Vizzy D Darlings, This week we're jumping into language and I'm inviting you to embrace this prompt in two ways: 1. Reflect on your own relationship with language in your corner of death and grief care. What's changed and evolved in you and your work? 2. How might you share this as advocacy? On socials, in a blog post, in an interview, in a conversation with someone. How can you more concisely weave and speak the evolution of death care language into your work and world? 🐦‍⬛ There's so much within language that's nuanced to who we are, where we work and what we do. A funeral director in a regional town carries different words than a chaplain in a city hospital, than a doula sitting with someone dying at home. None of us are working from the same script, and I don't think we should be. And yet, reflecting on the language we uphold and perpetuate in this work is relevant no matter where we live and what we do. It's culturally nuanced and our responses will all be different. It's something we should all keep tending to. For example, a lot of the western Anglo-centric grief language encourages us to "ask their name", or to "speak their name" to honour that person's loss and keep their memory alive. Some of my ‘best performing’ social posts are about exactly this. And yet, when I support First Nations families here in Australia, the cultural protocol is the opposite. In some communities you DON'T speak their name for the first year, to ensure their spirit can be free in the Dreamtime and not unsettled during a time when it needs to move on undisturbed. When supporting Sorry Business (the Indigenous name for death care and funeral rites), I always ask permission to speak their name or ask how best to refer to the person who has died. There will be nuance with this in all countries and communities. 🐦‍⬛ Here's some more examples from me if helpful. I haven't quite worked out how I want to share this as advocacy, but feel free to borrow or apply anything that resonates for you.

🐦‍⬛ This week: shoot your shot... Not recklessly. Not in a "put it out to the universe" kind of way. Just one small, deliberate act that takes you somewhere you haven't quite been willing to go yet. A podcast you'd love to be on. A publication you want to write for. Someone whose work you genuinely admire and whose radar you'd like to be on. A collaboration idea sitting in your drafts. A workshop proposal. A DM. An email. An ask. Most of us wait. We wait until we feel ready enough, established enough, polished enough to deserve the ask. We wait for visibility to arrive before we risk being visible. But it usually works the other way around. Courage tends to show up first - and it often looks completely ordinary. Sending the email. Pressing publish. Introducing yourself to that neighbourhood centre. Starting the Death Café. Replying instead of lurking. Letting yourself be seen before you feel certain. This isn't about being louder. It's about making yourself more available to what's possible. What if once a month we made a ritual of this? Carving out space for the courage to do something for our future selves. Consciously nudging the edges of our comfort zones. Forging a path in the direction of what's actually calling us. So, your Visible Friday prompt for this week: What's one shot you could take that your future self would thank you for - even if the answer turns out to be no? 🐦‍⬛ Drop yours in the comments - let's inspire each other, swap ideas, maybe even help each other craft the ask. Mine makes me wince a little to say out loud, but I've always wanted to be on the radar of Sarah Kerr at Sacred Deathcare. So I'm going to shelve my fangirl nerves and reach out. What's yours? 🎵 And because courage can grow collectively, I’ve made us a playlist mixtape. A shared 45minute soundtrack for sending the email. Pitching the idea. Hitting publish. Taking the meeting. Backing yourself.

This week I'm gifting you all a snippet from the Visibility Foundations Course because what we explore in this lesson seems to be coming up a lot at the moment. I'm keen to know how and where this lands in you... it's 5 mins, watch it & tell me... This is the video most practitioners tell me they needed years ago. Not the practical stuff. The permission. The naming of something that has been quietly operating in the background of every decision about pricing, posting and self-promotion since they began this work. Death care sits at the intersection of the sacred and the commercial. Historically it has belonged to community, to ritual, to religion, none of which operate on market logic. When you put a price on sitting with a dying person, or promote your grief facilitation services on social media, some part of you wonders whether something is being violated. Whether you are "cheapening" the thing you came here to do. Sacred, to me, isn't about religion or ritual done a certain way. It's about presence. It's the moment someone lets you see them at their most undefended, when the ordinary rules of composure and privacy fall away and what's left is just the truth of what they're going through. I learned that from my grandmother long before I had language for it, and I've spent years since trying to build spaces where people can arrive at that truth without shame. That's what I mean when I say sacred. Not separate from life. Woven right through it. That feeling is not weakness. It is not imposter syndrome. It is a structural reality of this field, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than hustled past. This video takes it seriously. And then it offers a reframe that I hope will stay with you long after... Visibility in death care is not about commercialising the sacred. It is about making the sacred accessible. 🐦‍⬛ Visibility Prompt #12: Which of the beliefs in this video landed most strongly for you? Which one felt most like your own? You may even want to journal using these prompts to explore it further...

Hello my darling Vizzy D's - ! We just ticked past 200 people in this little community. And we only started dreaming into all this eleven weeks ago. Eleven weeks. I keep sitting with that number, turning it over. When I started this I thought it was about visibility 'out there'. Being seen in our communities, online, in the industry. And it still is that. But watching this group take shape week by week, I'm noticing something else happening. We're becoming more visible to each other too. There are threads of connection forming here that I don't want to lose or let sit quiet in the comments and scroll past. So this week I want to slow down and ask you something honestly, because I don't want to build this community on guesses. 🐦‍⬛ Visibility Prompt for this week: What would genuinely serve you here? What do you actually want to get out of this group and the people in it? We're all coming at this work from different angles, different stages, different corners of the industry, so I know there's no single answer. But I'm keen to understand how we support each other well as this thing keeps growing... To get the conversation started, here are some shapes this could take. Pick as many as take your fancy, add your own, tell me what's missing... 1) Themed Deep Dives - ticketed online calls where we sit with one specific topic properly, instead of skimming past it in a scroll. Things like the trend toward direct cremation, VAD, business models in death care or the inner work this job demands of us. Sessions get recorded and made available in the classroom as ticketed Masterclass recordings afterwards, so the conversation keeps earning for the people who showed up and did the work. Profits shared amongst presenters. 2) Regular free drop-in calls - maybe every 6 to 8 weeks, no agenda beyond showing up. 3) One-to-one sessions with me - ticketed audit or planning sessions where we look at where you're at and map out what's next for you. 4) More self-paced courses - websites, newsletters, that kind of practical groundwork.

Hey! I took part in my first Death Café last Saturday and I loved it. One of the things that I noticed was that, besides the 2 facilitators who were palliative care nurses, I, a celebrant, was there, and there was also someone making beautiful wooden sculptures for graves and a couple of singers for ceremonies.. This observation seemed to show that we need a place to meet as a network and become more visible together! So, as I have some capacity and experience for that, I am taking the first steps to get it started with the 2 palliative care nurses. We imagined that having a common website that gathers all actors in the ecosystem of death in our city would be a good start, and then meeting up and hopefully having collaborations etc. This would include the traditional actors such as funeral directors, palliative care, priests, but also death doulas, celebrants etc. Do any of you have such a webpage and/or network in your area? Would you share your experience and the website if there is such a thing? Regarding the name, we were joking with "The Death Portal" but it might be a bit too much for a start.. :) Any experience or tip is welcome! Thanks! Johanna