Category: Culture & Politics
Keepers of Culture: The Sacred History and Art of Caring for Black Deceased Bodies
When we were brought to America as slaves, our sacred rituals and practices were stripped from us, particularly those pertaining to the care of our dead. Today, funeral and death care professionals can become empowered to renew balance while paying homage to the originators of our sacred practices.
Accessibility and Privilege in Grief Support
Most people don’t get the support they need after someone dies, and that is bad news for individual mental health, as well as for the development of healthy families and communities.
Pushing Up Daisies: Why Grave Gardening Should be the Latest Gardening Trend
Graveyards and cemeteries are spaces for burial and mourning, but they can also be spaces for life, community, and healing. This is where grave gardening comes into play, which is the art of creating a garden at the location of your loved ones grave. There have been many studies that show gardening has many mental …
Rainbows in the Cemetery: LGBTQ+ Representation on Gravestones
Gravestones and memorials are just one piece of a large and tangled web for LGBTQ+ rights and representation in death and dying. We as a death community should think more about how queer people are represented in burial and in death. We need cemeteries to create spaces for our communities to be allowed to reflect their identities through their grave markers.
Michif Storytelling: Connecting Us To the Dead
Thinking about Michif concepts of death and Storytelling brings me back to the kitchen. Like many cultures, the kitchen is the main site for cultural exchange and inter-generational learning. We just call it visiting.
This is What Happens to Unclaimed Bodies in Canada
We spoke to death professionals, and dove into Canadian laws and policies, to learn more about how unclaimed bodies are processed, and why the numbers of Canadian unclaimed are on the rise.
This is What Happens to Unclaimed Bodies in America
With the influx of deaths caused by the novel coronavirus, important questions about how we store the dead in times of crisis have been pushed into the spotlight. How should we handle abandoned, indigent, and unclaimed bodies, many of which languish in morgues for weeks or months?
Watch: Demystifying Medical Aid in Dying Video Series
Demystifying Medical Aid in Dying: Family Voices – Part One In this session, D.S. Moss of the Adventures of Memento Mori podcast is joined by special guests Dan Diaz and Myra S. for personal perspectives on the use of medical aid in dying. Dan and his late wife, Brittany Maynard, had to move from California …