This site is about a journey.  A journey to discover what dying means to people in our culture, what their experiences are with it, and what it means to be fully present as a person who offers counseling, comfort, and spiritual support to patients and their families at the end of life.  

It begins as a literal trip across the US, as I move from the East Coast to San Francisco and interview people along the way on this topic.  I anticipate this project will continue for some time, however, and I hope to maintain this site as a place for sharing parts of the interviews, posting my thoughts as this project develops, and as a format for discussion.

I am a registered nurse, who has been working in brain injury rehabilitation for the last two years and has, for quite some time, been moved to ask the question of why great parts of our lives - birth, death, coming of age, even things like major surgeries or disease battles - are no longer marked by a spiritual or ceremonial acknowledgment of their occurrence.

I do not affiliate with a specific religion, but consider myself to be a very spiritual person who has spent much of my life delving into questions surrounding our connection to nature, the life force, and the afterlife of the soul.  I am amazed at just how many ways of ritual expression exist in the world, some with a therapeutic intent and some, simply, with the intent of honoring whatever experience the person is enduring at that moment. I feel that our fear of death is one of the greatest symptoms, if not the root, of a cultural disease that removes us from the most sacred connections with our fellow humans, as well as the savage consumption and destruction of the only planet we have.

As the great-granddaughter of a mortician and funeral director who took his job as spiritual counselor to families very seriously, and the great-niece to a nurse whose last great work was starting a small home-style hospice, I feel that I am, in a sense, being drawn to carry on the family legacy of working with those at the end of life.  My hope in starting this path is to be an advocate and guide to those seeking to face their death with dignity, and to assist in easing the fear surrounding one of the most profound experiences of any soul's corporeal existence.  My feeling is that similar work can be done at other critical moments of body transition - birth, illness, trauma, etc.

As the call to do this kind of work has grown increasingly louder, I am now asking myself the question of how to do this.  How can I be the most effective and loving guide, advocate, or holder of space to someone in a critical moment of their life and/or death experience?  Is the answer to continue on as a nurse and find a way to integrate some elements of ritual into the traditional hospital or hospice experience, or am I being drawn away from Western medicine altogether?  What do I have to bring to the table as a 'death midwife' or spiritual advocate to people struggling to bring dignity to their disease process?  I want to answer these questions (and many more) in the truest and most respectful way to honor myself and the people that I am brought to care for.  

I invite you to share your stories, questions, heartbreaks and triumphs here.  I want this journey to be one that I take with as many people as would like to come along.  It is only by exposing our vulnerabilities to others, that we make the deepest connections possible.