As educators, death-workers, and community leaders, The Deathwives work to revive and share end-of-life wisdom rooted in many cultures, advance environmentally-conscious practices, and nurture a growing community dedicated to navigating death and dying with reverence, peace, & compassion.
As Seen InForbes • NBC • Denverite • The Trevor Moore Show • VICE News • National Home Funeral Alliance • Let’s Talk Taste • The Glam Reaper • Suffocate City • Voyage Denver • Farewelling • Policy Horizons Canada • Round Glass Media
Let’s Talk About Death.
Deathwives is an educational platform and community where deathworkers, the death-curious, organizations, and the general public can find connection, resources, empowerment, and support. As sacred grief practitioners and deathworkers for over two decades, we’ve witnessed the profound healing that conscious deathwork can bring. We founded Deathwives to bring this work to the world through courses, mentorship, and community-driven projects that help others integrate individual and collective grief and reclaim ancient deathwork and death doula practices. Our work is dedicated to re-aligning the funeral industry with Mother Earth, removing stigmas around death and dying, supporting a growing community of deathworkers, and allowing everyone to experience an equitable, holistic, and purposeful end of life.
Meet Erin & Lauren →
Bringing attention to our lasting footprint as human beings is the cornerstone of a healthy planet.
We believe that it’s time we respect the planet and the body after death, as our ancestors did. For thousands of years, we buried our loved ones directly in the earth (what we call a ‘green burial’ today) and honored nature’s cyclical processes that maintain a healthy ecosystem. Today, the traditional funeral industry uses nearly a million gallons of preservative chemicals annually and follows toxic protocols that completely disrupt nature’s processes (and our individual grieving processes). The time has come to revolutionize the funeral industry, and with new technologies, the rebirth of age-old practices, and a community of passionate changemakers, we now have options. We aim to bring truly ‘green’ end-of-life practices to the world once again through education (our Environmental Death course is a favorite), advocacy, and professional consults with funeral homes.
Honest conversations about death & dying are the cornerstone of a healthy society.
We facilitate open community discussions to help shift our overall culture of ‘death phobia’ towards talking about and preparing for death. In compassionately holding space for the topics that we’re often afraid to talk about—end-of-life planning, logistics, loss, grief—and welcoming Deathfolx guests from across death spaces and industries, we create community spaces to explore our own mortality.
In 2020, amidst and in response to the unfathomable loss of life during Covid, We created ‘Community Grief,’ a pay-what-you-can online workshop to help those grieving learn to integrate their experiences and move towards personal and community healing. We were founded with a mission to uphold equity, access, and community, and as such, will continue to keep this workshop accessible to all now and in the future, to help bring healing to all who seek it.
