A small note on honouring those who are no longer with us in physical form.

An ode to Carolyn Elliot.

When someone as significant as Carolyn Elliott passes, particularly in the way that she did, to suicide, we often want to unpack their death and locate some kind of “cause” - something that makes us feel better about the situation and that lands it somewhere inside of us, that we can locate and have certainty over.

Which is precisely the antithesis of what death actually offers. Death is a direct portal into the existential fears that we all have, sitting somewhere deep inside of us — the fear that we are but human, inifinte, only here for a brief moment in the spectrum of the time continuum.

It’s very human to need to work it all out and get to the “bottom” of something. It’s a deeply human impulse — to work a death “out,” to arrive at the bottom of it, as if grief had a floor.

In the days since her passing, I’ve watched people go live to channel what they believe happened to her. To narrate her final days as though they’d witnessed them. To offer a root cause, packaged and certain, delivered with some kind of hierarchical confidence.

I have my own insights here. I work in this field — as a psychopomp, someone who sits at the threshold between the living and the dead, who has spent years learning to be with a soul in transition rather than to explain it. And still, I have no interest in offering “my take” publicly.

A take implies a conclusion.

But the deeper work that comes with being around death is this: it brings up all that we have to confront around our own relationship to the finite, to this physical form. Our own innate buried complexes and terror around death… which is, ultimately, the terror of our capacity for aliveness — the irony of death is that it is the very entry point to experiencing the inifinte.. when we make peace with it and journey through and beyond our own existential terrors. I use the word existential here, to honour Carolyn’s profound body of work, Existential Kink. One that most of us could be reading right now, which would be more of an honouring to her, than our “hot take” on her death.

Reducing a person’s death to one root cause erases the complexity of the psyche that carried her, and everything else she may have been holding underneath it. Carolyn was a whole person. Not a case study, not a lesson, not a warning dressed up as reverence. Whatever the true circumstances of her passing, she deserves to be met as the beautifully layered, contradictory, divine being she was in life. Diagnosing her death in public is a kind of diminishment dressed as tribute.

There’s a season, right after someone dies, when the appropriate posture is humility. Not analysis. A quieting. A bowing down, for a while, before the mystery of what a life was and what its ending means. Public psychoanalysis of a person’s death skips that entirely. It rushes toward resolution because resolution is easier to sit with than grief.

A friend of mine, Dane Tomas, put something to me this morning that’s stayed with me all day: that this instinct to produce the next hot take, the next channelled explanation, is tacky. That’s the right word for it. It is tacky — and comes across in the way it is to fill a silence that was never asking to be filled.

So here is what I’d offer instead: save the analysis. Let it go quiet in you for a moment. Feel what’s actually there in her passing, underneath the need to explain it — which might be more confronting than a clean narrative ever could be, because Carolyn’s death hits close to something in many of us. It makes us enquire about the cost of the work she did. It reflects back something about our own mortality, our own shadow…

That’s my honouring of this woman who shaped so many lives, including in ways I’m still discovering in myself. Not to reduce her, not to explain her, but to let her remain exactly as she was.

On honouring the dead

If the impulse to explain isn’t the way through, what is? A few things I return to, in this work and in my own life, when someone significant has died.

Storytelling. Not the story of how someone died, but the story of how they lived. Tell the moment she said the thing that changed how you thought about your own shame. Tell the way she laughed, if you knew her, or the way her writing sounded in your head like she was in the room with you, if you didn’t. Stories keep a person textured. They resist the flattening that theories of death always perform.

Recalling fond memories, out loud, with other people. Grief isolates when it’s held alone and processed in silence, or worse, in a comment section. Call someone who loved her work too. Say her name to them. Let the memory move between you instead of staying locked in your own head, where it will start to calcify into a theory whether you want it to or not.

Simple rituals of release. Light a candle at the same time each evening for a week, or for the traditional forty days many traditions mark as a soul’s transition. Write her a letter — not for publication, just for the fire, or the earth, or the drawer. Speak her name aloud with gratitude before you speak it with anything else.

Marking the threshold, not the cause. In many traditions, the emphasis at death isn’t on what happened but on where the soul is going, and what it needs from the living to travel well. Offer that instead. A blessing. A prayer. Good company on the way out, rather than a verdict on the way she got there.

Letting the not-knowing stay unresolved. This might be the hardest one. Some things about a person’s death are simply not ours to know, and reaching for false certainty to soothe our own discomfort is its own small act of disrespect. Reverence sometimes looks like an open hand instead of a closed conclusion.

We don’t owe the dead our theories. We owe them our presence, and our willingness to let their complexity remain intact even after they’re gone.