Halloween Through History
This Halloween, or maybe the next day, take some time to reflect on the real reason for the season. All those spooky skeletons and ghosts aren’t just coming back for a party, they’re here to remind us that someday, each and every one of us is going to join them.
Telling Your Own Story
An obituary can be an opportunity to really tell your own or someone else’s story one last time, to put one last stamp on people’s memories and connect for a final time.
Peering Beyond the Veil
Here’s something you might not know: Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who created the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, was a big fan of going to seances. He was not only a follower but a spokesperson for a movement that began in the 1890s called Spiritualism, which reached its height in the late 1910s and […]
Finding the Answers
There are many reasons why people considering their end of life plans might call in a death doula, but what most of those reasons boil down to is that these people have a lot of questions, and they want to connect with someone who has the answers. Well, here’s the big secret: You, the doula, […]
The Importance of Showing Up
A couple of weeks ago I was woken up by a call at around 6:30 in the morning. A friend of mine needed to get to the airport and the person that had agreed to take them had canceled at the very last minute. It wasn’t a huge emergency, as emergencies go; everybody got where […]
Funerals Are For the Living AND the Dead
These days, many people are abandoning the word “funeral” and instead use the term “celebration of life.” This could not be more appropriate, because the ultimate purpose of these ceremonies is to gather one last time with others to celebrate someone we all cared about.
Last Call for Summer Summit!
Over the past few weeks, we have posted several blog entries spotlighting some of the guests who will be speaking to us at our upcoming Summer Summit celebration. Well this is going to be our last chance to do that because Summer Summit starts next week! Summer Summit is great opportunity for us to hear […]
Summer Summit Spotlight – Emma Acker
Everybody dies. We all know this; as death care professionals we face this reality every single day. One of the challenges of death care work is the fact that even though everyone dies, not everyone has the resources to pay for good care at the end of their life, and unfortunately this happens to be […]
Summer Summit – Through the Eyes of a Death Doula
Everyone here at IDLM has had the experience of telling someone they are a death doula and being met with the question, “What’s that?” We perform a necessary function, serving people in ways that have been essential for thousands of years—but at the same time, the changes in deathways across the twentieth century and the […]
My Love Affair With Forest Lawn
Forest Lawn is a company with several cemetery properties; by coincidence I happened to grow up just a few miles away from their main site in Glendale, California. It was a lovely place to meditate on life, death, or in my case, Poli Sci homework.
