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Betsy is a trained spiritual mentor, is ordained by Wisdom of the Heart Church, and holds certificates in Sound Healing, Aromatherapy, and Sacred DeathCare. Betsy officiates funerals and offers Sacred DeathCare services if you are dying, you know someone who is dying, or have lost a loved one, or you want to be prepared to meet death in a conscious, sacred, loving way.
What is sacred deathcare?
Sacred DeathCare is a holistic, spiritually centered approach to the end-of-life journey. It incorporates practices and rituals that honor and support the dying person, their loved ones, and the deceased person’s soul. It recognizes the importance of addressing the emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs of individuals facing death and loss, alongside their physical well-being.
While doctors, nurses, and hospice providers attend to the physical needs of the body — for comfort, pain medicine, and palliative care — Sacred DeathCare providers, sometimes called death doulas, attend to the needs of the person’s soul.
As my mentor, Sarah Kerr, teaches, the principles of Sacred DeathCare emphasize community connection, cooperation with archetypal forces, and the creation of healing rituals to facilitate a more profound and healing experience for both the living and the dead. The approach recognizes the importance of integrating the soul’s journey into end-of-life care and provides education and support to develop these skills.
Sacred DeathCare providers can assist with:
- Preparing for your own death
- Preparing for a death in the family
- Preparing for and processing pet death (especially for children)
- Complex family dynamics around death or loss
- Unresolved deaths from the past
- Pregnancy loss (abortion, miscarriage, etc.)
- Life losses that feel like a death, even if nobody has died
- Integrating non-ordinary or mystical experiences
- Any other deathly situation where the healing energy is stuck
Funerals
How Betsy does funerals
I’m an interfaith minister, and my spirituality is nature-based. In the funerals I facilitate, I use ritual and tell the universal story of death to harness the ancient power of archetypes. The universal death story describes how the person who has died leaves the land of the living, crosses a river in a canoe propelled by the love and grief of their loved ones, and arrives on the other side, where the ancestors reside. The universal death story is common across all indigenous cultures, with certain variations. In all of the tellings, the person who has died goes on a journey of some sort, leaving the land of the living, and arriving at a new place peopled by the ancestors.
The Supportive Container
A funeral is a ritual that allows you to honor your loved one while you are being held in a safe space for your grief to flow. In my experience, it’s best for close family members – spouse, kids, parents – to not have any role required of them in the funeral ceremony so you can fully embody your grief, and experience the transformation of the funeral ritual because you can’t simultaneously hold the container for others and attend to your grief at the same time. My role as the facilitator of the funeral is to hold this supportive, energetic container so you can grieve the loss.
Story Gathering Session
A story gathering session is held a week or so before the funeral with close family or friends. This allows you to tell the stories about your loved one, for me to hear them and write my eulogy based on your love and your words, and so you can mentally and emotionally begin to prepare for the funeral.
Ritual
Ritual is an action that means something. A ritual surrounding a death, such as a funeral, allows the power of ancient archetypes to transform everyone involved and align them with physical reality. Ritual also allows the identity and purpose of everyone who is grieving to change. Modern Western culture denies that death exists, but death changes everyone surrounding the person who has died, and calls everyone to take up a new identity. The wife becomes a widow; the child becomes an orphan; the friends become the bereaved; and the dying person’s identity changes from elder to ancestor. Ritual gives the soul time and space to catch up with the profound changes surrounding a death. A healthy funeral ritual teaches how to approach this transformation while modeling it for the community and transforming the underlying energetic pattern of the situation: You leave the old reality of life with your loved one, enter the liminal space in between, and come out the other side with a new role to accept and support for your grief.
Cost
Betsy charges $500 to officiate funerals, which includes up to 8 hours of her time for preparation, communication, facilitating the story-gathering session, service creation, travel, and coordination. For out-of-town funerals, additional travel charges may apply.
Please email me with questions about funerals at [email protected]
Care for the soul
Sometimes death happens quickly, or not according to plan, and you can be left with unfinished emotions.
Sometimes you don’t get the chance to say goodbye.
You might feel your loved one hasn’t fully crossed over and is stuck here, and not know how to help them.
You might want to support your soul through end-of-life, but not be affiliated with a faith community.
You might need extra help navigating issues surrounding a complicated death.
Betsy provides Sacred DeathCare Services that can help you hold meaningful rituals, process difficult feelings, support caregiving, receive one-on-one forgiveness coaching, and more. She can assist souls to get where they need to go after death and help untangle energetic blocks holding souls here. She can help to provide closure for deaths that have happened decades ago or support you in approaching a complicated death now.
Ritual
Rituals help to acknowledge the complicated feelings surrounding death or loss and assist in placing the experience in context. And what ritual does best is to bring the physical reality into alignment with the mental, social, and spiritual aspects, which are often processed on different timelines. In addition to funerals, Betsy offers support in planning and holding Sacred DeathCare rituals to bring healing to pain and transformation to stuck emotions and energy.
Schedule an individual sacred deathcare session
The cost of a 60-minute individual session with Betsy is $100. Please complete the New Client Form and schedule here.
Free class!
Betsy offers a free online self-study class called Preparing for a Good Death that provides tools for:
- Writing your Advance Directive
- Coming to peace with the relationships in your life using forgiveness
- Preparing for your transition mentally, emotionally, and spiritually
- Knowing how death works and what is coming next
- Honoring and saying “goodbye” to your life in a body
One-on-one support
Many folks these days are looking for spiritual ways to acknowledge the transition of death, but don’t have a map of the process. Betsy offers Spiritual Companioning for end-of-life care, Support to Caregivers and loved ones as they navigate their transition, and Sacred Self-Healing to repair relationships with your loved ones on both sides of the veil.
Betsy can serve as your guide through the many aspects of death and loss, providing comfort, support, and practical guidance about the death process.
The cost of each 60-minute session is $100. Please complete the New Client Form and schedule here.