Field Guides.
Long-form, practical guides for navigating end-of-life logistics and grief - written to be read when you need them.
Multi-part guides
Deal with Death23 parts88 min readThe First 500 Hours
The three weeks after a death are the most disorienting a family will face, and almost none of it is intuitive. This is the whole sequence, in the order it actually happens, from the first hour through closing the estate. Read it straight through, or jump to where you are.
The first hoursDocuments and securityThe funeralPeople and benefitsThe estateClosing
Heal with Death6 parts35 min readGrief Lives in the Body
Grief is not a problem to be solved or a process to be completed. It is something the body carries, and it moves on its own schedule. Six pieces on what grief actually is, why talking about it is often not enough, and what it means to be accompanied through it.
What it isThe grief nobody seesCarrying it
Heal with Death3 parts6 min readThe Sacred Return
Three short pieces on what the end of life teaches about the middle of it. Written to be read slowly, in one sitting, or one at a time when you need them.
Heal with Death6 parts22 min readThe Old Ways: Nature-Based & Ancestral Death Care
For nearly all of human history, death was tended by hand: by family, by ritual, by the earth itself. Somewhere in the last few generations we handed that over to institutions, and lost the thread of how to do it ourselves. Six pieces on the nature-based and ancestral death care most of us were never taught: holding a vigil, green burial, deathbed herbalism, Italian folk ancestor rites, bringing it into practice, and a conversation on what a green witch actually knows.