Blog Posts

Have you ever considered what your funeral will be like? Who will attend.. what will they say… what will be chosen by way of flowers, music and decoration… will there be tears.. will people celebrate you and all you meant to them? But more than that, what would you say if you had the chance… What would your last words be? Last week Edwin and I were privileged to have the opportunity to attend the very first living funeral ceremony in Tasmania. The very generous and thoughtful Maria Lazovic came to Tasmania and offered her Living Funeral session for the lovely people of Hobart. More than just a time to contemplate mortality, this is a few hours of intense soul searching and internal reconciliation of both what is

I am so pleased to be able to share with you all the report I submitted for my Churchill Fellowship. Some of you might know that when I sat to write I came up with about 80,000 words and so it was with the help of two incredibly supportive and courageous women that I identified the main points and created something manageable for a report. Annetta and Pia, I can not thank you enough. The rest has not gone to waste, I am considering options for putting it into a book. You will find the report is now available on my Fellowship page on the website of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Just click the ‘download now’ button and the report will appear. I hope there’s a little something

Time just seems to fly. Sometimes I wonder if that is how I will feel when my own life comes to its inevitable end. I hope to look back on the people I have loved, the places I have been and all the beautiful moments that I have shared with the special people in my life. But will I think it’s all been too fleeting? There are few things more powerful in the world than our memories and connections with each other – often with age, our memories fade but the feelings they leave us can most often stay a lifetime. In the last six months, we have been making some of those beautiful lifetime connections. As many of you know I went traveling in 2019 after being

Dying to know… dying to get there…. dying to see you again… It’s amazing how often we hear people talk about what they are dying to do….. When I logged in tonight I realised it has been four months since I wrote a blog post. The death of my Grandmother. And she was dying to die. She had lived an incredible life and she had had enough. Since then I feel like the world has been turning a little too fast. I have done talks at various places, the Whittle Ward, Southern Palliative Care Service, a Lung Transplant support group… You n’ Taboo has been asked to have a table at a new event this week coming called ‘Shining a Light on Death’ – https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=508476, we are organising ourselves

Many of you would have seen a few days ago a post I put on our facebook page letting you all know we were in the process of our very own home funeral. Gladys Mary Steele, my grandmother, at the grand old age of 98 took her leave of the world and our family just under a week ago. For the last four years, Nana had lived in a Nursing Home after my mum got unwell and I needed to return to work. Prior to that, she had lived in the family home for 28 years. The separation was hard at the time and it did not get easier. Now, it is final and so much harder. But… Over the course of the 5 days following her death, we