It was certainly not my life plan to be a death midwife.

Born and raised in rural England, I trained as a music teacher for special needs children and put myself through college working as a nursing assistant. After a year in the classroom I was safely within the comfort zone. My life was slowly and predictably unraveling through wet and drizzly suburbia. It was terrifying. I was going to die before I had lived!

So I jumped ship.

I travelled first to Australia and then California, landing in Hollywood at the tender age of 22. I secured work as a nanny for a celebrity. I learned to fly planes, sky-dive and ride motorcycles. I studied acting and stand-up comedy, wrote and published children’s stories and volunteered for the hungry, homeless and elderly.

I worked my way up the movie industry ladder to Director of Development for a production company at Paramount Studios and in my free time I studied metaphysics, energy healing, past-life therapy and alternative religions. I earned a degree in Natural Theology and was ordained as an Inter-faith Minister. I started a hands-on healing practice, raised a dynamic daughter as a single parent and became a U.S. citizen.

Ah Yes! Now I had a stimulating, creative, meaningful life that I loved. Now it was okay to die.

But then mother died and life got even better.

Mother had the perfect death

After undergoing surgery for ovarian cancer and then a round of chemotherapy, Mother declined further treatment. “I’ve had enough of this nonsense,” she said very matter-of-factly during one of our weekly telephone calls across the Atlantic. “I think it’s time to go.”

Mother spent her last few months at home on hospice, surrounded by family and friends. I went back to England for her final days to help relieve my sister of the care-giving duties and to say goodbye.

Mother was as opinionated and determined in death as she was in life. “I don’t want to lie in bed all day, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Put me in my chair!”

Every morning I helped mother wash, dress, arrange her long hair in it’s familiar up-twist and sit her in the chair in the living room. She existed on cups of tea and the occasional miso soup. She was thin and frail but still she read the paper, did the daily crossword and talked to whomever came to visit.

“All my affairs are in order, and everybody’s been forgiven,” she declared proudly. “I’ve had a good life with no regrets and I’m looking forward to going to meet my maker.”

The day before she died she told me to get a notebook and proceeded to outline in detail the plans for her funeral – the people she wanted to invite, the hymns she wanted sung, the kind of flowers she wanted placed on her coffin and where we were to sit in church. She even designed the program and wrote her obituary. “Now all you need to add is the date dear,” she said with a satisfied smile.

The next morning she motioned for me not to get her dressed,

“Leave me in bed,” she whispered, “I’m going home.”

Mum had been a teacher all her life and this was her final lesson, ‘The Art of Dying.’ Her last breath would come just 18 hours later. Mother died the way she lived. In control. Clear. Organized. Considerate of others. Filled with love and upheld by her unwavering faith that God was going to take care of her.

Mother’s leave-taking evoked a tsunami of pain as the umbilical cord was severed once again, as she floated off to who-knows-where and I was left alone, untethered, also floating but with earthly duties to attend to like raising children and earning a living. It wasn’t fair!!

There is a seductive deliciousness to grief, like falling in unrequited love, over and over again. Mother’s dying taught me this and many other things but

The events that followed her death changed the direction of my life forever…

Shortly after mother died the hospice nurse arrived. She offered genuine condolences while she quietly put away the prescription bottles and medical supplies. Then she calmly filled a bowl with water and asked if I would like to help her wash mother’s dead body. “Er… yes please,” I answered somewhat hesitantly yet greedy for anything that would give me a few more minutes with Mum.

“We’ll do it together,” she said kindly. “What was her favorite soap?” As I cradled Mother’s frail body in my arms, the nurse used a washcloth and warm lavender water to gently wash Mother’s back. She quietly hummed a lullaby. I wept, the tears dripping freely onto Mother’s creamy white skin – but these were not tears of grief, these were tears of love and awe and gratitude.

Caring for Mother’s body evoked profound gratitude.

Everything she had ever said or done for me was crystallized here in her lifeless body, and this was my final opportunity to say ‘Thank You.’

My sister and I dressed Mother in the white lace burial trousseau that was hand-sewn by her grandmother and stored in the bottom drawer of her dresser for this sacred occasion. We laid her on her bed in the living room with a rose on her chest and her Bible in her hands. We held each other and prayed for her safe journey. The veil to the ‘other side’ had lifted and the room was transformed by a tangible and profound peace. It was agonizingly beautiful.

Friends and neighbors stopped by to pay their respects. They brought flowers and food and children with snowy boots and muddy dogs, and soon the room was filled with the humming of love for Rosemary. While they gathered round the dining table to share stories, I pulled up a chair between the table and the bed – between the noise and the silence, between life and death.

Hours went by. The guests finally left and sister cleared the table and went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Mother still lay motionless in her white dress. I still sat in my chair close to mother’s bed.

Alive and Dead had collided. It was deafening.

My mind, made feeble and exhausted by it’s inability to understand, finally stopped grasping and relaxed. I let myself sink with the anchor of death deep beneath my humanness. Death was taking me somewhere, she was showing me something, something unfathomable, something sublime. I was intoxicated, drunk with reverence, with awe, with, with…?

And then the Funeral Directors came.

My sister ushered two polite, stiff, strangers into the living room. They pulled their rattling gurney over the white carpet and parked it by the bed. “We are deeply sorry for your loss,” the tall one said. Then they stuffed mother and her beautiful white dress into a black plastic bag and zipped it up. They wheeled her out across the frosty lawn and into the waiting green van. They didn’t even say goodbye.

“Wait!” I called out. “Wait! I’m not finished! Come back! I need more time!” But the van had turned onto the main road and was out of sight.

This was a turning point for me. The beauty and peace that the open window to ‘the other side’ had created with mother’s body laying in honor in the living room, clanged firmly shut when her body was taken away. I knew that I needed more time with her, but didn’t know why and certainly didn’t know how. Even though the funeral that ensued was fabulous and people returned to their daily lives, the questions took hold of me and ignited deep curiosity and inspiration.

“What if we could extend this liminal space for a few more days? What if this extra time could inform us of something about the nature of life and death that wouldn’t be possible anywhere else? What if caring for our own dead until burial or cremation was critically important?”

I set out to find answers and upon returning to the U.S. immersed myself in learning everything possible about the world of death, dying and home-based after-death care.

I chose the name, Sacred Crossings because this work was definitely sacred and the event of death is a crossing over for both the deceased and all those left behind. I had crossed from one state to another when Mother died; it was as if she had birthed me again. I began offering services as a Home Funeral Guide helping families in Los Angeles to reclaim three more days after a loved-one died, to care for them as only they knew best.

For five years I managed to do this while holding down a 9 to 5 day-job and raising a teenager, but when the need exceeded my ability to do it alone, I began teaching Conscious Dying and After Death Care in an effort to recruit others to help me in the work. In 2016, I partnered with a student of the program and together we formed Sacred Crossings Alternative Funeral Home. Now students of the The Art of Death Midwifery training program have the option of mentoring with a seasoned Sacred Crossing Guide to support families who are reaching for something more intimate, more meaningful and more environmentally-conscious than conventional funeral home services.

To learn more about our classes and workshops please visit: https://sacredcrossings.com/institute/

To learn more about our alternative funeral home please visit: https://sacredcrossingsfuneralhome.com/

Thank you.
Olivia

Why I Became a Death Midwife…