Going with Grace End of Life Education and Planning

Absolutely every death care worker should take this course. As death care workers, we claim to strive to ensure a good death for every client and their families. But are we? In a world where white supremacy rules every aspect of our lives it only makes sense that it would also rule every aspect of our death. This course helps with reflection and tools to start the fight against the biases that have been ingrained in us since birth and the systems that keep them in place in order to ensure that a good death is something that is attainable for all.

These five wisdom keepers (Alua Arthur, Oceana Sawyer, Lashanna Williams, Joe'l Simone Anthony, Alica Forneret) came together in our time of collective need and brought forth an outpouring of knowledge and wisdom forged in the fires of their personal experience. I feel so honored to be a recipient of the love and respect with which they shared these teachings. I gained important tools of self-reflection and new perspectives that I will take with me into the birthing of my own service, as a guest, to the dying, the dead, and those in grief. Thank you Thank you Beautiful Women!

I had the privilege and pleasure of learning from Alua Arthur, Oceana Sawyer, Lashanna Willians, Joel Simone Anthony, and Alicia Forneret in this course. I learned so much about implicit bias across all aspects of death care and learned how to identify the way by own privilege has impacted the care I provide. This course is a well-crafted starting point for me to continue doing the work of decolonizing how I approach how I speak and how I listen in my work and at home.

I work in at a Hospice and this information was great to hear from five woman of color. This course should be taken by all Hospice workers. Thanks you so much.

I trained as a death doula several years ago, and found a lack of conversation about structural racism in end of life care, and in deaths themselves, in death care spaces particularly unnerving. I was so excited to see that Going with Grace was offering "Shifting Deathcare: Tools for a New Paradigm," because I recognize how pervasive anti-blackness is in impacting how black Americans die and the kind of care they experience and feel they can advocate for while dying. I loved learning about the radicalization of a "good death" (i.e. its continued inaccessibility to many), the importance of language for nonjudgmental support, disenfranchised grief, and histories/practices of homegoing rituals in black communities, and how to provide informed and prepared grief support.

Learning about the importance of funeralization and how (as a funeral professional myself) to approach BIPOC grief and funeral arrangements as a guest is a highly valuable lesson. I was grateful for the history of homegoings, how that history connects to modern tradition, and the insight that current events affect how BIPOC experience not just life but death/loss, too, and that it can inform perception and feeling even if the family you're working with didn't necessarily experience a traumatic/violent death. I also appreciated looking at embalming/restorative art with the removal of a privileged view. It was a nice reminder that these things can be powerful and healing tools. Thank you Joél!

This is a really wonderful course that's addressing so much essential work that needs to be done in death care and end-of-life care. I am so glad I was able to take this course and I will continue to refer back to it often to make sure that I am making a welcoming and open space for all that I encounter in my work as a funeral director. I will also be revisiting the notes from this work to remember to look for and acknowledge my own biases and how those affect the people that I serve. er

Every module brought new insight and gave pause for reflection - what has drawn me to this space, what am I capable of giving back to it, and where do I stumble over the privilege I neglect to notice? A debt of thanks to each instructor for sharing their guidance and insight, and experience.ser