-GUEST BIOGRAPHY-

Karla Kerr is a holistic funeral director and death doula whose mission is to reclaim death care and bring it back into the community. She focuses on creating safe spaces for open and honest conversations about end of life options with less euphemism and more clarity.  Karla is passionate about sharing the knowledge and experience she has gained from working in traditional funeral homes and does so with a healthy dose of levity and humour. 

Website: https://karlakerr.ca/

-EPISODE SUMMARY-

PRACTICES: 

• Find creative ways to talk about death: Death over dinner conversation, Death café, Death over drafts. Use entry way conversation starters to ease into the topic. 
• Talk about your end of life with your family so they know how to act in your interest. Let them know what would be worse than dying and let that inform the decisions you make. 
• When dying, return to the senses and find moments of pleasure and joy. These will be unique to each person. Prepare beforehand by telling the people around you about the things that bring you pleasure, so they can make sure you have access to them.
• Find ways of connecting to activities that you used to enjoy together. 
• Show love to yourself by tuning into what you really want, free from expectations of how you should be. Connect to your true needs. 
• Help protect the time of someone who is dying. 
• You can deeply honor the dying person by honoring their values and requests at the end of life. You are celebrating them exactly as they are. 
• If you have remorse or regret regarding someone who has passed, give space for it not to be ok, the pain and the heartache. 
• Draw comfort from people who have already died. You can continue to be in connection with them in a way that makes sense to you. 
• Alternatives to cremation: Alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation), Terramation (human composting). 
• Imagine leaving this life feeling a lightness in your soul. 

IDEAS: 

• Death is an opportunity to be grateful for what we have (ex. walking and breathing), and to take vulnerable risks by speaking what we truly feel and following the dreams we have been putting off. 
• It is easy to hide from our true desires by telling ourselves we will follow them in the future. Sometimes the future comes and we are no longer able to. 
• We have a finite amount of time and we don't know how much time that is. 
• Acceptance doesn't mean being ok with what is happening, but acknowledging it is happening and determining how to best move forward.  
• There are two kinds of death: sudden and prolonged. Today, most people live a prolonged death. 
• Dying people want authentic and deep connection & relationships .
• You don’t need to see everyone that wants to see you when you’re dying. 
• Focus on the needs of the dying person. Their needs become small and pure.  
• Common regrets include working too much, putting family aside, not pursuing a dream, holding a grudge.
• There are concentric circles around the person who is dying. We lean in when we can offer support, we lean out when we need support. 
• We don’t reach the end of life with perfection, and everything doesn’t close perfectly. 
• You can’t take away the sadness of someone leaving forever. 
• The death positivity movement allows us to reduce anxiety around death.

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