Dying and death pathways

We live in a time when many folks agree on “no funeral”, saying “Mom didn’t want anything.” “We can’t afford it.” This is understandable. Still, the human life in transition deserves, and requires, meaningful attention.

Carving out a space and time outside of everyday life to host an honoring service for the person who is new to being dead and for those being left to grieve is crucial to each person’s well-being and ability to integrate their experience.

An honoring service celebrates the web of life that defined the person who died, and the brokenness of their web is grieved by those who remain.

A Home Funeral

is family/community-led deathcare. This practical and reverential process of applying love and grief into the gaps between the living and the dead restores the continuum of Life. The tending applied in those spaces is physical, psychic, spoken, and felt messages into the multiple dimensions of Life/Death/Life.

The human heart knows no time or space. Practices of connecting to those in the afterlife are always open and available as long as we are.

Rituals that make sense to our family and community contain both personal markers and universal signposts, bringing cohesion and drawing strength from the truth-telling stories our grieving bodies need to share.