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Did you know, you are going to die! Have you considered what it’s going to feel like. Look like. Sound like. If you have considered your own mortality, chances are its going to have been in a way that is ‘other’ to yourself. We are getting pretty good as a society , talking about death as an abstract thing that happens to someone else without ever really considering what that reality means for us. Death can be messy or clean. Loud or quiet. Death can be alone or in company. There can be tears of anguish or relief. There can be pain or peace. While we might know all this, we rarely put ourselves in the picture. If you talk to people diagnosed with a terminal illness, or

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

Hello, A big shout out and a hearty hello to all of the people who came and visited us today and joined our mailing list as well. We are so grateful for all of the conversations, and congratulations received in relation to this work we are doing. Now you will not have heard from us in a good while now and that is because we have been very busy. I have been working on a Natural Burial Project, finalising the Churchill Fellowship Itinerary so that flights can be booked and most of all we have been helping families with Family Led Funerals. What a humbling and special start to the year we have had, being able to help families keep their loved ones at home after death and plan

Good morning! We are on the countdown for Christmas and I wanted to share with you what has been happening in the last few weeks. Many of the Doulas and people working in this alternate space got together for dinner a few weeks ago to share ideas, developments and talk about future prospects. There are some very exciting things happening, some of which I will share with you into the new year. I had a date at Government house to receive my Churchill Fellowship award and then dashed off to Deloraine to join Ediwn and Mea on her Peace Pod stall and talk death with the good people of Tasmania and beyond. My planning for Churchill is in full swing. I am making the final arrangements of meeting

Hello! I read a lot of books, those about dying and death. Personal accounts, peoples views, medical perspectives, books that are designed to connect us with our own mortality, books that offer a new way of doing dying and death as a community and society (which is often really the re-discovery of old ways). The book that I finished this afternoon had me in tears nearly every time I opened its sacred pages. Tears of joy, sorrow, intense knowing, tears of challenge and elation, relief and disbelief. This book invites you in with a warm hug, it places you in the centre of peoples hearts and you are carried through their journey, privileged to share their thoughts, feelings and actions… all the while it is as if they are

Greetings! We’ve has a marvelous day today at the Natural Death Expo, held in line with Dying to Know Day 2018 and in conjunction with the Tamar Peace Festival. What incredible people we have here in Tasmania. Today we met hospital workers, a mayor, retirees, a man living with a stroke, community leaders, refugees, women of substance and power, men of incredible courage, inventors, entrepreneurs, the socially conscious and community-minded… It was a truly lovely day. There are people right here in Tasmania working to bring about change in the space of dying and death, they are striving for natural burial here where there is none, they are walking the end of life path with the dying and making beautiful things like coffins and shrouds to help families with