As a Sacred Deathcare Guide (trained by Dr. Sarah Kerr and certified by The Centre for Sacred Deathcare), I am honoured to work with people who are navigating death, loss, or grief in any form and who are looking for something a little extra and different from the other therapeutic supports they might also be receiving. I come to this work as an xyz person whose existing epistemological and cultural models—i.e., the models of secular, x, and ecocidal capitalism—were a dangerous barrier to my own survival of grief. [either repressing or distorting]. Witnessing a range of deaths—from bad to beautiful to psychedelic—I am interested in how we can “do death better.”

During a session, I will offer deep listening to your story—whatever it is and wherever you’re at with it—plus imagination, tools, and maps for traversing the meaning-making dimension of your experience. Drawing on everything I know as a person who’s witnessed a lot of death (both involuntarily and voluntarily), who’s written through and about traumatic grief, and who’s interfaced in various ways with the unseen or not-usually-seen realms, I view my role as companioning others through the deathspace with a special attention to its aesthetics (in the widest and richest possible sense of that word). How can we make this as beautiful as possible, I’ll gently guide us through asking, while not denying the absolutely obliterating realities and frequent injustices of loss?

As an artist, teacher, and academic, I bring the totality of my curiosity, creativity, discernment, and range of study to my service as a Deathwalker, committed to helping people (re)learn to trust and tap into their own pragmatics of intuition when it comes to moving grief wherever it needs to go. I believe we all have these capacities—to improvise rituals, to x, and to y—but often lack the cultural and community support to call upon and use them. In addition to support

Our work together could involve revisiting a human or pet death that occurred in the near or distant past and still feels unresolved; discussing a terminal or otherwise destabilizing diagnosis (whether yours or someone else’s); designing rituals/ceremonies for funerals, anniversaries, or other transitional moments and events (big or small); or simply digging into a more generalized fear of death on a personal, political, and/or planetary scale.

My deathcare approaches and offerings are grounded in the principles of xyz and the teachings of xyz.

“We die into our imaginations.” Jeffrey Kripal

Though Gently.

Bayo Akomolafe.

You can read my manifesto of sorts here.