Fresh Air - A Death Doula Says 'Get Real' About The End

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Alua Arthur works with families, caretakers, and people close to death who want to be intentional about the end of life. She's learned through her work and her own experiences with loss that facing the inevitable can help lessen the anxiety and fear so many of us have around death. Her new book is called, Briefly Perfectly Human. Also, we remember painter Faith Ringgold, who died Saturday at the age of 93.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Have you thought about your death? Who you want to be there with you during your final days, and how you want it to happen? Death doula Elua Arthur opened up a national conversation last year when she gave a TED Talk about death and why thinking about it can help us live a better life. I want to die at sunset. I want to watch the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple as day

dies into night. I want to hear the wind fluttering through the leaves and smell very faintly Nag Champa amber incense, but very faintly because scent can be tough on a dying body. I want to die with socks on my feet because I get cold. And if I die with a bra on, I'm coming to haunt everybody. I will terrorize you, and that is a threat, okay? I want to die in my own bed, in my own home, with my loved ones nearby who are talking amongst themselves and comforting each other for this very big thing that's about to happen in their lives.

I want to die with all of my affairs in order so my loved ones have nothing to worry about but their grief after I die. That was death doula Elua Arthur talking about the kind of death she hopes for when her time comes. Her TED Talk about death sparked for Elua a deeper conversation that is now a book called Briefly Perfectly Human, making an authenticentic Life by Getting Real About the End. Elua Arthur is also an attorney and founder of Going With Grace, an end-of-life planning organization that supports people as they ask the question and answer for themselves, what should I do to be at peace with myself so that I live in the present and die peacefully?

Elua Arthur, welcome to Fresh Air. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you today. Well, Elua, your TED Talk about dying is absolutely beautiful. Even you admit, though, that we can plan all we want, but when, where, and how will always be one of life's greatest mysteries, basically. So why is it important that we intentionally think about our deaths? Well, when we're thinking about death, we can see our lives in very clear focus because my death touches every single part of my life, and also my death is a terminus point for my life. And so when I'm thinking about my death, I'm thinking about my life very clearly. I can see what I value, who I care about, how I'm spending

my time, whether or not I'm living in my authenticity. And all these things allow us to reach the end of our lives gracefully so that we can die without the fear and the concerns and the worries that many people carry. How did formalizing in your mind the way you want it to go, how you want your loved ones to celebrate you, help you solidify the life that you want it. Well, it really helped me see how I wanted people to be around me, the types of relationships that I had. When we're also looking at our deaths, we can see the state of our relationships to see if there's anybody that we want to be there that isn't currently there in our mind's eye and what is standing in the way of the relationship so that we can fix it. It also let me see the things that I really cared about, like I love being outside. Of course I want to die outside. I want to make

sure that my affair is in order. I don't want to leave a mess for the people that I love. And so looking at my death helps me see even further what I need to do with my time right now so that I can make sure that I reach there having done all the things that I want. You know what it also does, though? It helps you look at the things you don't want. So, I mean, people in doing this probably are facing or having to answer some really hard questions or look at some things that they may have been avoiding. Big time. What I've noticed also is that as people start planning for death, they can also tell, like you just said, they can tell what it is that they don't want,

the ways that they've been living that are not the way that they want to. I came to this work because I'd been practicing law at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles for about 10 years and grew really, really depressed. And I took a trip where I went to Cuba and I met a fellow traveler on the bus who had uterine cancer. And we talked a lot about her life and we started talking about her death. And while talking about her death,

she was about the same age that I was, just a couple years older. It helped me think about my own death. And when I did, I saw very, very clearly that the life that I was living was not one that I would have been happy to die from. So it kind of forced me into reckoning with myself, reckoning with the choices that I'd made to create an opportunity to shift because at that point, I still had time to shift. I wasn't yet looking at the end of my life. And so looking at my life through the lens of death created an opportunity for me to create change. I think you called yourself one of the living dead. That is a really interesting term, because essentially talking about death actually brought you back to life. Big time. It was one of the first times I felt myself. I felt my body again. I felt tinkles in my blood. I felt curious. I was leaning in. I felt tingles in my blood. I felt curious. I was leaning in. Like there were sparkles in my eyeballs.

I was just very excited about this possibility of thinking about mortality and what it could bring us when we are present to it. It really brought me back to life after that serious depression. That's pretty interesting, Elua, that you felt like just facing your own mortality, having these questions you ask yourself, actually cured you of your depression. waiting for my life to right itself without taking any action in order to make it so. And thinking about my mortality, about my death, really created action. Thinking about death can be a really powerful motivator when we let it be rather than just sit in a place of fear and anxiety and keep us from doing things. But when I think, okay, I'm going to die, and so what is it that I want to do with my life? It can really spur us into action like it did for me. I think the term death doula is still pretty new to people. We're hearing about it more and more. How is what you do different or maybe in partnership with hospice care?

It's a beautiful partnership. Death doulas and hospice workers have a really nice allyship going on. I find that we can serve as an extra set of hands, eyes, and ears, just an extra human, an extra person to support with what's going on. I find also that sometimes when I'm in a home and the hospice nurse or an aide walks in, they'll check in with me to see how I'm doing. They'll check in to see what I know about how their patient is doing. They'll check in with the caregiver. We're just so holistically supporting the client through the entire process. Also, death doulas can often get to the patients, our clients, further upstream than hospice folks can because we're also working with people when they are healthy to complete comprehensive end-of-life plans. And sometimes when somebody gets a diagnosis, they'll reach

out to a death doula, and we can support them in finding a hospice if they would like, or just even in managing, help managing their care before they get to hospice. What are some of the first questions you ask people when they call you up and they say, okay, I'm ready to have this conversation? The very first question is always, how can I support you? What are your needs at this moment? And often folks will say, well, this is where I'm stuck or this is what I'm looking for. Or even sometimes I don't know what I need. I just know I need something and so I found you.

And that's where we can be really helpful is helping folks talk through what's sitting on them right now to see how much we can take from them or how we can support them through the process. What is an overriding thing that you hear most often from people on their deathbeds? And really, what have those things taught you about the life you want for yourself? Some of the major things that people talk about is regret about how they spent their time, about what they did with the time that they had and wishing that they had more of it. But when people always say that they want more time, I always ask what would they do in that time that they haven't yet done and to see if there's anything that we can do to support them in experiencing that while they're still here. But often those regrets are about things like the work that they did

or how little time they spent with their children or living authentically, how they expressed themselves, making lives that were true for other people and not true for themselves. Those are amongst some of the greatest regrets. And that is constant information and feedback for me to make sure, I'm thinking about if someone says, I regret that I didn't spend enough time with my children or I didn't cultivate the kind of relationship I wanted with them. Is part of your work also helping them maybe reconcile that or develop a new relationship or develop a relationship with the time that they have?

Both. I think that a big portion of the time that we spend together is about helping people reconcile the lives that they had with the ones that they thought that they should have or the ones that they wanted to. We serve as space holders. So I'm sitting there as gently of a mirror as possible to reflect back what people want, what they desire, what they needed, and seeing if we can help them in getting to a place where they feel comfortable with the choices that they've made. There's no real clear line in the job description to say exactly what it is that we do. But when folks are grappling with the choices that they've made, my role is to be there with them. And sometimes the greatest gift that we can offer is grace, which is part of the reason why I named the business Going With Grace is because of the grace that needs to be present at the end of life for people to be able to let go of it. You know, Elua, it feels almost like a privilege to sit down and think about how I want to die

when so many people die tragically or die young. We're seeing in real time people all over the world dying in wars and in conflict. And then there was the pandemic when people we loved all around us, millions of people died. I'm just wondering how the pandemic changed or impacted, if at all, you and really the work that you do. The pandemic shifted things significantly. It is an utter privilege to be able to think about our death. And thank you so much for saying that, Tanya, because I don't ever want that to get lost. It requires us to feel a sense of safety in our bodies and in our lives to know that I have the opportunity to

imagine a death that feels good for me, as opposed to questioning whether or not a bomb is going to come down today or tomorrow, what's happening with my family members. In the pandemic, things shifted because not only could we not see each other, I couldn't be physically present with folks, but the fear of death was really high. I think the fear of death is what drove so many of the policies and decisions that were made at the time, is because we didn't want people to die in these ways and, you know, stay away and wear masks and stay far apart because we didn't want to catch the virus and ultimately what we thought at the time, instantly die from it or spread it to people that would die quickly. And so fear of death was high,

which meant death doulas went into overdrive. I had so many more end-of-life planning clients at the time, people that finally wanted to write down what their wishes and desires were for the end of their lives. And also so many more students that wanted to learn how to become death doulas because for the first time, folks were hearing about people dying alone or people dying on ventilators, people thinking about these deaths that they think of as bad deaths and wanting to do something about it. So our student rate shot up 250% during the pandemic. Wow. So it was your trip to Cuba and meeting the young woman who knew that she was dying soon, showing you that there was actually a place for you in this work to actually help people and help usher them through.

But I want to talk about your late brother-in-law, Peter, who also was very instrumental in you coming into this work. He became your North Star in this journey to becoming a death doula. He died in 2013 of lymphoma. How did that experience of watching him die give you a clearer sense of your purpose? After I came back from Cuba, I was so curious about death. I mean, I just, I had tingles in my blood every single time I would be in a conversation about it

or somebody would reveal something or I'd learn more, get my hands on a new book. It was like Christmas every single day. And during that time, it was burgeoning curiosity, but also my eyes started opening to how many people were dying around the world in ways that felt really unjust to me. And thinking about death as a justice issue, and not long after that, when Peter became ill, I hoped that he would survive. Of course, there was no reason to think that he would die from this disease, but for how serious it was, how advanced it was. And then when the time came, about four months into his diagnosis

that he was going to die, it felt like the earth was moving underneath me. And I had no sense of what was up or down. It was confusing is the best way I can put it. Because some of the very basic tenets that people that I love will live went away up until Peter, nobody close to me had died. And so it was the first time I was really faced with this reality that the people that we love might not be here for much longer. It felt really isolating. I knew intellectually that there were a lot of other people that were ill and getting close to their lives, the end of their lives.

But it felt like we were the only ones. It felt like we were on this little cancer planet by ourselves where somebody we loved would soon be dying and there wasn't some one person that I could turn to to say help just help we you know I'm lost here or today's really hard or how do we navigate this or what do we do with all these medications where can we find smaller size hospital gowns that will arrive like in the next days because he was losing weight so rapidly. We just needed some help. And I mean practically, but also just somebody to be there to listen, to rely upon, somebody that I could lean on as other people were leaning on me. Yeah, because I'm thinking about how so many people are de facto death doulas for their family members.

But there is that intimacy of that relationship and all of the complexity of the emotion of the reality of what's happening. So you as a death doula in this instance would be someone who could be there for your family in a way that is a step apart or step removed from it. Absolutely. Many people have already served as death doulas for somebody in their family, and most of us will at some point, which is why I think it's so important that we all have a functional death literacy, because we live in community, we die in community. At some point, a member of that community is going to need the support. So many of us are going to do it and already have. That's how I learned how to do it is through Peter. I took courses afterward, but that was the initial spark, the initial practical application of the work itself. Yeah. I mean,

watching someone you love suffer is so hard. And you watched Peter go through this painful chemo, and you watched him deteriorate, and you watched your sister and their child suffer from the loss. Can you talk just a little bit about the payoff for you in facing that debilitating grief? Because so many people, they think that it's easier to not face it, even in the midst of feeling it. Well, the thing about grief is whether or not you want to face it, it's going to find its way through. Either we don't acknowledge it emotionally and it manifests itself in work or our relationships or addiction or some other traumatic event, or it shows up in our bodies as illness. But grief is present. Grief lives in the body, and it must be accessed at some point. It will force its way. I think that since we push so many of our sad or difficult emotions away, we don't allow space for grief because it is difficult.

But I don't yet know anybody who has died from grieving. It's hard, and yet there is always another day, provided we choose the next day. One of the biggest headaches during the depths of your grief was handling Peter's affairs. And anybody who has had a close person die knows this, the headache of closing out bank accounts and email addresses and social media accounts and real estate and assets. I mean, the list goes on and on. It was hard for you, and you're a lawyer. So if death is a part of life, and every day hundreds of thousands of people die, why is it so hard to navigate closing down a person's life? I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Right. Because this is something that will touch every single person. And bureaucracy must know that. I mean, they are humans too, and they have dealt with

death themselves. It was very foolish of me to think that bureaucracy would favor the grieving or would favor those that are operating at an emotional deficit because of grief. But it was tricky. I would call a company only for them to ask to speak to him to verify that I was allowed to talk to them. And I could think, gosh, this doesn't make any sense at all. We need to take better care of our fellow human as they are navigating grief. We will all do it. It's difficult. Let's make space for people to be able to be held while they do it and not make it hard. Something else that you encounter in your work that you try to help people through is for them to get their affairs in order. And this is a phenomenon that we have seen often where people, because they don't want

to think about it, they just don't plan. I am always surprised, for instance, when we hear about celebrities or people who are worth a lot who don't make arrangements like James Brown's estate and Prince, for instance. What is the number one thing you tell people who are dying to do as it relates to their affairs? The first thing I encourage people to do is to think about the person who will make the decisions for them in the event that they can't. That is a healthcare proxy or a medical power of attorney or just somebody whose job it is to make your decisions, somebody who would make decisions the way that you would, not the way that they would, not the things that they want for you, but rather what you would want for yourself. And to begin communicating those desires to your healthcare proxy, because the communication of that desire is going to open up a beautiful, rich conversation

about what you want with your life, how you want your life to eventually end, if that is the way that it's going, and then get you started on the path toward planning for it. And you say it's never too early for us to start doing this. Now is the best time to start. When it's too early to start planning for something that you know one day is going to happen. Now. Our guest today is Alua Arthur. She's written a new book called Briefly Perfectly Human, making an authentic life by getting real about the end. Let's take a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I'm Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado.

Are you hungry? In the 1960s, you could eat anything you wanted and there was no talk about fat and anything like that. And butter and cream were rife. Those were lovely days for gastronomy, I must say. Pioneering celebrity chef Julia Child from our latest Fresh Air Plus bonus episode. You can hear more and get all of your Fresh Air episodes completely sponsor free by joining Fresh Air Plus for yourself at plus.npr.org. Elua, the book is a guide to getting real about the end, and it's also a memoir.

And those who will read it will enjoy learning so much about your rich life. You've had kind of like 10 lives. You know, you've traveled around the world. You've done so many things and interesting ways that have led you to the work that you do now. One of your first memories in life is escaping death when you were three years old in Ghana during a coup. Can you tell us what happened? Sure. I remember very clearly running down somewhere. There were a lot of stairs and I could see out of the glass windows and my dad was such a source of calm, still is a source of calm and ease and a balm for my spirit. And I remember him picking me up and just holding

him and looking over his shoulder out of the windows as we were running down some stairs. Only as an adult did I understand now that what was happening was that the military coup was occurring. My father was a member of parliament in Ghana, and we lived in housing for the members of parliament. And so when the coup occurred, the soldiers of the opposition were on their way to that building to snatch as many of them up and their families as possible. And so we were fleeing. Only now do I also understand that the fear of death was thick in Accra that

morning. I could tell that there was some panic and worry in the folks, but my dad was calm. I felt calm. And it should be no surprise that I ended up as a death doula because I experienced so much ease in the midst of all that deep chaos. You said that the feeling of death was in the air, and you remember that feeling. I remember panic. I remember deep, deep, deep chaos, and people were moving in a way that, as I'm talking to you, I'm holding my body in a particular way. My shoulders are tied in on my sides, and I'm shaking my hands. There was this frenetic energy about that is only present when folks are in fear of life itself, of their life. Your father was in prison during all of this. He was. They got him eventually. Well, he surrendered. And my mom and sisters and I

were safe. But my dad went to prison for about six months, whereas his friends were sentenced for decades. And thinking about how this all led you to the work you do now, while your dad was working through things, he was in prison and your family was separated, you all moved to the States and your mother really developed a religious practice that, in hindsight, you can really see this was part of what she was holding on to in order to move through, to be strong. You also feel like that coup robbed you of a piece of yourself, your culture. Can you say more about that? To this day, when I go to Ghana, I still hear obroni, which is the phrase that we call foreigners or white people or people that don't belong in Ghana. It's because while I am fully Ghanaian by blood and DNA, since I was raised in the States, when I go back to Ghana,

I am essentially an outsider. I still retain language and food, but a lot of the customs and cultures, you know, my parents couldn't teach us everything not growing up there. I still feel like an outsider when I wasn't. And so I've also had to reconcile the life that I had with the one that I thought that I should have or the one that maybe I really wanted to have, which is where I ate keluwele, which is deep fried plantain rolled in pepper and salt and ginger. It's really delicious. Where I could eat that every day, where I could shop in the markets, where I speak the language very freely and where people are not calling me a bruny when I'm trying to bargain. When your brother-in-law, Peter, passed away, you had to have a conversation with your niece, and you learned a lot. She was really young at the time. How do you answer questions about death from kids? Kids know so much more about death and dying and grief and loss than we think that they do. I think we sell them short because they're children or maybe we want to protect them from the difficult things. But by doing so, we just pass on our death phobia to them. There was a young man I talked to recently who shared with me that when he was seven and his grandma died, his mom told him that grandma had gone to sleep and he never saw her again. when he was seven and his grandma died, his mom told him that grandma had gone to

sleep and he never saw her again. And he was terrified to sleep for so long because he was afraid he would go away for forever. And so we unintentionally pass on death phobia, where had somebody said perhaps grandma died and give a little bit of an explanation for what they could understand about what happens at death and say, there's some things that I don't know, that would have been a lot more helpful. I think if we can provide them some security and some safety, like, well, are you going to die, which is a very natural question for children, that we can say, I plan to be around for a long time, you know, just to give them that security, but say no I'm not dying because then when you do oh boy there goes that entire belief system let's take a short break if you're just joining us my

guest is death doula Elua Arthur she's written a new book that is part memoir called briefly perfectly human making an authentic life by getting About the End. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. What do you think the popularity of death doulas means for our society? What does it say about us? Are we becoming more open to the idea of death and talking about death? I hope so, Tanya. If not, all this work is in vain.

Right, I know. I really hope so. I see that it is. I feel like it is. A few years ago, when I would tell somebody I was a death doula, I'd not only explain what it was and what the work entailed, but also have to give some encouragement as to why somebody should seek one out.

Although, very often the response was, I wish you were there when my brother, mother, father, sister, pet died. Lately, when I say that I'm a death doula, not only do people know what it is, but they will share with me some of the plans that they've made or where they may have seen a death doula on TV or heard a song called Death Doula on the radio, it's starting to permeate into our culture. My hope is that by virtue of this happening, it means that more people are actually seeking the services. That anger and frustration that I felt when Peter died to not have somebody to turn to,

I hope is starting to lift and that other people have somebody that they can rely upon in their time when their person is dying or when they are dying themselves. You know, I've always been fascinated by the role of caregivers because they show so much humanity during those last days of life. And you are holding so much during the process of helping people die. How do you hold all of that and then let it go after a person has passed? Or do you let it go after you've done your job? So much of what I was talking about earlier about compassion means that I'm not taking it on. Since compassion comes from a place of I don't know what

it is that you're experiencing, but I'm here with you, I only have to carry it temporarily. I'm not taking it into my body. It's not mine to carry. A big part of the work means separating myself from the client in some way, and I don't mean it in a distance way, but rather recognizing my own boundaries, closing up my pores, if you will. Often after I see a client, I will take a bath and I sit in the water and watch the water drain down the drain, making sure that I'm also imagining all the things that are not mine to carry going down with that water into the drain, because it's not mine to carry. I shoulder with them briefly, but it is their journey. It's their journey. It's from a compassionate place that belongs to you.

That doesn't mean that I don't grieve heavily, though. I grieve for my clients. I grieve with my clients. I grieve for myself in that process. But also being around grief so much and being around so much death and loss means that it's a muscle that I've been flexing a whole bunch and that muscle is tight. It's real swole at this point. Right.

You know? Yeah. And so I've gotten better, much, much, much better at figuring out what belongs to me and what belongs to you. And I will let you carry what you will carry and I will carry what belongs to me to carry. I was wondering as you evolve and you grow, does what you will carry and I will carry what belongs to me to carry. I was wondering, as you evolve and you grow, does what you want for your death sometimes change and evolve too? Absolutely. As I get older, what I want for my death changes. I used to think that I wanted to be shot out of a firework with my cremains. But now I just would like a green burial, just put me directly into the earth,

no more than three and a half feet underground, so that I can just be returned to the very nature I'm made of. I think as we grow and we take in information from the world and the people that we love and watch how people die, that does end up teaching us something about how we want to approach dying. I've noticed repeatedly that how we die does teach the people that are around. And so I would like my death to be a teaching moment as well. I would love to go into it in full surrender and in grace. But who knows, I may go kicking and screaming and crying like, no, no, not me. We'll see.

What do you recommend for people who are in the midst of watching a loved one actively die? I've been there before, watching my grandfather with his last breaths. And it's such a powerful moment. And I almost didn't know what I should be doing, who I should be caring for in the room. What's some of your advice to people during those moments? Do your best to stay present. Do your best to stay in your body. It can be so confronting that the desire, the urge to disassociate or to distract is huge. And yet, if this is somebody that you've loved and cared for, if you could hold thoughts of love and care and honor and gratitude for their lives, that's a really beautiful way to be during that time. And also, as always, give yourself plenty of grace for however it is that you're approaching it. If there's somebody in the room that is having a bigger emotional reaction,

ask for their consent before touching or interrupting it or being with it in any way. Not everybody who's crying wants their tears to stop or needs a tissue to plug them up or wants a hug. Maybe they want to stay present in their bodies without the imposition as well. So if you are reaching out to anybody, ask for some consent in doing so. But stay present. It is a moment, as you said, full of awe. It's utterly profound.

Getting to witness the doorway to existence is a gift and a privilege and a huge honor. And so hopefully we can continue to treat it as such. You know, in everything that you're saying, and I know it's probably pretty obvious, but what you're also just telling us to do is to confront grief. Because when we don't want to confront death, it's because we just don't want to face the prospect of that pain. And you're saying that, like, we have to go through it. Yeah, we're all going to die. And if we don't think we're going to die, we know somebody in our lives is going to die at some point. And we must be with it.

Societally, we push away so many of the emotions that we think are hard, but they're just human. It's just a part of this ride. Like, grief is a part of this. And if we can just be present for it, be with it, there's a lot that it has to teach us, but it's also a very human thing to do. And so we can just allow ourselves to be it and to experience it for a while it's there. It's just tough. You've also seen a lot of joy and celebration during those last moments of life. Do you see much joking and laughter? And what is that like to be in the presence of that type of experience as someone is transitioning?

As there is so much humanness happening when dying is happening, that means that there's also a lot of laughter and a lot of joy. And there's some beauty and there's also a lot of laughter and a lot of joy, and there's some beauty, and there's some ridiculousness, and there are jokes and food and tears and sorrow and sadness, but then there's also so much life that's happening at the same time. Being around the dying is the most life-affirming thing that I can do. I cannot imagine something that makes me more grateful to be alive, to be in this experience of life and being around the dying. And that's real talk. Like, I mean that. In many ways, you see what you do as activist work. Can you explain that?

Absolutely. In order to support people in their dying, it means that we are honoring the unique lived experience of each individual, the totality of their life, not just the experiences that I'm down for, I understand, but everything that they did with their time and who they were. If I can honor the totality of the lived experience for each human in their dying, then there's no reason why I can't do it also while they are living. And if I can do it while they're living, there's no reason why we would still have transphobia or homophobia or white supremacy. None of these systems, racism, none of these systems could coexist in a society that also reveres death. Because in order to revere death, you must honor the individual for their ride, the totality of their human experience. And so those two things don't go together. They can't go together.

You have to honor the human in their dying and in their living. Elua Arthur, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Oh, the pleasure was all mine. Thank you for having me. Elua Arthur's new book is called Briefly Perfectly Human, Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End. After a short break, we remember acclaimed artist Faith Ringgold, who passed away Saturday at the age of 93. This is Fresh Air. The acclaimed artist Faith Ringgold portrayed themes of Black life and culture through her quilts, paintings, dolls, and books for

children. Ringgold died on Saturday at the age of 93. Her work was exhibited in many museums, and she was an advocate for other Black artists. Ringgold's work may be hard to describe, but it is glorious to look at. Her quilts stitched together fabrics with bold patterns and vibrant colors. One of the fabrics she used was canvas, which she painted and wrote stories on. In the center of her quilt, Tar Beach, there's a painting of a family enjoying a picnic on the roof of a Harlem building. The image came from her childhood, summer nights after sundown. Her family used to gather on the tar-covered roof of her apartment building. Tar Beach is also the title of her 1991 children's

storybook, which features illustrated versions of her quilt paintings. Terry Gross spoke with Faith Ringgold after the book was published. They began their conversation with another childhood memory. Faith Ringgold's mother was a dressmaker, and she was surrounded by fabric when she was young. I was brought up with little pieces of fabric, and I was always sewing and making things, you know, but then I would discard them because they didn't look, you know, I mean, we're trained to feel that everything's supposed to look like it's commercially produced. And so I didn't really like my little fabric pieces.

I wish I had some of them now. But it wasn't until the 70s when we women artists were trying to find out what women's art was, trying to identify who we were as women and what is our culture. I had already been through the 60s where I had done that as a black person, going back to my African roots, using African art as my cultural stimulation, as my root to define myself as a black person in art. And now I was doing it again as a woman. And those two experiences totally shaped my art. Did you know other black artists or other women artists

when you were getting started? As a young student, no. I did not. I had to find these things for myself. I wasn't taught about any black artists when I was in school. I never had a black teacher in my life. But I, no, I didn't learn any of that in college. I had a problem trying to paint people with brown skin like mine. And I used to make them purple and orange.

Is it hard to find the right colors for the skin tone? Yeah, especially when you're not being taught, you know, and my professors, they thought I was being exotic. They said to me, what are you trying to do? You know, why don't you just go ahead and paint people? And I said, well, what do you mean, which people? What are you talking about? So to them, you know, there was only one kind of people, white people. I mean, what are you trying to make up something new here? And I had to find out for myself. And in the process, in trying to mix colors to represent the browns that I was interested in making, I came up with orange and green and purple and all kinds of things

before I finally was able to teach myself how to create the hues of black people. I want to ask you about one of your earlier quilts. This one is called Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? What was the significance of the Aunt Jemima image for you that led you to want to do a quilt on it? Well, I was always quite turned off by people's hatred of Aunt Jemima because of her size and her color and the way they used to change her on the boxes.

You know, the Aunt Jemima pancake box? If you look at the early ones, when I was a kid, she was much darker. She had her, that cloth was tied in another way, and her nose was wider, her lips were fuller, and she was fatter. Now she's thinner, she's lighter, the nose is thinner. I mean, what is all of this? And so I wanted to pay tribute to all of these Aunt Jemimas that we have in all of our families, these strong and very powerful women who sometimes don't pay attention to their weight because they're so busy nurturing and feeding the whole family, you know. And it seems to be a kind of enigma among people that there is often this auntie

or this sister in the family who negates her own life and existence to take care of and provide for other people. And that's what I associate with Aunt Jemima, a woman who cared and took care of people. I just couldn't understand why people would want to hate her. You did a story quilt about your own weight loss. Yes, I did. You want to describe that quilt? And I guess also I associated myself very strongly with Aunt Jemima because, you know, I was fat, too, and you get a lot of flack from people when you are, you know.

They kind of care about you less. They feel like you can—you're big, so you can take it and they lean on you heavily. That quilt that I did about weight loss was a public commitment to lose the weight and a performance also, which documents the performance and the quilt documented all the decades of my life. I was born in 1930, so I did a whole collage of photographs of me in the 1930s, in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, to see when it was I gained the weight. In the 30s, I wasn't fat. In the 40s, I wasn't. In the 50s, I used to model for my mother.

I was very slim. In the 60s, I got married the second time, and I began getting fat. The 70s, I gained even more weight, and the pictures show that. And in the 80s, I began even more. And by 86, I had reached enormous proportions and really decided to lose it. And so I went on a liquid diet. And then I left that and went to Weight Watchers and lost the weight and changed my whole way of eating. I stopped eating meat and dairy. And it's a constant struggle, but I keep it public because that way it's not just between me and the food.

You grew up in Harlem and you still have a studio there. It's quite a lovely place to live. It's close to everywhere. I mean, the transportation is great. The people are friendly. I feel at home. I'm not a minority there. I've lived there all my life. I live in a beautiful building. Everybody says hi to me coming in and going out. When I go away, they miss me. When I come back, they're glad to see me. It's wonderful living in Harlem.

Of course, you don't roam around late at night by yourself, but then you don't do that anywhere in New York. That's right. You know? So what keeps you in Harlem, that sense of community? Yeah, I like not being a minority. I like the idea that when I look around, I see a whole lot of people like me. I go in a store, nobody follows me around thinking I'm trying to steal something, you know? And that happens a lot, you know. It doesn't make any difference how you're dressed or who you are. You know, there is this stereotype that, you know, if it's black, it must be doing something wrong. So I like that. At home, at least I can relax and just be me. Well, Faith Ringgold, I thank you very much for talking with us.

Well, thank you for having me on. It's been real fun. Artist Faith Ringgold speaking with Terry Gross in 1991. Ringgold died last Saturday at the age of 93. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser joins us to talk about his latest look into our nation's food systems and how mergers and acquisitions have created food oligopolies that are inefficient, barely regulated, and in some instances, dangerous. I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Teresa Madden directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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