Bluegrass Death Doula offers end-of-life planning, legacy project assistance, comfort therapy, living funerals, vigil services, home funeral workshops, green burial consultations, and celebrant services. To request a consultation, click here.
Basic Planning
In this form of planning, you will complete your Advanced Care Directives and decide what you want your funeral to look like. An Advance Care Directive is a legal document that explains how you want decisions about your personal welfare to be made if you cannot make the decisions yourself. BGDD will help guide you through each aspect of completing your directives while informing you of your rights and educating you about the options you have when you enter your end of life. Funeral options and body disposition will also be discussed. This form of preparation is a great way to open a conversation about death with your loved ones and is recommended to everyone.
Legacy Projects
Legacy Projects can be many different things. They may be something small like a love letter to a spouse, or a video tutorial of how to make a favorite recipe and they may be something as complex as writing a book. In either case, a Legacy Project can be a valuable gift to give your loved ones. What may surprise you is how valuable this process can be for you.
Bluegrass Death Doula will guide you through selecting and creating the Legacy Project that is best for you and your family.
Comfort Therapy
Lauren Hunter-Smith is certified to provide aromatherapy, sound therapy, personalized hypnosis, guided meditation, gentle massage, and hand-holding therapies. Each of these disciplines are proven to help ease stress, anxiety, depression, and pain. These therapies may also provide relief when other treatments have become unsuccessful.
Comfort therapy is available to individuals and groups.
Living Funerals
Final farewells often slip by without recognition, robbing the dying and their loved ones of the closure that truly saying goodbye can bring. We let our fear of death and sadness stand in the way of that one last ‘I love you’ so many of us wish we had… but there is another way.
A Living Funeral is essentially a declaration that it is time to say goodbye. They can be anything from one last poker night, to one last family dinner, to one last night at Studio 54. Bluegrass Death Doula will help you plan the event of a lifetime and while it may be sad at first, I promise you and your guests will end the night beaming.
Vigil Services
A candle lit room filled with the gentle scents of the sea
Your favorite pillow and blanket
Your loved ones snuggled up against you
Music
Your favorite painting in view
Your pet at your feet
The rhythmic words of your favorite poem
The reassurance that your loved ones are prepared for this moment
The reassurance that when the moment comes, someone is there to care for your loved ones
Bluegrass Death Doula will help your loved ones prepare a vigil schedule to ensure you won't be alone, educate your loved ones about the time of death, and create a peaceful ambiance through the use of oxygen tank safe LED candles, aromatherapy, music, literature, and your favorite possessions (pillow, blanket, art, etc). Lauren is also availed to support loved ones at the time of death.
Home Funeral Workshops
A home funeral is the most beautiful thing in the world. Washing the bodies of our loved ones is ancient and sacred. It allows the bereaved an opportunity to honor their loved one and say goodbye. It also allows for a far more intimate viewing if the family so chooses.
Bluegrass Death Doula offers private and community Home Funeral Workshops which include what to expect when a person is actively dying, what to do at the time of death, and instruction on how to move, cleanse, and prepare a body for viewing and disposition.
Disposition Education and Resources
How would you like your body put to rest? What options are available? Where can you get them? How much do they cost? Lauren Hunter-Smith knows.
Learn all about conventional burial, green burial, cremation, aquamation, human composting and more.
Celebrant Services
For those who want a personalized and authentic funeral experience, Bluegrass Death Doula offers non-denominational celebrant services. As a celebrant, Lauren Hunter-Smith will interview friends and family to create a eulogy as unique as you are. Lauren will also coordinate those who also wish to speak, supporting them through the entire service as necessary.
Bluegrass Death Doula