The problem with trying to have a happy funeral is, that when someone we love dies, we aren’t happy, we’re sad. There can be parts of a funeral that have happiness. But when someone we care about dies, the normal and natural [Read more…]
The Ancestors of My Village
In 1903, 82 million tonnes of limestone broke off of Turtle Mountain and fell onto the town of Frank, Alberta. 115 years later, I gave a keynote speech at a ceremony to commemorate the event and the 90 people killed [Read more…]
Shaman, Priestess, Mystic, Scapegoat
This interview, on The Numinous Podcast with Carmen Spagnola covers all sorts of interesting territory, including important archetypes, and the experience of white woman doing shamanic work. [Read more…]
My Teachers: Betsy Bergstrom
Betsy's teachings have impacted me in many ways, and I continue to study with her. Betsy's no-nonsense approach to the interrelationship between the worlds keeps her grounded in this reality and the others [Read more…]
What is Death Midwifery?
Death Midwifery is part of a huge social movement emerging around what I call “doing death better.” It’s driven by the Boomer generation, and it’s happening both inside and outside of mainstream healthcare and funeral institutions [Read more…]
The Ritual of the Obituary
By not including this man in the obituary, the brother-in-law ritually dissociated him from his sister, and from the rest of his family, on both sides of the river. It was essentially a form of ritual shunning [Read more…]
Where, Exactly, is Heaven?
All her life, this woman had believed that God was a man with a white beard who lived above the clouds, which is exactly what she’d been taught in school and church. She tried to live a good life so she would go there when she died [Read more…]
Meeting Death as a Couple
The pressure of facing his death was putting an enormous strain on their marriage. When the tension surfaced, it was easy for them to believe that the stress and discomfort they were each feeling was caused by something the other person [Read more…]
Digging my Father’s Grave
There’s something deeply cathartic about passing the shovel from hand to hand, and carving out a spot for the one we love. At some primal level, people know how important this task is, and the sign we’re finished is not that [Read more…]
Birth Midwifery and Death Midwifery
I can’t tell you how many people have told me they thought they’d invented the term Death Doula or Death Midwife. They were thinking about how poorly we meet death, and then about how we’re better at meeting birth, and [Read more…]
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