What is Death Care?
Death spans a wide range of experience: it is the literal end of life, but it is also the losses, transitions, liminal spaces, and energetic deaths we are always navigating. I like the expression “pan-death experience” to convey the wide range of deaths we die in one lifetime, and the wide range of support we need throughout this cycle.
When I first heard about death doulas, I knew instinctively that I was one. I have a natural affinity for supporting people through intense grief, and for being a reservoir of calm in the potentially chaotic moments surrounding death.
Over time, my seemingly disparate paths of healing work and death care began to converge… because healing work is death care and death care is healing work.
My death care practice is a tapestry that weaves together:
- In-person vigil support for folks at end of life, and their loved ones — coming soon
- Death Side of the Moon: a monthly container for shepherding energetic death and renewal, just before the New Moon
- Home Funeral Stories: a podcast where friends tell stories of the home funerals they’ve hosted
- Collecting resources for the growing holistic death-care movement
Training
I am trained as an end-of-life doula through the International End-of-Life Doula Association.
I regularly support folks in hospice in my local community, and I also have experience with in-home caregiving for seniors with dementia.
Death Side of the Moon
Once a month, I offer this remote group container which sits at the intersection of energetic work and death care. In Death Side of the Moon, I’m jointly supporting two participants in opening to and moving through the energetic life-death-life cycle. This two-hour session includes a group discussion on pan-death themes, a transmission on the energetic-death process, and individualized energy guidance offered to each participant in turn.
The next session takes place October 13, just before the New Moon: a moment that naturally supports cleansing and releasing.
Email me at [email protected] if you’re interested in joining.
Resources
~ Grief: Dr. Mia Hetényi‘s free grief rituals, available over Zoom to those in her Dreaming Awake Facebook group. Also, her writing on grief (on Facebook, Instagram) is the deepest and most expansive I’ve found.
~ Home funerals: for those in the U.S., please know that home funerals are legal in all 50 states. The exact laws vary by state — a good starting place for researching your state’s laws is the National Home Funeral Alliance. They also have an incredible PDF guidebook available on their website, for purchase by sliding scale. You can also hear firsthand home-funeral stories on my new podcast.
~ My favorite holistic deathcare workers to follow on social media are Narinder Bazen (who I interviewed on my podcast) and the Aware Care Library, great for suicide-aware resources.
~ Death Cafes: Attend (or host!) a local Death Cafe, where people gather to drink tea and discuss death. It is crucial for us to have safe spaces to discuss death openly.
~ Doula directory: find an end-of-life doula near you
Cover photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova