RestSure.

caring for our dead.
Caring for your dead.
This is care you can do!
Humans did all our own death care since the beginning of humanity. Only in recent times has this been given to ‘professionals”
if you are a human - you know how to do this - we are in the age of remembering this basic human experience - handling, witnessing, caring of our dead.

Care of the Body After Death topics article on Care of the Body After Death.

Keening, from the Irish "caoineadh," was a full-body wail let out over the dead. Women gathered around the coffin, pounded on it, chanted the person's name, and let sound carry what words couldn't. It could go on for days, and it was sometimes led by a professional keener.

This wasn't a performance. It was an ancient way to move through grief, built on the idea that pain had to be let loose through sound and motion instead of trapped in the body.

The Catholic Church started speaking against it as early as 1614. Priests called it pagan and uncivilized, a threat to the natural order. By 1748, keening in public could get you excommunicated.

By the mid-1900s the tradition was basically gone.

What went with it was a space where people were allowed to fall apart and weren't alone doing it. We mourn now in silence, in small sobs, on a schedule that fits around a Monday morning, and then we wonder why grief feels impossible to move through.

We didn't evolve past needing this. We just stopped doing it.

These words remind us that aging, illness, death, change, are not interruptions to life. They are life.

The deeper task is not to avoid them, or to avoid talking about them, but to find ways to be with them as part of what it means to live, and to love the people in our lives.

Sacred Deathcare is committed to bringing more meaning, beauty, and healing to experiences of death and loss. When we weave nature-based rituals with an understanding of the afterlife, new possibilities for healing emerge.

If you’re called to bring this wisdom into the way you support your famliy, friends, clients, or patients, comment CERTIFICATION and I’ll send you more information about our upcoming Sacred Deathcare Guide Certification Program.

⭐️ Enrollment is now open ⭐️

Cohort 4, River Song, runs from September 2026 to March 2027 and we’d love to have you join us.

Early Bird registration ends July 19th. This includes a $500 USD discount off the regular tuition, and two additional video modules:
💜 Healthy Boundaries for Deathwalkers
💜 Validation for Your Mystical Experiences

Building an altar to support our dying.
This week my husband and I set an altar to his dear friend who was in the final moments of living.

We simply placed a framed picture of them laughing, we placed items that meant a lot to the both of them, we left a little offering and a small led candle- and we called in the LOVE.

The Brotherhood with a life time of experiences and more LOVE>

We called in his well ancestors and asked our well ancestors to support us as we supported him, his brother and family.

We placed it high on an eye level shelf - holding space for both our friend and for us.

He died less than hour later.
We felt held.
We felt held.

LOVE was holding all of us as we collectively released the cords of connections, intentionally.

Later we added rose peddles and said a prayer!

So grateful for this little space, holding place, and space for all of us in our transitional time.

Journey well friend!

thankyou to Sarah Kerr, PhD - The Centre for Sacred Deathcare for your teachings. This video helps high the reasons and purpose for an altar.

https://youtube.com/shorts/X5Z4PZ9Eikc?si=B7YSXAPnFQCYjz5n

Long before the funeral home and the formal eulogy, the Irish had keening. 🌿 It was one of the oldest and most powerful grief rituals in the world, a tradition so ancient its roots disappear into the pre-Christian Irish past. When someone died, the women of the community would gather at the graveside or around the body and give their grief a voice, a raw, wailing, wordless sound that rose and fell in waves, filling the air above the fields and the hills so that the whole landscape knew someone had passed.

The keeners were not performing. They were doing something far more serious than that. They were holding the community's grief so that no one had to carry it alone. The sound of keening was believed to ease the passage of the soul, to honor the dead in a way that silence never could, and to give those left behind permission to feel the full weight of their loss without shame or restraint. In a culture that had already survived centuries of conquest, famine, and dispossession, keening was proof that the Irish had always known how to survive sorrow by naming it out loud.

The British colonial administration banned keening in the 19th century, calling it uncivilized. 💚 The Irish kept doing it anyway, in quieter forms, in the kitchen, at the graveside, in the way certain families still go very still and very present when one of their own is lost. You cannot legislate grief out of a people. You can only drive it underground, where it waits.