Dyeing before Dying: A Return To Indigenous Wisdom on Death

In summer 2025, I was in Benin and went to my paternal grandmother’s grave, visiting it for the first time since she died some years ago. Her grave is not just a stone in the ground of a cemetery, but a room within her family’s house, a place where life continues to unfold with death resting beneath us. With my brother, my aunt and my grand mothers’s siblings, we settled in the room, removed the dust, sat, chatted and performed rituals and prayers for her soul to continue resting in peace and wisdom. There, in the presence of her spirit, we shared foods and drinks that are specially made for death rituals, we laughed and told stories about her and us, not only beautiful ones, but also painful ones.

The room and the entire family compound filled with memory, with sound and silence, with the feeling that she was still among us. We stayed the whole afternoon until dusk. The light dimmed; the air thickened with memory, and I felt how thin the line between life and death truly is. How in our ways, death is never separate from life but part of its ongoing rhythm. It was there, sitting in that room together with everyone, repeating the same ritualistic gestures, being in silence and patient, that I remembered that dying , like dyeing is a slow process, a transformation, a return.

It is from this experience that the workshop Dyeing before Dying: A Return to Indigenous Wisdom on Death was born. An invitation to sit with death, not as an abstract or frightening idea, but as a teacher, a companion; and a mirror.

In this weekend workshop, we will explore what it means to prepare for death while we are still living: To reflect, to make peace, to organise, to imagine our departure, and to reconnect with the ancestral and Indigenous ways that hold death as a continuation of life. We will then begin thinking and writing our own Death Journal, a gentle space to gather our reflections, memories, unfinished conversations, and visions for what we wish to leave behind.

To dye is to steep. To soak. To sit with something long enough for it to leave a mark. It is a slow, deliberate act. It transforms what is plain into something layered, stained, changed.

I borrow this image of dyeing to speak about the process of preparing for dying.

In many Indigenous worldviews death is not the end.

It is a return. A passage. A continuation.

This workshop is an invitation to reconnect with those ways of knowing and to reflect on:

• What kind of death do I long for?

• What needs to be closed, spoken, or reconciled?

• What rituals do I want to accompany my departure?

• How do I imagine my afterlife, not only in spirit, but in memory, in legacy, in land?

We will sit with these questions as a slow dye bath allowing them to seep in, mark us, and guide the way we live and prepare to leave.