalking class about preparing not only the practical details of your spiritual practice, but the relationships that will remain when you can no longer tend them yourself.