In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Anne-Marie Keppel, death doula educator, founder of the nonprofit Village Deathcare, and author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, about what has and has not shifted in the culture since she wrote the book. Anne-Marie traces the origin of Death Nesting back to her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, a Meals on Wheels director, and to the elderly homeless man she looked after through Vermont winters; work she did because she wanted to.
They look at the 1920s as the demarcation point when care left the home, when antibiotics became a god and the hospital became the authority realm, and at what has been lost in the handoff from family to funeral home. Anne-Marie makes the case that death curiosity is healthy, that it is okay to want to see and touch a dead body, and that fewer than half of the 500 students she has taught ever have. She describes the vortex that opens when someone is leaving their body, why timing matters more than ceremony, and why she considers the celebration of life a travesty when it replaces mourning rather than following it.
The conversation goes into difficult territory: what care workers have reported feeling after a medically assisted death, the sense of severing and whiplash, and Kimberly’s parallel that you can die and death does not happen. They talk honestly about suicide, about normalizing the thought rather than exiling it, about the scammers now working the death doula platforms, and about why people who long for death often do not know what dead actually is.
The episode closes on professionalization: why she calls the business plan death doula training a lost opportunity, why she teaches citizens rather than experts, why the hairdresser who talks about dying with people in her chair is doing death doula work, and why the point is to give all the knowledge and wisdom, everything you’ve got, away. If any of this landed close to home, you don’t have to sit with it alone. In the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, day or night.
Anne-Marie Keppel Bio
Anne-Marie Keppel is an international speaker, award-winning author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, and founder of Village Deathcare 501c3, whose inspiration and purpose is incorporating deathcare into community. Of Irish Celtic and Finnish Sámi (indigenous Finno-Ugric) roots, she draws from her work as a death doula, nurse assistant, life-long meditator, Reiki Master Teacher and mother of three. She leads retreats and talks in Vermont, across the US, in Ireland, England, Costa Rica and Mexico on death, dying, healing and intuition. She lives in Vermont where she practices meditation, magic, community deathcare, trains her Siberian Husky (nonstop) and delights in her family’s love.
What Anne-Marie Shares
- Why she wrote Death Nesting from a place of genuine care and not a business plan, and how she only later realized she had accidentally built a business model
- The basic physical skills nobody is taught anymore: how to transfer someone from bed to chair, how to protect your own back, how to hold a body that cannot hold itself
- Her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, and director of Meals on Wheels in Montpelier, Vermont
- Caring for an 89 year old homeless veteran through Vermont winters, and what it taught her about doing the work when nobody is filming
- The 1920s as the demarcation point: hospitalization, antibiotics as the new god, and the hospital as a god realm where we send our loved ones away
- Why death curiosity is healthy, and why it is okay to want to see, touch, and smell a dead body
- That fewer than half of the 500 plus students she has taught have ever seen a dead body, at every age including into their sixties
- The vortex that opens when a person is leaving their body, why others feel it whether or not they know it, and why it stays open afterward
- Why the celebration of life is a travesty when it replaces the funeral, and why timing is the thing that matters
- What people have told her after being present at a medically assisted death: the severing, the whiplash, and the gap between what their eyes saw and what their body felt
- The scammers currently working death doula platforms with fake terminal diagnoses, and the empathy they exploit
- Why she normalizes suicidal thoughts immediately, and what happens in a room when she asks how many people have thought about ending their life
- Why people who long for death often do not know what dead is, and her prescription: volunteer for hospice, work in a funeral home, dig a grave
- Why coupling a death doula training with a business plan destroys the training, and why she teaches citizens instead of experts
- The hairdresser and the barista as models of community deathcare, and how to be a death doula without quitting your job
- Why she teaches her students to empower the family, stay in the background, and then walk away
- The student who finished her training and realized he actually is afraid to die, and why she called that a hallelujah
What You’ll Hear
- What has and has not shifted in the culture since Death Nesting was first written
- The parallels and the gap between birth doula care and death doula care, and what weekend trainings do to a threshold
- Why 88 is very old, and what the denial of that reveals about the culture
- Embodied knowing versus instruction: holding a baby, holding a fractured heel, holding a leg someone cannot feel
- Why proximity beats curriculum, and why no training substitutes for a long embodiment practice
- How the handoff from family to hospital to funeral home created a generation with nowhere to put its grief
- The vortex, the gateway, and why people need to step outside for coffee during a death
- A candid, careful exchange about medical aid in dying, individualism, sovereignty, and what Canada has shown since legalization
- Stephen Jenkinson’s line that you can die and death does not happen, and its birth equivalent
- Suicide, ideation, and the difference between exiling the subject and washing away the taboo
- Disconnection from the physical earth, zero vulnerability tolerance, and why medical professionals arrive at death doula training carrying decades of unprocessed exposure
- Kimberly on mothering the bones as a lay practice, and on what teaching does to your ability to receive
- The professionalization problem, the learning rate, and permission to be new at something
- Why awkwardness is the skill worth practicing before the business card
- Details on Anne-Marie’s upcoming autumn death doula training
Anne-Marie Keppel Resources:
Main Website: https://stardustmeadow.com
Anne-Marie Keppel: https://www.annemariekeppel.com
Death Doula Training (Village Deathcare Citizen Course): https://stardustmeadow.com/death-doula-training
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/village_deathcare/
Medium: https://annemariekeppel.medium.com
Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula: https://www.innertraditions.com/books/death-nesting
Referenced in conversation:
- Stephen Jenkinson, Orphan Wisdom: https://orphanwisdom.com
- Tom Myers, Anatomy Trains: https://www.anatomytrains.com
- Tami Lynn Kent, Wild Feminine: https://www.wildfeminine.com/
If you or a loved one are dealing with suicide or suicidal thoughts you can call or text 988 in anywhere in the US to find someone to talk to.