Hello and welcome listeners to another show. Let's talk about grief. I'm Anne debutte Your host, grief guide and author of griefs, abyss, finding your pathway to peace. I'm both honored and delighted to welcome Dr Sarah Kerr to our show today. Sarah is a death doula and a ritual healing practitioner at soul passages in Calgary, here in Canada. Welcome Sarah,
thanks, Anne. It's lovely to be here.
Can you tell the listeners just a little bit about soul passages and how it came into being? Well, Soul
passages is my death doula practice, and I do a variety of things under that umbrella. I work with clients, I teach and I mentor students. I do public education and community ceremonies. It's really an undertaking about helping people navigate illness, death, loss and transformation from a really sole perspective.
And I work primarily around death, either upcoming deaths or unresolved deaths from the past, pet deaths, pregnancy loss, any variety of that helping people at wherever stage they are, integrate and bring their soul along with the process. Because often we can get separated, body and soul, the world gaps forward and we haven't caught up. So I would say that's an overview of the work I do.
Hence, all passages brilliant. I think that's so true. Just the shark of getting that terminal illness or the shock of the death. It's almost as if the soul and the bot can perhaps separate, as you say, from the body and calling it back in again. Is that something that? Well,
it's, you know, that would be sort of along the lines of a soul retrieval, and that certainly can be part of the process. I'm more thinking that it's not like it disappears. It just gets stuck in us, in a certain place in time when we all know people who've been through it has happened a lot with, say, big relationship breakups, where they've broken up and they have both moved on and but 10 years later, they still haven't let go. That's when your soul and
your body haven't caught up. And it can be the same way if someone gets either an expected or unexpected death or experiences someone close to them, and even if you expect it, even if you know it's coming, it's such a primal shock to the system that the soul doesn't, doesn't, by default, integrate and continue to catch up it. It needs ritual, or at least some sort of psycho spiritual support to do that. Okay,
well, thank you for explaining that. Curious. How did you get into becoming a death doula?
Came through, I think, a lot of different ways, and as I look back on my sort of life history, everything seems to have lined me up to get here, but I never would have thought at the beginning, and I never did think that this is where I was going. So I spent a long time in different sort of work situations, working with groups, helping groups work together, accomplish things together, conflict resolution, group
decision making. So I'm really wired for how groups operate, and the work I do is primarily with groups. I work with families and communities, and I was an activist for many years. And so for me, this is a sort of extension of social justice work, a kind of social healing
work. And then my dad had a big stroke in 2009 and lived for another seven years, but was really, it was a kind of social death, and that really threw me into realizing how unprepared I was, and wanting to get better prepared myself and to help others. And then lots of different threads weave in here.
And then I did my doctoral research on ritual and how modern Western people can meet the big transitions in their lives with contemporary ritual, which is not extracted from other cultures or other religious traditions, but grows as much as possible out of our own lives and our own contexts. So all those things kind of fed together to lead me to this place. And I say I'm a death doula and a ritual healing practitioner, so it's primarily the ritual work, which I focus on.
That in itself, I find intriguing in this day and age when we know funerals themselves are tending to be less and less, and people don't seem to have that ritual, but are jumping more to. To celebrate life, almost as if they are bypassing the pain and the grief of the of what a traditional funeral is. And I find that that is so sad to me. I feel there needs to be some kind of container for the grief. Would you agree? Yes,
you know, I think one of the great tragedies around how we meet death, and there are many in this culture, is that we've lost the practice of a healing funeral, of a meaningful, valuable experience, where people go in and they come out with more resilience and more capacity, and they're more accepting of what's happened. And we have a lot of examples of not very satisfying kind of bad
funerals. And so I think somehow people have thought, well, I don't want a bad funeral, so I'll have no funeral, when, in fact, the solution is actually to explore what a good funeral would be and and layer on top of that this other cultural pattern where we don't have skills to deal with grief and we our only solution is to think, well, if I don't think about it, I won't be
sad and don't cry. We have these sort of warped understandings, and so we think, okay, we need something, but we'll make it a happy thing, not a sad thing, because then we'll be happy, not sad, when, in fact, as you say, we are sad and we need a container to hold that sadness. And when we give ourselves a chance to be present to that sadness and let it move, that's actually how it heals. It's not by repressing it, it's by being
present to it. And a good funeral can be one of the most beautiful things, but we don't have a lot of models for that. No, okay,
so say, I come to you I'm experiencing a loss, and we know that we want to have something. What would you counsel me or how would you coach me into say a good funeral? Well,
there are two things that happen. One is that it's very personalized. So you would probably be you and your family, because these things happen in families or you and your community. So I do a lot of exploring to see you know, depends where we are. Has the person died yet? Have they just died as an expected death, sudden death? All of those make a big difference. Was it a was it a death 10 years ago that was
never properly honored? So we figure out what the situation is and and what's needed for this family. So sometimes there's some unique aspects of it, but mostly a funeral and a death is a fairly archetypal event, so they're often have a similar pattern. And what I often do, if I'm working with families from before a death to up to and including and past the funeral, my approach is that again, back to the soul needing time to catch up. So say someone dies, I go to the hospice three in the
morning. That's how we do our first ceremony. So it's actually a series of ceremonies, because the closest people are in shock right then and there, and they
need some integration. So we'll do a kind of bedside Last Rite ceremony might take two or three or four hours to get people to the place where they can just if they're not going to bring the body home and care for it themselves, then just to the place where the closest person, say the spouse or the child, can pull the sheet over someone's head that says they are dead, and that movement says, okay, my soul has come to terms with this part of it. That's the first
ceremony. And then there might be two or three more ceremonies between that point and the funeral, which might be a week or 10 days later. At each of those ceremonies, ever increasing, groups of people get together and get to process and integrate, and then process and integrate with a bigger group, and then the funeral is the fourth or more in a series, and that's where you process and integrate with a really big group, because for the family, the funeral is not a grief
ritual. It's not an integration ritual. And I think people will probably be familiar with the feeling of kind of having to zip yourself up and button yourself down, yeah, and gird yourself to walk in and prepare. And people don't hear what anybody says. They don't know who was there. They're not ready for that, yeah. So these other ceremonies get people ready for that, and then the funeral. Then we design
it and do the funeral. But for me, the funeral can't happen very well unless we have some of these other ceremonies that lead up to it, to get people able to receive what the funeral is, which for the family, is a sign that your community is here on your behalf. It's a support ritual. It's not a grief ritual.
Yeah. And very often, once the funeral has happened, the community goes back to their lives, and the family is totally on their own. Is that something that you stay with a family and help them through those early stages, or have you prepared them well enough that they don't perhaps need that? You
know, it's interesting this idea of creating new cultural patterns around death. And I in working with families, this series of progressive ceremonies leading up to the funeral, that's starting to, you know, I do that fairly with them when I work with a family, that's that's generally how we do it at the end of the funeral, people are often exhausted, and there's a there's a way that the funeral
is a kind of period. At the end of a sentence, there's a new sentence that begins, but a funeral lets you, least you come down, you take a breath before you take the next one. So as of yet, families have been so exhausted, they just kind of are done. But I actually really see a need for some post funeral work and a more titrated, gradual, sort of leaving of the community after the funeral.
You're right. People kind of vaporize, yeah, and there's some beautiful traditions in the Jewish tradition around this different timing, but this way of people being with you and feeding you and you're not alone, and maybe there's another week. So again, I haven't done that, but I certainly have some ideas about how we could do that to, again, help people gradually come to terms.
Yes, I, for one, have looked at the Jewish faith to how they manage to do it. And to me, it's such a loving way, because you the last thing you want to do. You've got family who have descended, perhaps from out of town, and there you are cooking and cleaning still. So how lovely just to be able to sit there with your emotions and talk about the person and just be with family. So yes, I think we need to advocate a little bit
more for that. Thank you. I noticed when I peeked on your website that you have all your ancestors on on your page, and I noticed that some of them come from
Glasgow, yes. And that's Scottish roots, yeah.
And that's where I was born. So I was delighted to sort of see that. I wasn't too sure if that was you honoring your ancestors, or do you actually work with the Family Constellations? There's been a lot of resurgence of looking into the lineage and and healing around that. So I wasn't too sure if the
answer is yes to both they are there, because I spent a lot of time thinking about and honoring and being aware of how my life is possible because of them, and so that's part of my own practice. It's also a bit of a, I guess, a teaching moment to say that we live in a culture that forgets the old and forgets the dead and we gallop forward into the new. And that I believe is part of our dysfunctionality around
death. But death is so scary because in a way, we get lost when we die, we're we're almost abandoned by our community, and so that's just a little gesture that says, No, you're not lost, you're there, and you still hold a place and an important place in my world. So it's both a personal practice and a move towards creating a new cultural pattern. And to your other question, yes, I work a lot with systemic family constellation
models and use that. And we could go down a long path about how I use that in my work with families, but certainly the ancestral patterns, and in particular, for folks who aren't familiar with constellation work, it's a model that was developed by a man named Burt Hellinger in Germany, and looks at the field and how the field, the energetic field of any system, is like a mobile you touch one piece and something else moves. So that, I find is a very useful frame for working with families.
Would you work with them if there was some dysfunction in the family, or if somebody was having a really hard time? I'm just attempting to see how you would pull that into your work.
Well, I don't so the traditional family constellation model is a therapeutic model. You come with an issue and you find a ancestral root of that issue often, and unwind it at the ancestral level. I don't do anything that looks like that with families, okay, but what I
do is so often in a family. So if there's a death that wasn't properly honored or properly integrated somewhere up the line, that has repercussions downstream for people, and so someone will say, Well, I, you know, I, I was in constellation the other day, and this woman said, You know what, I just have been struggling with eating issues. And we did a constellation, it turns out, your ancestors had been Ukrainian and starved by style, and so we're great grand so there's a way that eating issues
traveled. So what I more look at doing is saying, okay, here we're in the moment. How do we integrate this experience so it's fully digested in the family field so that it doesn't have to show up later as something dysfunctional. So I look at the gestures, the constellation show us how to make, and the statements, the healing sentences that need to be said. I'm sorry. I forgive you, I love you. I leave this with you. I take this. This is
mine. This is not yours. Those kinds of things, and the physical movement, gestures, rituals, are very much about embodied movements. And when we do something with our body, like pull a sheet over someone's face, that's that does something in the field. So I use those principles, okay, but no one who I'm working with would ever look and say, Oh, isn't this like a constellation? It's more that those principles guide the work, beautifully
done. Be interesting to see that in action. You see people who have a life threatening illness, and you help them, I understand, to grieve their life before it may be a cancer diagnosis, the doctor can say three to five years. So obviously there's the grief. They can do that. But then, how do you integrate obviously, they still need to live. They can't be sort of, oh, looking at the end. I'm going to
die and be waiting for it. So I was curious to know how you handled the grieving part of of the loss of we're going to live forever, kind of attitude, and then helping them integrate to the life that they have left. Perhaps that's a better word,
you know. I mean, I certainly have lots of space in my work and there's lots of attention to grief, but I wouldn't say I'm a grief coach, right? I'm not working specifically with that. I'm a death doula, yeah? And so I don't the person who's dying is not my only client. I'm working with the family, and they're part of that, okay? And I often become really more active with people when they it's almost
like a conveyor belt. One of my clients described it like this, and you know, if, if you have a terminal diagnosis, the conveyor belt is rolling, and people run backwards against it, and they try and find new routes, and they they do everything they can to try and assuage death. It's this the response, and I often come in when people have made that turn, or I sort of help them make that turn, if that feels like the place that they are, where they say actually, I'm not looking back at my life
anymore. Now I'm actually moving at the same speed as a conveyor belt, and I'm looking at where I'm going. And so if that's where I'm going now, I actually need to look at it. How do I do that? What do I need to do to be able to say goodbye? What do I need to be able to do in my family so that we can love each other as much as we can, knowing that this end is coming and grief is part of that, but it's also a much bigger frame around okay, this is, this is the next
thing we're going to do. How are we going to do this together? So that, I would say, is a bigger focus of it, and, and, you know, someone working with a grief coach or a therapist as part of that would probably be a good adject, because it is. It's a community process I'm doing, and there's community grief, and we make space for that. And that can be even just family ceremonies. Sometimes it's and ceremonies can be on the outside, very simple looking, but on the inside, quite
profound. Just the first conversation that gets the elephant out from underneath the rug and people get a chance to say. Things and the grief, the flows and the space, so that kind of witnessed grieving is a big part of it in community.
Yeah, that's amazing that you're able to create that sort of space. Because people feel so embarrassed if they start to grieve, you must set the some parameters around allowing, if somebody I do
a lot of work energetically and just in the space with family, talking about grief, validating it, giving them permission, and then, you know, so I'm just picturing a family. I sat with two young adult children. The father was very close to death and had been ill for a long time, and it had been one of the experience where he'd, you know, they'd given him a six months, and he'd live 12 and then they gave me a two month, and he lived more. He
kept out living. And everybody thought, okay, somehow they sort of adjusted the fact that he was never actually going to go and then he really was. So they'd all been in the fight mode and the life mode, and just everybody around the coffee table with a pot of tea and a cat, and giving them the opportunity passing a Talking Stick, giving each person an opportunity to say, and how is it for you? It doesn't need much more than that. The tears flow. You just let the stopper out.
Yeah. And, and when people you know, I just want you to know you are the most amazing father I ever could have bought it. And Father saying, and I know you will make good decisions, and I trust and you have my support. So there are these statements that are made in ritual space. It is different than a conversation at the dinner table.
Yeah,
that's what makes it different.
Wow, so much more meaningful. Rather than going to visit the person you know is is dying and you paste your happy face on and, oh, they're there, everything's going to be fine.
To me that is such a waste of energy and time, rather than having allowing yourself to be vulnerable and having those meaningful conversations, because very often that's when you get to know that dad actually loved you, or mum did, or somebody, rather than keeping up the pretense that everything is fine, one thing I was curious about as a young nurse, I'm dating myself, on the long Florence Nightingale wards, people could get lost and they would just silently die without
us alerting the family. And I just used to think this was awful. So when I was going to go back to Britain, I was going to potentially going into hospice work. I didn't. I ended up staying here, but I did do a stint of palliative care volunteering, and part of the training, we were told that very often, the person who is dying will send the family out of the room because the family's grief can actually keep them from leaving. Can is this something you've encountered or Well,
I don't know about very often, but certainly I think there's an anecdotal understanding that everybody needs to go their own way. And some people want to be surrounded by friends and family. Some people want to be touched. Other people are retreating, and they actually, actually don't want to be touched at the very end, some people find it too hard to
leave. I worked with a client just recently, the grandmother was dying, and she said to her daughter, in the last three days, she said, Please don't bring my grandchildren anymore. It breaks my heart. I cannot see them. It's just too much. So some people can't leave when people are there. Some people have a sense that the people or they they they have a sense that their family won't be able to handle it, so they'd rather leave when they're not there.
Okay, sometimes the family is grasping and won't let them leave. So there are lots and lots of different energetic dynamics that can be happening. But there are lots of stories of people who are, you know, the room is full, 24/7, except for 115 minute break where someone goes to get coffee and someone goes to the bathroom and someone makes a phone call, and that's when the person leaves. Yeah, I. So it can sometimes be a good idea to just make sure you're there a lot and then just give a
little bit of empty space. If you think this might be a good thing, because people really need their own perfect exit scenario, and it may be to be alone.
Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I just find that that can be one of those guilts that, especially my clients, will hold on to. I didn't get to say goodbye. I was getting coffee, and, of course, the blame and all that good stuff. So this was
that is reason to say goodbye a lot before they die.
Don't that last minute. That's right. That's what I usually bring them back to, because they say I never got to say goodbye. So then I'll bring them back to when was the last time you did so when they see, yeah, I do. I do actually say goodbye a lot. It can help. Thank you again for creating that awareness, because that is something that we in the West really do need to do a lot more
education around, don't we? If you could help parents understand how they can teach their children how to be able to be with grief and not be not to fear death and dying,
that's a big question. But of course, children learn from how their parents act, and if their parents are haven't themselves, learned how to be with grief, how to be present to death, then it's really hard for children to learn that. So it's a culturally transmitted skill, and we we get what we're given. It doesn't
come in innately with us. I guess one thing would be really encouraging parents to do their own grief work and clean up their own house, so that they are genuine, genuinely able to be present, because then when a child is in the space of death, then they know there's this stable force beside them. It's
safe. That's one part, and the other is to to really model if death is normal and that it is safe, it's really sad, and the sad can sometimes feel like it's going to kill us, but it's it's emotional pain that needs emotional skills, so all the grief and grieving skills are what allow us to be with it. It's not feel a bit like the beginning of the conversation. We talked about having a happy funeral so we don't be sad.
Sometimes people think, well, I won't take my child at this funeral, because it'll make them sad. Well, the child knows and the child feels in the family space, and what children need is congruence. They need to know that what I'm feeling and what everybody else is talking about, what's our public truth, are in alignment. If the child is all scrambled up inside and everybody's smiling, doesn't make the child happy, it makes the child confused, yeah, and so children just need to know this
is what it is. It's not scary. It's not dangerous. You know, I did a funeral, and there were little nieces and nephews of this young man, and we had the ceremony, and the ashes were at the front and a table and an urn, and then we did their section in the same area further towards the back of the room. And everybody was back drinking coffee and eating sandwiches and and I looked up and there were three, probably 12 year olds up at the urn, and they had lifted it up, and they were walking
inside. And so I walked up, and I said, that's that's what it is. And they first, they were shocked and scared. I said, Well, you know, this is ashes. This is what ashes are, lifted up. See, feel how heavy it is and and you can see, and you can see what it is. And they, they just sort of, they were curious, and they wanted to know, yeah. And we made it really normal and easy to answer the question. And then they were like, Okay. And off they went. They
were quiet, yeah. Rather than, Oh, don't touch that being scared yourself that this wasn't the right thing to be doing. Would you like to see education around death more in the schools? Do you think that has a place for it?
I think we need, as I say, it's culturally transmitted skill, and so we need to transmit it everywhere. We transmit our cultural patterns. So yes, in schools, with families, in institutions, politically, socially and how we have community ceremonies. In Calgary, we have a beautiful ceremony on the solstice which is coming on the equinox, sorry, the Fall Equinox which is coming up. It's a big arts and remembrance festival and
cemetery. So we need to, we need to have it be as much part of how we live our lives well and communicating well. So we need to teach it in all sorts of places,
have it more a kid. Action Table Talk, rather than it be talked about when the event has happened? Absolutely, yeah, my children, actually, they don't, but they will time me. When is she going to start on the death talk again? So we have fun with it. Sarah, this has been absolutely delightful. I'm conscious of your time here because I know you've got another pressing engagement.
This was delightful. I do hope we can have another conversation again at some point, and I wish you all the best out in Calgary, and let's see what we can do to make more or create more awareness around death and dying. Thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks, Anne,
bye, bye bye.