Peaceful Death Wishes

In Search of Cemeteries Alive With Beauty, Art, and History These resting places celebrate life.

How do you “remember to remember” those you’ve lost? ✨🖤

A beautiful poem

In the untimely event of my death,
Immediately unwrap everything
you have kept for new,
I will enjoy it in spirit with you.
Take out all your brightest colours
and clash so hard,
the sun is in awe of your light.
I want you alive and present
and rainbow-bright.
Eat cake.
And slather butter on your bread,
this is the prize for not being dead.
Book a holiday,
somewhere we said you must go
walk to the forest, make it long and slow.
Watch everything grow.
Touch your face, that nose,
you so often berate,
marvel at how you arrived so late,
to see its beauty.
To see it daily now, is duty.
Set your watch, time is not yours
but oh this life, it is
and it’s down to you,
how you choose to live,
this is the gift, my dying,
will give.

Donna Ashworth

Art by Olay Haidamaka

Did you know this? 😃
"DID YOU KNOW... that a lot of coffins do not have weight bearing handles?

Many coffins out there on the market have handles that are for aesthetic purposes only - they are simply not designed to bear the weight of a coffin with a human being inside it.

As a result, this makes it much more difficult for families and friends to carry the coffin themselves. Lifting and carrying a full coffin on your shoulders can be very uncomfortable and it is precarious. Which is why most funeral directors 'employ' others to do this.

Not only can this incur an additional financial fee, I believe it also takes something away from those families and friends - another opportunity to be close to the person who has died. To literally bear the weight of their body and physical presence one last time.

I believe strongly that we need to more involved in these rituals. They bring us closer to those we are grieving and therefore to the viscerality of grief itself.

All Wild Heart coffins have load bearing handles and can carry a weight of up to 158kg ⚰️❤️" - Wild Heart Coffins

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
—Mary Oliver

Stunning shroud by Lena Sass Hughes (shrouds_and_ashes), made by using cyanotypes, a process which uses sunlight to create an image. ❤️🌻

Nothing is wrong with you when you are grieving. It is a season that needs nurture, tending and support.

For the first time in over a year the Deathwives are offering Deeper Deathwork - a 6 week hybrid program that asks you to go deep within and examine your own gief. How do you make meaning of it? How can you achieve post traumatic growth alongside the trauma? What is your relationship with the idea of your own inevitable death, and how prepared are you? How are you using your precious mortality? Deathwork teaches us a great many things but at the bottom, the lesson is about living while we are alive (which requires great grief to free us).

We will traverse this and much more. This hybrid class includes 4 live classes with Lauren and Erin and 6 weeks of rich, guided self study. It also includes access to our coveted student portal and the 6 core classes within it. As always, we have many payment plans at checkout.

Details: https://deathwives.org/deeper-deathwork

“On one of life’s most difficult days, someone will have to make some of life’s most difficult decisions. Without planning, the final arrangements can become overwhelming, and many decisions will have to be made quickly.”

Join us this Wednesday, January 24th, at 7pm ET/4pm PT for our Peer to Peer: Discussing the Value of Pre-Planning for Natural Burial with Your Community!

We'll discuss the benefits of pre-planning for natural burial, how to help conduct those conversations with the communities you serve, and share our new resource for facilitating pre-planning!

RSVP to join us for this valuable discussion



https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/781435192697?aff=oddtdtcreator

The Green Burial Council is excited to invite you to our next public webinar- Caring for Our Dead: The Home Funeral - Green Burial Continuum!

Many people don’t know about the rights of families to care for their own dead – what’s often called a “home funeral." The continuum of family-directed funeral care options are often a good match for those wanting a green burial. Learn about families’ rights and responsibilities when death occurs; what’s meant by a “home funeral” and how families can benefit from more hands-on engagement with after-death care; the barriers posed by misinformation, conventional wisdom, and default practices among helping professionals; simple techniques for empowering families with non-commercial consumer information; and how green burial providers can facilitate arrangements with families serving as their own funeral director.

This event is free and will be held via Zoom on Wednesday, February 21st at 7pm ET/ 6pm CT/ 5pm MT/ 4pm PT!

Presenter Bios:
Jodie Buller is the sexton and cemetery director for White Eagle Memorial Preserve at Ekone Ranch, a conservation burial ground in rural south central Washington State, established in 2008. She has been helping families and communities to bury their dead for over ten years, and is a founding Board member of the Conservation Burial Alliance.

Holly Pruett is a certified Life-Cycle Celebrant and Home Funeral Guide who has provided community death education and consulting services for more than a decade. She has completed Professional End-of-Life Doula training with the Peaceful Presence Project, studied for 8 years with Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School, and is certified in Thanatology by the Association for Death Education & Counseling. Founder of PDX Death Café and the Death Talk Project, Holly led “Talking About Dying” sessions for Oregon Humanities for three years.



https://ow.ly/F61B50Qsfx6

https://www.facebook.com/share/vzUCHsgNW5oXRfA4/?mibextid=WC7FNe

https://www.facebook.com/happyeconews?mibextid=LQQJ4d

Happy Eco News Happy Eco News provides positive environmental news stories to make you feel good.

"Death is a labor out of life just as birth is a labor into life".

Death is a labor out of life, just as life is a labor into life. End of life is often a period of many months, similar to conception to birth.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=675794854564975&set=a.639070831570711&type=3&mibextid=DcJ9fc

"And it is the “moving-on” that often feels so wrong to us. In some Scandinavian cultures, there is a tradition of taking a year of mourning after the death of a beloved, during which time the mourner would take a pause from participating in their duties at work and in the home, to properly honor their loved one and tend to their grief. This time was called “living in the ashes”, and the community would surround the mourning person during this time to provide support and take on the tasks they would normally do, to help in carrying the burden and allow them to focus on grieving."

This is a beautiful snippet from the community ceremony led by Summer (our Ceremony Specialist and creator of .beloved) over the weekend. It was too beautiful not to share. 🤍

"We are here together today in this intimate group because we believe that grief is a communal ritual. We are meant to hold each other up, not to carry our burdens alone; even though grief can feel like the most personal and isolating experience there is. But if you look around you, you will be looking into the eyes of people who have also lost someone they loved dearly in the last year. They are on a similar journey as you, walking with a similar gaping hole in their hearts, searching for a way to carry on. They know this feeling, that the world stopped the moment that your beloved left this earth; they know how much it hurts to see the world move on around you, when it seems to have stopped forever for you. And it is the “moving-on” that often feels so wrong to us. In some Scandinavian cultures, there is a tradition of taking a year of mourning after the death of a beloved, during which time the mourner would take a pause from participating in their duties at work and in the home, to properly honor their loved one and tend to their grief. This time was called “living in the ashes”, and the community would surround the mourning person during this time to provide support and take on the tasks they would normally do, to help in carrying the burden and allow them to focus on grieving.

Know that you are not alone here. You are in good company with others who are also
“living in the ashes”. You all know what acute grief feels like; the way it rips the ground out from under you and leaves you swirling adrift in a sea of heartache. This morning, you do not have to pretend that you are okay, or hide the heavy burden of your grief; you are in a place where your grief is welcomed, surrounded by people who are also grieving, in a quiet place that can hold your grief."

Even if you aren't gathered in a physical space like this, you are NEVER alone in your .

An excellent write up on the need for celebrants and reconnecting with ceremony and death in this fast paced modern world

Why We Need Celebrants - Be Ceremonial Learn what a celebrant is, why they are needed, and how can they can help us personalize and create rituals that honour the moments and milestones we face in life and in death.

I believe in staying connected with our beloved dead. This is an interesting article of a bygone activity- I think we should bring it back- respectfully of course

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/picnic-in-cemeteries-america?fbclid=IwAR0jEzBeBGld-8BxkGCiJ5_uxuQL1WNL3bZpMNO-H3C3Cbq4N8D1N29bZD8

Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries For a time, eating and relaxing among the dead was a national pastime.

https://www.talkdeath.com/we-are-still-believers-in-dokhmenashini-leaving-the-dead-for-vultures-in-india/?fbclid=IwAR0ryGZRqwvOsXPLLBsTs7_JlqCYVV-cRfozBqhpNSYexhSXmU9Zz5bzBcc

One of the many things I find fascinating about death is the different ways it is celebrated, perceived, and processed in different cultures around the world -

‘We Are Still Believers in Dokhmenashini’: Leaving the Dead for Vultures in India For over 3000 years, Zoroastrians have left their dead for vultures to consume. What happens when the vultures disappear?

A lot of friends speak their wishes to become a tree when they die ( a beautiful sentiment!) - and I often send them notes like this-

A place for useful links and positive death talk