Hi Friend,

In the midst of preaching (I'm doing a 2-part series on ‘accompanying history’ at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, about 30 mins south of where I live), visits to lakes and rivers, and doing Sessions with clients, a small, very ordinary looking envelope arrived in the mail a few days ago.

My partner Krissy had told me to keep an eye out for it. By which I mean, for several days, she had asked me, has the envelope arrived? (I'm the one who checks the snail mail).

There had been the envelope that announced the envelope - at first I thought that was The Envelope, but it wasn't.

And then it arrived. She knew it would come for at least a year, when she started filling out paperwork.

Do you want to see it? She asked me after she had opened it.

Sure, I said.

I looked at the check.

It was from the New York State Teachers' Retirement Fund, and it was made out to The Estate of Montgomery Hill.

That's Krissy's eldest son, who passed away over a year ago. He was a linguistics professor at the University of Buffalo, and as such, had paid into the New York State Teachers' Retirement Fund. Upon his unexpected death at age 35, the money went to his estate (once Krissy went through the paperwork of setting up the estate, that is, which she did last year)

A lot of the money will go to taxes and lawyers' fees, she said.

There was a deep bitterness in her voice. A sigh that spoke volumes of unfairness.

It's bad enough that her son died. And now a significant portion (we are currently estimating 30%) will go to various fees.

Everyone, it seems, gets a cut. All of those fees keep certain systems in place.

What's left - which will still be the majority of it - will go to her son's child, Krissy's grandchild, a super smart and very funny 12-year-old - when the child comes of age.

We are all very glad that the child is getting this money.

And, to be honest, this is weird. We would far rather her son still be alive than receive this money.

Even now, there's a fair amount of additional paperwork and phone calls to make. None of which is fun. Rather: all of which is hard. To say it again. And again. He's dead. And now I need this paper.... and now I need to do this thing.... and now can you please help me do this thing for the estate? For this child who lost their beloved father?

More Morbie Things.

In death, many aspects of a person's life - their property, their money, their debts - transfer to the Estate, this thing that has its own kind of demands and obligations; its own kind of agency in the way that so many people revolve around it.

Estate law comes to America from England and it came to England over a thousand years ago from William the Conqueror who brought it from Europe… and a history that can be traced further back to Greece and Rome.

When William the Conqueror seized the English throne, he declared that the Crown held absolute ownership of all land in England. Individuals could not truly "own" land; instead, they held an "estate" in the land—which translates to a specific package of legal rights and duties granted by the monarch.

For those of you who pay attention to theology, you might think to yourself - wait a second, wasn't it well understood that God, not people, owned the land? (Psalm 24:1 - The Earth is the Lord's and everything therein).

Yes, yes. But in medieval political theology, the monarch represented God. That whole "Divine Right of Kings" thing. And, for that matter, an issue of great contention with the Pope in Rome (who saw themselves as the representative of God on Earth). Many arguments and outright political, legal, and sometimes actual fights over who controlled what land for what reason ensued.

Who engages with what land for what reason is, much of the time, a theological and spiritual question, as well as a political and legal one.

Which, I've come to realize, is part of why, if we want to engage with eco-spirituality, if we want to think about this human-earth-spirit connection, regardless of our faith background or current pathway, we need to be able to think through a set of concepts that are often pushed to the side of "spiritual" concerns as being way-too-materially-and-legally-oriented: estates.

Indeed, most books about human-earth-spiritual connections (which is sometimes called eco-spirituality, but there are lots of terms for it) don’t talk at all about estates. If they engage with death at all its about the value of green burials - what to do with death rituals. That's very important and I fully support green burials.

But what happens to a person's physical body after death is only one aspect of how our modern world engages with death. When it engages at all. In general, Americans, and indeed much of the western world, prefers avoiding the topic all together; "death literacy" is notoriously low.

Estates entail the assets and debts a person leaves behind when they die. The term can also refer to a person's social position, or a large amount of land and property. At its core, it’s an inherently social, material, and ecological relationship. Though we don’t always think of money and apartments or cars as especially ecological dimensions of the material world, they still require care and attention.

And how we engage and structure care and attention around the earthly matters of life and death requires spiritual fortitude. And, ideally, companionship to help navigate what can sometimes feel like dark woods.

These days, the term "estate" includes money (including insurance claims and retirement payouts).

Which is part of what we will be looking at in our upcoming course this Fall.

Because our relationship to land and ancestors and even to how we think about god/spirituality is connected to how we engage with what gets passed on.

Finally, I want to introduce our framing around "morbies."

Early on in the process of dealing with things related to the estate, we needed language to talk about dealing with "estates" and the things related to the dead people in a way that sounded better - less harsh, more playful, more gentle, but still saying something - to our ears... and to our tender hearts. The term "morbie" and "morbs" began to help us get there.

At one point, one of Krissy's daughters said, "Anybody Got The Morbs?"

And we all laughed.

With these deaths, our humor had begun to shift, too. It was becoming distinctly more morbid. There were a bunch of jokes that we were not at all sure were fit for 'polite' company that we suddenly found absolutely hilarious.

And laughter - being able to laugh at the absurdity of all that surrounds death (death itself is both one of the few things we are guaranteed and itself can be weird) and this crazy world that we live in - is absolutely essential to the long work of engaging with death, which is to say, with life.

So while this course is going to deal with Serious Stuff, I am hopeful that we will also experience a fair amount of laughter. Laughter is a big part of who we are.

I mentioned, at the beginning of this piece, that I am in the midst of a two-part series on Accompanying History. I'm working with Sarah's Laugh - when Sarah, wife of Abraham, laughs at God when he tells her that she, in her nineties, will bear a child. Most of what I'm preaching about has to do with matriarchs, and the Indigenous roots of Democracy which puts that which gives life - Mother Earth, women, and structures that support life - at the center. But I'm also noticing that I've been thinking about all of these morbie things at the same time as working with a 5000 year old story that reminds me of the importance of laughing.... and it also reminds me that Creator/Spirit most likely has a rich sense of humour!

Wherever your heart/mind journey is taking you this Fall, I hope you find ways to laugh. At yourself, if no one else, for we humans - with all of our bumblings, all of our ridiculousness, all of our paperwork - are, surely, worth a good laugh, at least once in a while. Or, in my case, on the regular!

Many blessings - Sara Jolena