About me – and how I came to do this work

People often ask what drew me to work with death and dying. The truth is that I’m not completely sure! For two decades, I’d had a successful career as a freelance writer, contributing to lots of leading women’s magazines, newspapers, websites, apps and literary journals. But in 2016/17, I experienced some big changes, and one result was that I had to accept I wasn’t going to have the family I’d hoped for. I went through what I now know was a grieving process. Around the same time, a few of my friends were bereaved in shocking and unexpected ways and I realised there was a lack of openness about death in our society, which meant – among other things – that those grieving didn’t always get the support they needed.

In 2017, I decided to start running a regular death cafe, where people come together to chat mortality over tea and cake, helping to break taboos and fears – it seemed a simple way to make a small difference. Through holding those, I learned about lots of incredible people doing amazing work to change the way we ‘do death’ in our culture, and I felt inspired.

At this point, I was halfway through training as a pagan priestess at the Path of Love Mystery School in Glastonbury. I’d signed up mainly for personal development reasons – and because it sounded fun! But during training, I experienced the transformational power of the nature-based rituals and ceremonies we studied to support life’s transition times – and I felt most passionate about the death and funeral rites.

I embarked on an intensive period of further learning. I trained as a soul midwife (similar to a death doula), giving holistic, non-medical care to the dying, and as a funeral celebrant. I also found a wonderful holistic funeral director, Holly Lyon-Hawk, who trained me in ceremonial care of the body and other aspects of funerals, so that I could offer a full circle of support to the dying and their families. I became especially interested in family-led (or ‘DIY’) funerals, where loved ones arrange intimate funerals themselves. At one time, death and funeral rites would have been carried out within communities – my dad, from Ireland’s west coast, remembered the women of his village washing and dressing people for their coffins – but now we tend to outsource everything to companies, cheating ourselves out of of close involvement in this sacred part of life.

I knew I wanted to put care of our unique planet at the heart of this work. A committed environmental activist, I’ve been involved in campaigns against plastics, the pollution of our waterways and the insurance of fossil fuel projects – and I’m a co-founder/director of Kingston Hive CIC, a community eco-hub. But it was only after my own dad’s funeral, in summer 2023, that I realised I needed to make greener endings my speciality. We gave Dad a natural burial at beautiful Clandon Wood Natural Burial Ground in Surrey. It was the end of August, and as we celebrated Dad’s life in the glass pavilion on-site, with kestrels gliding over the wildflower meadows, butterflies dancing in the air and white clouds drifting across the sky, it was hard to feel sombre.