You Only (a)Live Once...

Making Sense of Collective Grief with a Nervous System That’s Doing Its Best

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

You Only (a)Live Once...

By Jess Wakefield

Somewhere along the way, “You Only Live Once” became a kind of cultural permission slip. It gets tossed out when we want to justify the impulsive choice. The extra drink. The late night. The leap without a plan. It’s shorthand for urgency, risk, and the belief that life is too short to think too hard about consequences.

And sure, there’s a place for spontaneity. There’s a place for boldness. But the phrase itself is deeply misleading.

Because you don’t only live once.

You live every single day.

Living isn’t a singular event or a dramatic highlight reel. It’s not just the milestones or the stories you tell later. It’s the slow accumulation of ordinary moments. It’s the routines you fall into, the relationships you tend or neglect, the ways you talk to yourself when no one else is listening. Living happens in the repetition, not the exception.

What you only do once is die.

Death is the one-time thing. It’s final. It doesn’t repeat. And when you really sit with that truth, it changes how the rest of life looks. Living stops being something you rush through and starts being something you participate in more deliberately.

When we believe we “only live once,” it’s easy to treat days as disposable. We burn ourselves out chasing intensity. We confuse chaos with aliveness. We tell ourselves we’ll rest later, heal later, repair relationships later. But later has a habit of turning into never, especially when we keep living as if the point is to consume as much experience as possible before the lights go out.

If instead you recognize that you live every day, the question shifts. Life stops being about how much you can cram in and starts being about what kind of life you’re building through your choices. Not just the big choices, but the small, almost invisible ones that stack up over time.

How you start your mornings.
How you care for your body.
How you handle conflict.
How often you tell the truth instead of the convenient version.

Those things shape your life far more than any impulsive decision ever will.

This perspective doesn’t make life dull or cautious. It actually makes it more expansive. It gives you permission to slow down and go deeper instead of wider. It invites you to find joy in consistency, meaning in commitment, and freedom in living a life that doesn’t require constant escape.

When you spend enough time around death, this becomes impossible to ignore. At the end of life, people rarely wish they had lived faster or packed in more thrill. What they wish is that they had lived in a way that felt more aligned. More honest. More connected to the people and values that mattered most to them.

They wish they had paid attention.

Understanding that you only die once but live daily pulls you out of the pressure to perform life and drops you into the practice of it. It asks you to build days you actually want to return to. To create rhythms that sustain you rather than exhaust you. To choose a life that feels steady and meaningful, even when nothing extraordinary is happening.

So maybe YOLO isn’t an invitation to recklessness at all. Maybe it’s an invitation to responsibility, presence, and care. Not the heavy kind, but the kind that comes from realizing your days matter because they keep coming.

You live every day.
You die once.

And when you live with that truth in mind, life doesn’t get smaller. It gets richer. More grounded. More yours.

So here’s to living a life of YODO, and I hope you will join me!

 Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula

Why caring for the dead and the Earth are inseparable

By Jess Wakefield

Before I ever cared for the dead, I cared about the Earth.

I studied environmental science as an undergrad because I was drawn to systems. To how water moves through land. To how nothing exists in isolation. I learned early that every action has downstream consequences, even when we cannot see them right away.

Funeral service came later. Unexpectedly. And at first, it felt separate from everything I had studied.

Truth is; it wasn’t.

Photo by Claudio Testa on Unsplash

The longer I’ve worked with the dead, the clearer it becomes that deathcare is an ecological practice whether we acknowledge it or not. Bodies are not exempt from natural systems. Grief is not disconnected from land. Caring for the dead and caring for the Earth are part of the same responsibility. Through hands that learned the weight of the human form when it is no longer animated by breath. Through the quiet hours after families leave, when the room changes and the work becomes slower, more intimate. Through the realization that death is not abstract when it is quite literally in your care.

I learned early that grief does not live only in tears or words. It lives in posture. In breath. In the way someone hesitates before signing a form or touches their loved one in a casket as if they might still be warm. Grief lives in the body first, and the body, whether we acknowledge it or not, belongs to the Earth.

That truth changes how I see death.
And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The first rupture

There is a moment many funeral directors remember clearly. The moment when death stops being theoretical.

For me, it was not dramatic. It was quiet. A transfer completed. A door closed. A body resting still, no longer responsive to time or urgency. I remember thinking how strange it was that this person had spent decades occupying space in the world, and now the world had no idea they were gone.

The Earth did not pause. The weather did not change. The systems continued uninterrupted.

And yet, something had shifted.

That moment planted a question I did not yet have language for. Where does this person go now? Not spiritually, but physically. Relationally. Ecologically.

We have answers for the paperwork. For the logistics. For the industry standards.

But those answers often avoid the deeper truth. That death is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be witnessed.

Grief is not separate from the land

We talk about grief as if it is purely emotional. Something happening inside the mind. Something that can be processed in isolation.

But grief is physical. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. The heaviness in the chest. The exhaustion. The way the body forgets how to do ordinary things.

Grief changes how we move through the world. And the world, especially the natural world, responds to us whether we are paying attention or not.

When I began paying closer attention, I noticed how often grief sought the Earth instinctively. People going for long walks. Sitting by water. Touching trees. Standing barefoot on grass without realizing why.

We do this because the nervous system recognizes something ancient. The Earth has always held grief. Long before therapy models or bereavement leave policies, people grieved in relationship with land.

We buried our dead close. We marked places with stones, trees, stories. We returned to those places over seasons and years. Grief unfolded alongside growth, decay, weather, and time.

Modern deathcare interrupts that relationship.

What we hide, we fear

The more death became professionalized, the more it was removed from daily life. Bodies disappeared quickly. Preparation happened behind closed doors. Cemeteries moved to the edges of towns. Language softened until it barely referenced reality at all.

We told ourselves this was progress. But fear grew alongside convenience.

People became afraid of decay. Afraid of bodies changing. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, feeling too much for too long.

In my work, I have seen how deeply this fear affects families. They arrive already anxious, already unsure, already bracing for something they cannot name. Not just the loss, but the disorientation.

When death is hidden, grief has no map.

When nature does the teaching

I have stood at gravesides where the wind moved through trees so gently it felt intentional. I have watched families soften when soil returned to earth without machinery roaring nearby. I have seen children ask honest questions when death was presented plainly rather than sanitized.

These moments do not erase grief. They contextualize it. Nature does not rush death. It does not apologize for it. It integrates it.

When families choose burial practices that allow the body to return to the earth without barriers, something subtle but profound happens. Death becomes less adversarial. Grief becomes less isolating.

People often tell me they feel calmer, though they cannot explain why. The explanation is simple. Their bodies recognize the rhythm.

Ecology is grief literacy

Ecology teaches us how systems survive loss.

Forests do not panic when a tree falls. They reorganize. They adapt. They use what remains. This does not mean the loss is insignificant. It means the loss is meaningful enough to be integrated.

Grief asks us to do the same.

When we deny decay, when we attempt to preserve bodies indefinitely, when we promise permanence where none exists, we send mixed messages to the grieving psyche. We say this is final, but also frozen. Gone, but unchanged.

That contradiction makes grief harder.

Ecological deathcare, by contrast, tells the truth gently. This body will change. The relationship will change. The love does not disappear, but it will not look the same.

Truth, offered with care, is regulating.

Speed as a form of violence

This mirrors how we treat the Earth.

Clear the land quickly. Extract resources efficiently. Move on before consequences surface.

But both grief and ecology punish speed.

Unprocessed grief shows up later. In bodies. In relationships. In burnout. In illness.

Environmental damage does the same.

Slowing down is not indulgent. It is necessary.

When deathcare slows, people breathe differently. They ask better questions. They feel more agency. Grief has space to unfold rather than explode.

The land remembers

Trees grow. Paths shift. Seasons layer memory upon memory.

I have watched families return year after year, noticing small changes. A sapling taller than last time. A new bird species. A familiar bench worn smooth.

The land becomes part of the relationship.

This matters because grief is not something we “get over.” It is something we live alongside.

A living landscape reflects that truth better than polished stone ever could.

Being shaped by the work

I’ve always noticed soil quality. I thought about water tables. I pay more attention to how land is used, preserved, or abused. Because I understand, in a way I did not before, that bodies do not disappear. They go somewhere.

Caring for the dead made me more protective of the Earth, not less.

It taught me humility. It taught me restraint. It taught me that not everything needs to be fixed or improved. Some things need to be allowed.

The shared work of tending

To care for the dead is to tend a transition. To care for the Earth is the same. Both require patience. Both require listening. Both require acknowledging limits.

We cannot control grief any more than we can control ecosystems. We can only create conditions that support healthy adaptation.

That is the work.

Not mastery. Not domination. Stewardship.

Where this leaves us

This is not about convincing everyone to choose one kind of burial or one way of grieving. It is about remembering what we forgot.

That death is not separate from life.
That grief is not separate from the body.
That the body is not separate from the Earth.

When we align deathcare with ecological truth, we do more than reduce harm. We restore coherence. We allow grief to be held by something larger than ourselves. And in that holding, something softens. Something steadies. Something remembers how to belong.

That is where ecology and grief meet.

Not in theory.
In the ground.
In the body.
In the slow, honest work of returning what was always borrowed.

 Marc D Malamud

Transitioning Doula