We Are All Apprentices of Death: From Recreation to Re-Creation
Santa Muerte—Holy Death—pregnant with the world: every ending holds the seed of re-creation.
Photo: Tina Gong / Labyrinthos. Artwork: Fabio Listrani, Santa Muerte Tarot.
When I first came to deathwork, I thought my role was to help others die better. I would be the guide, the helper, the professional. I believed detachment would keep me safe, that I could witness without being changed. Looking back, I see the savior-impulse, the avoidance woven into that call. That beginning was less about Death and more about me. And yet, even in its imperfection, it was the doorway that led me here.
There is a difference between recreation and re-creation. Recreation are the things we do for pleasure, because we like how they make us feel. We read recreationally because stories bring delight. We practice yoga recreationally because it loosens our bodies and settles our minds. We dance because it feels good. These things restore us for a time, but they do not necessarily change us.
Re-creation is different. To be re-created as a reader, a yogi, or a dancer means allowing the practice to claim you, to shape your life, to change who you are. That is the difference: recreation is enjoyment; re-creation is transformation.
In deathwork, the difference is stark. Recreation is moving through a shift on autopilot: turning off lights, fetching water, saying polite hellos in the hallway. Re-creation is pulling up a chair and listening to the whole story of how someone ended up here, from the very beginning. It is sitting quietly with a man whose chest rattles with the sound of dying and offering nothing but the reverence of your breath beside his. It is holding the daughter who missed her mother’s last moments and letting her weep in your arms until her body softens again.
Re-creation is choosing to love and to trust that even if the cost is high, you will be remade by the weight of the exchange; remade into someone more honest, more authentic, more whole.
I was reminded of this truth recently as I watched one of my apprentices complete her training. She didn’t just collect skills or move through the motions. She didn’t practice death recreationally. She surrendered to Death and allowed herself to be re-created. The journey was not easy or bright, and the path was often unclear. But what emerged through that surrender was not performance or pretense, but a truer self; one shaped by compassion, steadied by authenticity, and strengthened for service. She is a living example of what it means to apprentice to Death.
My own hospice shifts have felt muted, as if I’ve been moving through them on autopilot. Grief has piled up, and my body’s instinct has been to close. When I learned that a dear friend in Room 157 had died, exactly three months to the day after my beloved client Roxane, my shoulders sagged beneath the weight.
Now, when I walk the halls, I don’t see only the patient before me. I see layers of ghosts, superimposed upon each room: the gruff woman who died last week, the alcoholic whose family mourned both his passing and the life he might have lived, the charming New Orleanian from the spring, the young father blanketed in flowers by his children last winter, the cat lover from last year, the grandmother who once volunteered in these same halls. Their words echo, their stories overlap, and I feel the weight of so much accumulated loss.
My mind responds by spinning its own stories: I shouldn’t be grieving this deeply. Maybe I’m not tending grief well enough. Maybe I’m even losing my grasp on reality. Fear and doubt stretch long shadows, and no wonder I find myself offering only safe, measured connection, the kind that keeps my heart protected.
I can see now how my practice has, at times, slipped into recreation as a way of protecting myself from the raw mystery of re-creation. Routine tasks, familiar rituals, the comfort of showing up as teacher rather than apprentice. These soothe, but they also shield me from the surrender Death demands, the kind that reshapes us in ways we cannot control.
To honor my apprentice’s graduation, I will place in her hands a Santa Muerte tarot deck. In one of its images, Holy Death appears robed like Our Lady of Guadalupe, but here she is pregnant, carrying a perfect globe within her. I see this as Death gestating the earth itself, life sheltered in her skeletal belly. A vision that reminds me: within her, every ending already carries the seed of renewal.
Death does not ask us to witness only the gentle parts. She beckons us into the composting: to stand in the loneliness of the graveyard, to stir soup in Roxane’s kitchen and ache for her laughter at the glass table, to remember 157’s gentle reminder not to sweat the small stuff, life is too fleeting to waste on what will grow back or fade away. To heed the whispered exhortations of the dying: live every moment, find your joy, write the book, call your mother, hold your beloved’s hand tonight. These lessons, offered in surrender, have re-created me into one who treasures each day with unguarded eyes.
When I began this work, I thought I could stand at a distance. Guide but not walk. Help but not learn. Stay professional, detached, unchanged. But Death had other plans. She has undone me and remade me and I am only eight years in.
She has re-created me: from wine lover to teetotaler, from social butterfly to bookworm, from always making new friends to always saying goodbye, from helper to witness, from rescuer to mirror, from safe to surrendered. With each layer stripped away, I move closer to what feels true. It isn’t always bright or bountiful, and that’s okay. Darkness holds beauty too. The moon’s illumination is as necessary as the sun’s bright rays.
By loving myself in both the light and the shadow, I step closer to integrity. And I suspect that is the only way to prepare for death in the end.
This is the lesson I keep returning to: we are all apprentices of Death. She is the one who teaches us to surrender to the mystery of re-creation, even when our humanity longs only for the comfort of recreation. Death has re-created me into a teacher, but never into a master. Like my students model for me, as they bravely allow Death to change them and trust that they will be stitched back together as something closer to the truth of who they always were, I remain her apprentice still, learning again and again how to trust her reshaping.
So I ask you: has your relationship with Death, or with life itself, slipped into something recreational, safe, familiar? Or can you open enough to let her re-create you?
Jade Adgate is a death doula, educator, and writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Through her work with Farewell Education and the Farewell Fellowship, she guides apprentices and communities in remembering Death as teacher, companion, and sacred mirror. Her writing and teaching weave personal story, cultural lineage, and spiritual practice, inviting others to walk more honestly with mortality and more fully with life. She is tending her first book into being, “This Is How We Say Farewell”.
