The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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What's a way I can volunteer where I can be near or acquainted with death? Stuff like suicide hotlines, or doing some work around a funeral home, or something. Not anything like a job, but some thankless work I can do on the odd weekend where everyone around is sad or somber. Honestly I can probably only spare a few hours a week.
I want the burden of mourning, or the heaviness. I want to do something necessary and generally unpleasant, because I think I'm particularly well-suited for emotional lows or even tragedy (but maybe not necessarily trauma). When my 19-year-old sister-in-law overdosed, I experienced plenty of serious faces and serious conversations, and I was slightly intoxicated by it, like the places we were going and the things people were saying mattered very much.
You could consider finding an old cemetery you have a connection to and cleaning it up. Cemeteries slowly decay: the stones get overgrown with moss and lichens, the engraving fades and disappears from weathering, stones fall over and get broken and buried. Groundskeepers and sextons can prevent some of this, but usually their duties don't include repairing anything but the most egregious damage (and sometimes not even then). You'll want to contact the cemetery board and ask for permission first, but they'll probably be happy for the help.
The easiest thing you can do is cleaning off the stones. The stuff you want is called "D/2 Biological Solution"; this is what they use at Arlington to keep the headstones white. The befores-and-afters can be quite striking, particularly for marble stones which can go from greenish-gray to gleaming white. The typical procedure is to spray the stone with water, then with D/2, then scrape the worst of the growth off with a plastic scraper and let it sit (the D/2 will continue to work for weeks). A few hours a week is enough to make a marked improvement over the course of a few months. You can get more involved and get into resetting and repairing stones, but that requires a larger time commitment and more specialized skills.
If you do this you'll begin to develop connections to the people buried there. You'll find the graves of people who lived long and fulfilling lives and people who suffered tragic accidents, people who were very important to the town and people who ended up buried there by happenstance, people who were very wealthy and people who weren't. If you're in America, you'll find graves of people who emigrated from the old world (and may even be written in a foreign language) and people whose families lived in that town for generations. You'll see names you recognize from streets and parks, and maybe even from friends and relatives. You'll get a sense of what it might have been like to live in a time when deadly diseases were more prevalent and every family had a child or two (or more) who died from smallpox or diphtheria. You'll also spend a lot of time around monumental sculpture and may even uncover some sentimental poetry.
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In addition to the other suggestions, I would add facilitating a grief from death support group. One may already exist and you could just attend. Even though you aren't technically volunteering I think it still fits the spirit of volunteering because you are helping other people process their grief just by showing up and being supportive. I think rationalist-adjacent thinkers can often add a valuable perspective to support groups if they are also personally impacted by the issue.
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Good luck in your quest. IIRC volunteering at a hospital is more difficult to do because it’s a go-to experience for students and suitors. So don’t forget that there are also shelters, clinics, random organizations to help with grief, churches, online communities. Your comment also vaguely reminds me of the first opening 20 minutes of Fight Club, which I would recommend watching or reading.
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.(Ecclesiastes 7)
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Palliative care? I think you can volunteer to converse with and hold the hand of the dying.
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Suicide hotlines, funeral homes. If you want something really goddamn heavy - try to find a way to volunteer in a pediatric cancer ward. Hospice is second - but in a pediatric cancer ward you'll see families that are more or less broken by grief. If an old man with a pack-a-day cigarette habit he's had for 60 years is dying of lung cancer, few people are surprised. Even the old man himself often shrugs and says something like "I knew the smoking was gonna catch up to me". When it's a twelve-year-old, it is different. I was a medical student in a cancer ward for a month. I don't have the words to describe it: if we could resurrect Wilfred Owen and have him walk those halls, he might be able to write poetry sufficient for the task.
Daniel Abse and Dante might be sufficient too.
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