The death positive ceremony movement finally has language for what many of us have known for a long time. Death is not the enemy. Avoidance is the enemy. Silence is the enemy. The refusal to sit with what is coming — for all of us — is where the suffering compounds.

I have been creating death positive ceremony work in one form or another since the 1970s. Long before there was a name for it, long before it appeared on wellness blogs or in documentary films, I was sitting beside people who were dying, learning to listen without flinching, learning that the threshold between life and death is not a place to turn away from but a place to enter with presence and intention.

I was formed by teachers. Some of them are names you will recognize. Others shaped me in quieter ways — a chaplaincy discipline, a weekend in Northern California, a community in my own backyard in Tiburon. All of it accumulated into the celebrant I am today: someone who believes that ceremony at the threshold of death is not a consolation prize. It is the work itself.

This is not a credential list. It is an account of how I came to know what I know — and why it lives in every ceremony I write.

Where It Began: My Grandparents

Before any teacher, before any training, there were my grandparents. My grandfather died without having said what he wanted. My grandmother died having never written it down. In both cases, the family was left to make decisions in grief without a compass — and in my grandmother’s case, the weight of those decisions fell to me.

I have written about those passages at length in The Greatest Gift, and I won’t retell those stories here. What matters in this context is what they planted in me: a bone-deep understanding that how we approach death — whether we turn toward it or away from it — has consequences that ripple outward to everyone we love.

I did not yet have language for what I was learning. I simply knew that something important was being asked of me, and that I wanted to be worthy of it.

The Discipline of Listening: Good Samaritan Hospital

In the mid-1970s, I became a volunteer assistant chaplain at Good Samaritan Hospital in Santa Clara. I was drawn there not by a professional plan but by something more instinctive — a need to be useful to people who were frightened and dying, and a sense that I might have something to offer simply by staying in the room.

The chaplaincy training was run by a psychologist named Brad — a man whose discipline was radical observation. What he required of us was demanding in a way I did not anticipate: after every visit with a patient, we were to write down everything that had been said. Not a summary. Not our impressions. Everything — their words and ours, in sequence, as precisely as we could reconstruct it.

Those transcripts were then reviewed. And what the review revealed, again and again, was the moments when we had steered the conversation away from death rather than staying present with it. A patient would edge toward something true and frightening, and we — with the best of intentions, out of our own discomfort — would redirect. A gentle change of subject. A reassuring pivot. A question that led somewhere safer.

We didn’t know we were doing it. That was the point. Brad wanted us to see the pattern in ourselves before we could be truly useful to anyone else.

I spent two or three years in that chaplaincy. It was unglamorous, quiet, and transformative. I sat beside people who were at the edge of their lives and I learned to simply be there — not to fix, not to comfort in the shallow sense, not to perform peace I didn’t feel, but to listen without agenda.

I also studied with Brad separately, in a program focused entirely on observation and presence. That training — whose name I can no longer recall, though it preceded my later work with EST — built a foundation in me that every subsequent teacher would build upon. Before wisdom comes presence. Before ceremony comes listening.

Stephen and Ondrea Levine: Approaching Death With an Open Heart

I attended a weekend with Stephen and Ondrea in Northern California, sometime in the 1980s. It was, as best I can place it, my first true formal introduction to approaching death as a spiritual and human territory — not something to be managed or survived, but something to be entered with an open heart.

I had already been sitting beside dying people at Good Samaritan for several years by then. I understood something about presence. But the Levines gave me language for what I had been doing by instinct, and they expanded my understanding of what was possible in the space between a dying person and the people who loved them.

What I remember most is not a particular teaching but a quality — the quality of how they were in the room together. Ondrea and Stephen seemed to embody the very thing they were teaching: a kind of tender, unflinching openness that did not look away. Being in their presence made it feel possible, and even natural, to go toward the thing that frightens us most.

That weekend began building the base — what I can only describe as an honoring instinct — that has guided every ceremony I have written or delivered since.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The Permission to Speak Plainly

I came to Kübler-Ross the way many people did in that era — through her books, and through the conversations that surrounded them. Her name came up often in the circles I was moving in, and in hindsight I believe the Levines and Kübler-Ross arrived in my awareness at roughly the same time, each amplifying the other.

On Death and Dying was published in 1969. By the time I encountered it, it had already begun reshaping how hospitals and hospices thought about end-of-life care — which is to say, it had begun insisting that dying people be treated as people, not problems to be solved or situations to be managed. That insistence felt radical then. In some quarters, it still does.

What Kübler-Ross gave me was permission. Permission to name what was happening. Permission to speak directly. Permission to believe that honesty at the threshold — even when it is hard, especially when it is hard — is a form of love, not cruelty.

That permission lives in my work every time I write a ceremony that names a death plainly, that does not soften a loss into abstraction, that trusts a family to be present with the full truth of what they have lost.

Dr. Gerald Jampolsky: Love in the Neighborhood

When I moved to Tiburon, I did not know that Dr. Jampolsky’s institute was there. But there it was, in my own town, and it felt less like coincidence than continuation — as though the path I had been walking simply kept revealing the next step.

I took a death and dying series through the center. What made it distinctive was the form: not a lecture series, not a solo study, but a group experience. A collection of people willing to sit together in the territory of mortality and explore it honestly, with one another as witnesses.

Jampolsky’s central teaching — that love is the release of fear, that our suffering is compounded by our resistance rather than the thing itself — had a particular resonance for me in the context of death. So much of the pain that surrounds dying is not the dying itself but the fear of it, the fighting of it, the sense that something is going wrong when in fact something very human is simply happening.

The work we did in that group — sitting with our own mortality in community — gave me an experience of what ceremony can do when it is done well. It creates a container. It makes the unbearable not only bearable but, sometimes, meaningful. People leave changed not because the facts have changed, but because they were not left alone with them. That is what death positive ceremony does at its best — it creates a container for what cannot be avoided, and transforms it into something that can be held.

Ra Uru Hu: The Bardo Sequence, Lived Twice

I studied with Ra for over seven years and was deeply involved in the early years of Human Design. It was one of the most intellectually and spiritually demanding things I have ever done — Ra was a remarkable teacher, rigorous and visionary in equal measure, and the community that formed around his work in those early years was unlike anything I had encountered before or since.

The Bardo Sequence was not something Ra taught in the abstract. It was something he lived.

When Ra’s mother died, he walked our group through the Bardo Sequence in real time — not as a theoretical exercise but as an actual ritual of accompaniment, a way of consciously participating in her transition, of being present with her soul as it moved through the process of leaving. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life. The care with which Ra held that space — the precision and the tenderness of it — was something I had never witnessed before in the context of death.

And then Ra himself died. And our community did it again.

I do not know how to fully describe what it means to perform a death ritual for the person who taught you that ritual. There is a completeness to it, a profound circularity, that goes beyond anything words can adequately hold. What I can say is that it confirmed everything I had been moving toward for decades: that the moment of death is not a moment to turn away from. It is a moment to enter with intention, with love, and with the most careful attention we can bring.

What All of It Means Now

The death positive movement is having a cultural moment. Films like Pitt are putting Death Doulas on screen. Platforms like SevenPonds are building communities around end-of-life literacy. People are beginning to talk about dying the way they talk about living — with curiosity and care rather than avoidance and dread.

I am glad for it. I am glad the culture is arriving where many of us have quietly lived for a long time.

But I want to say something clearly: death positive ceremony did not begin with a trend. It began with people — like the Levines, like Kübler-Ross, like Jampolsky, like Ra — who were willing to go toward death when the culture told them to look away. And it began with ordinary people, in hospital rooms and small group gatherings and weekend retreats, learning the discipline of presence.

What I carry from all of those teachers is not a philosophy. It is a practice. It shows up in the way I listen when a family tells me about the person they have lost. It shows up in the words I choose when I write a ceremony — words that honor rather than soften, that name rather than abstract, that trust the people in the room to be equal to their grief.

Every ceremony I write carries something from each of these teachers. The listening I learned at Good Samaritan. The open-heartedness the Levines embodied. The plain-speaking permission Kübler-Ross gave us. The understanding of love as the release of fear that Jampolsky taught. And the knowledge — lived, not theoretical — that Ra gave me twice: that the threshold of death deserves the most careful, most loving ceremony we can bring to it.

That is what I bring to your family’s death positive ceremony. Not a script. A formation.

Questions People Often Ask

What is the death positive movement?

The death positive movement is a cultural shift toward openness about death and dying — treating mortality as a natural part of life rather than a taboo to be avoided. It encompasses practices like advance care planning, Death Doula support, home funerals, green burial, and the creation of meaningful ceremony around the end of life. While the language is relatively new, the underlying wisdom has been taught by thinkers like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Stephen Levine for decades.

What is a Death Doula?

A Death Doula — sometimes called an end-of-life doula or death midwife — is a trained companion who supports dying people and their families through the dying process. Like a birth doula, they offer presence, guidance, and advocacy, helping families navigate both the practical and emotional dimensions of death. They are not medical professionals, but they fill a profoundly human role that medicine alone cannot.

What is the Bardo Sequence in Human Design?

The Bardo Sequence is a teaching within the Human Design System, developed by Ra Uru Hu, that draws on Tibetan Buddhist understanding of the consciousness process after death. It offers a framework for accompanying a dying or recently deceased person through the transition — a form of conscious, ritualized presence at the threshold. It is one of the most profound death-related teachings I have encountered in five decades of this work.

How does a celebrant differ from a funeral director or chaplain?

A funeral director manages the practical and legal dimensions of death — the body, the paperwork, the logistics. A chaplain offers spiritual support, often within a specific religious tradition. A celebrant focuses on ceremony — the words, the ritual, the story. My role is to listen deeply to a family, understand the irreplaceable person at the center of the ceremony, and create a script that honors them with specificity and love. I work in partnership with funeral directors and am equally comfortable with religious and secular families.

Do you have to be religious to work with a celebrant?

Not at all. I have written and delivered ceremonies across the full spectrum — deeply religious, entirely secular, and everything in between. What matters is that the ceremony reflects your family’s actual values, beliefs, and relationship with the person being honored. My job is to listen to you and write something authentically yours, not to impose a framework from the outside.