Dying with Grace

08/05/2026

♥ THIS WEEKEND ♥

FREE EVENT!!!

🩵 DYING MATTERS IN TOTNES 🩵

SCHEDULE:

SATURDAY – The Old School Hall, The Mansion (opp. library)

11.30 – Welcome ritual and poetry to open the space

12 – 1.30 – The stages of dying and how to be with someone at each stage – interactive discussion, with Tasha Kalisher

1.30 – 2 – Lunch (there’s a lovely café and courtyard downstairs or bring a packed lunch)

2 – 3 – Compassionate care after death with. Heart & Soul Funerals

3.15 – 4 – Nickie Aven and Sarah Parker address the often unspoken fears, anxieties and vulnerabilities at end of life, and in facing one’s death - Beauty Ritual

4.15 – 5 – Death Meditation with Anne Oversee

5pm – Moorheart Threshold Singers

Closing ritual
6pm – End

7pm – RedEarth Playback Theatre @ Bogan House

SUNDAY – Birdwood House

10.30 – 11.30 – Morning Death Café for everyone – a space to come and chat over tea and cake about all things death and dying

11.40 – 1.10 – End of Life Planning: Wills, LPAs, Advance Statements / ADRT and other death admin. with Rebecca Collett

1.30 - 3.45 – 'Touched by Su***de' - a deep and tender space held by Paloma Suarez and Anthony Johnston, for anyone who has been affected by Su***de.

4 – 7 – A Space for Grief and Beauty – Grief Tending Ceremony with Sarah Parker & Amie Roberts

Sunday – Bogan House (across the road from Birdwood House)

1.45 - 3.45 Death Morris – A creative workshop exploring death & dying through creativity - booking essential as limited spaces.

Book your place at info@dyingwithgrace.co.uk

For more details of any of the programme please email info@dyingwithgrace.co.uk

www.dyingwithgrace.co.uk/DM

Please feel free to drop in to what ever you’d like to, stay for the whole weekend or dip in and out. We’d love to see you there! ITS ALL FREE!

Dying Matters Week Dying Matters Week 2026 Dying Matters Week is a nationwide campaign run by Hospice UK. Each year people around the UK use this week to encourage their communities to get talking about death and dying in whatever way, shape or form works for them. May 4th – 10 thDying with Grace ...

06/05/2026

This Saturday night! ❤️ We are super delighted to have RedEarth Playback Theatre back with us, sharing their magic this Saturday evening, as part of the DYING MATTERS IN TOTNES EVENT- www.dyingwithgrace.co.uk/DM for further details of the weekend. Thank you to the wonderful actors and director for being part of our Dying Matters program again (third year running!). If you haven't seen RedEarth before, I would really encourage you coming along. It's special and potent and healing, and sometimes even humorous! ♥

A chance to come together as a community to explore the topic of Death and Dying

This performance is part of Dying Matters Week, hosted by Dying with Grace

All welcome

This is a FREE event

03/05/2026

Sarah is in the news today ❤️

Death doulas or soul midwives have increased in popularity in recent years. What do they do?

30/04/2026

♥ 🖤 Introducing Death Morris 🖤 ❤️

WHO ARE HOLDING A FREE WORKSHOP NEXT SUNDAY 10th MAY AS PART OF DYING MATTERS WEEK @ BOGAN HOUSE IN TOTNES.

TIME - 1.45 - 3.45

FREE EVENT!

♥ Death Morris is a creative collective based in Exeter who use dance, music, costumes and more in response to their fears, curiosity and experiences of death and mortality. At its core, Death Morris is a response to a need for space and time to explore death and dying through a creative folk practice that exists outside mainstream ideas and expectations of creativity.
The group meets fortnightly and members collaboratively contribute to running each session, allowing for the emergence of different perspectives and creative insight through the use of different media and practices. This results in a sprawling creative exploration of what it means to be mortal, distilled into moments, movements, sounds, garments, lyrics, invitations and more, that try and describe the indescribable feelings of being mortal and our relationship to death.

Death Morris embodies the idea that folk should be an active response to the present day experience of what it means to be alive; a reflection of what the current folk are thinking, making, doing, remembering and dreaming. We exist alongside contemporary re-interpretations of the tradition of Morris Dancing, and aim to open up a new Grove that allows for an evolution of this type of folk practice, that draws courage and inspiration from a tradition that continues to persist and respond to the world that we live in.

What to expect at the Death Morris Workshop:

We will aim to run this workshop as if it were a usual Death Morris meet up. So expect, communal alter building, writing games, movement prompts and some gentle musical invitations. As well as, cups of herbal tea, snacks and chats.
All the activities in the workshop are optional and participants are welcome to opt in and out to suit their needs.

Book your space at info@dyingwithgrace.co.uk

FREE EVENT! ♥

29/04/2026

Hello 🌞
From Today onwards we will be posting about the Offerings happening next week in DYIING MATTERS WEEK! Stay tuned....

♥ TUESDAY 5th MAY : 2 FREE EVENTS HAPPENING IN BOVEY TRACEY.. ♥
Sponsored by Dying with Grace (www.dyingwithgrace.co.uk)

🖤 DREAMING MY THRESHOLD GARMENT 🖤
with Anne Overzee

Imagine having a garment you could put on at any threshold moment in your life, including your dying, to resource you! We will dream this into being through creativity and visualization, with the possibility of making the garment in an ongoing group subsequently.

💜 WRITING FROM THE THRESHOLD 💜
with Jackie Juno.

Explore, through discussion and creative writing, life's many thresholds, including the ultimate one of death. You will dicover your innate skill for writing poetry!!

-These are stand-alone FREE workshops with a common theme-

Location: Bovey Paradiso, The King of Prussia, 83 Fore St., Bovey Tracey, TQ13 9AB

Date: Tuesday 5th`May

Times:
Dreaming my Threshold Garment: 10.00 am– 12.30 pm
Writing from the Threshold: 2.00 – 4.30 pm

Enquiries: Anne Overzee 07717 221504.
Booking Essential at info@dyingwithgrace.co.uk

♥♥♥♥♥

14/01/2026

✨A Space for Grief & Beauty✨
I am delighted to be offering this grief tending event with my colleague and friend Amie Roberts, in her beautiful yurt in Bridgetown. The afternoon will include the process of the Truth Mandala, which is a powerful vehicle and container for our grief, and a traditional Tea Ceremony to bring balance and soothing to the deep places we touch within. When we work in this way, Grief and Beauty walk side by side, hand in hand, as the expressions of Love.

The event is 2pm - 6pm on Sunday February 1st. Please see the flyer below for more details. Spaces are limited to a maximum of ten people so that we can really nurture safety and intimacy.

Offered With Love ♥

01/11/2025

It really is all about love ❤️🌹

After listening to the confessions of 300 dying people, I decided to completely change my life

29/09/2025

I know the exact pressure it takes to crack a rib during CPR. But last Tuesday, I learned a patient’s silence can break a doctor’s soul.

His name was David Chen, but on my screen, he was "Male, 82, Congestive Heart Failure, Room 402." I spent seven minutes with him that morning. Seven minutes to check his vitals, listen to the fluid in his lungs, adjust his diuretics, and type 24 required data points into his Electronic Health Record. He tried to tell me something, gesturing toward a faded photo on his nightstand. I nodded, said "we'll talk later," and moved on. There was no billing code for "talk later."

Mr. Chen died that afternoon. As a nurse quietly cleared his belongings, she handed me the photo. It was him as a young man, beaming, his arm around a woman, standing before a small grocery store with "CHEN'S MARKET" painted on the window.

The realization hit me like a physical blow. I knew his ejection fraction and his creatinine levels. I knew his insurance provider and his allergy to penicillin. But I didn't know his wife's name or that he had built a life from nothing with his own two hands. I hadn’t treated David Chen. I had managed the decline of a failing organ system. And in the sterile efficiency of it all, I had lost a piece of myself.

The next day, I bought a small, black Moleskine notebook. It felt like an act of rebellion.

My first patient was Eleanor Gable, a frail woman lost in a sea of white bedsheets, diagnosed with pneumonia. I did my exam, updated her chart, and just as I was about to leave, I paused. I turned back from the door.

"Mrs. Gable," I said, my voice feeling strange. "Tell me one thing about yourself that’s not in this file."

Her tired eyes widened in surprise. A faint smile touched her lips. "I was a second-grade teacher," she whispered. "The best sound in the world... is the silence that comes just after a child finally reads a sentence on their own."

I wrote it down in my notebook. Eleanor Gable: Taught children how to read.

I kept doing it. My little black book began to fill with ghosts of lives lived.

Frank Miller: Drove a yellow cab in New York for 40 years.
Maria Flores: Her mole recipe won the state fair in Texas, three years running.
Sam Jones: Proposed to his wife on the Kiss Cam at a Dodgers game.

Something began to change. The burnout, that heavy, gray cloak I’d been wearing for years, started to feel a little lighter. Before entering a room, I’d glance at my notebook. I wasn’t walking in to see the "acute pancreatitis in 207." I was walking in to see Frank, who probably had a million stories about the city. My patients felt it too. They'd sit up a little straighter. A light would flicker back in their eyes. They felt seen.

The real test came with Leo. He was 22, angry, and refusing dialysis for a condition he’d brought on himself. He was a "difficult patient," a label that in hospital-speak means "we've given up." The team was frustrated.

I walked into his room and sat down, leaving my tablet outside. We sat in silence for a full minute. I didn't look at his monitors. I looked at the intricate drawings covering his arms.

"Who's your artist?" I asked.

He scoffed. "Did 'em myself."

"They're good," I said. "This one... it looks like a blueprint."

For the first time, his gaze lost its hard edge. "Wanted to be an architect," he muttered, "before... all this."

We talked for twenty minutes about buildings, about lines, about creating something permanent. We didn't mention his kidneys once. When I stood up to leave, he said, so quietly I almost missed it, "Okay. We can try the dialysis tomorrow."

Later that night, I opened my Moleskine. I wrote: Leo Vance: Designs cities on paper.

The system I work in is designed to document disease with thousands of data points. It logs every cough, every pill, every lab value. It tells the story of how a body breaks down.

My little black book tells a different story. It tells the story of why a life mattered.

We are taught to practice medicine with data, but we heal with humanity. And in a world drowning in information, a single sentence that says, "I see you," isn't just a kind gesture.

It’s the most powerful medicine we have.

12/07/2025

Please don’t call 999 when your person is dying. Please don’t send them to A&E to die in a corridor.

This has happened recently, it actually happens a lot, and it’s heartbreaking. It adds so many layers to grief and our experience of losing our person.

If someone is dying at home, their death is expected, and they’re being supported by healthcare professionals, you do not need to call an ambulance when things change.
This is what dying looks like. This is what bodies do. And this is where death education comes in. This is why the conversations matter.

We panic because we don’t know what to expect. We call 999 because we’re scared. But if we can have the right conversations in advance, if we can prepare, we give our people the best chance of a peaceful, comfortable death in a place they love, surrounded by familiarity and safety.

Paramedics can’t stop death. It’s not an emergency when someone is, expectedly, at the natural end of their life. They may offer kind words or reassurance, and could give medication, but they can’t fix what’s happening.

What can help is:

💫 Knowing what to expect
💫 Having medication and support plans in place
💫 Keeping them safe, being present and being as calm as possible

We don’t need bright lights and cold hospital corridors.

We need comfort and dignity.

We need to hold a hand and stay close.

This is why death education matters. So we don’t panic, so we know it is not an emergency when things are expected.

So we don’t send our people away to die somewhere that doesn’t feel like home ❤️

19/06/2025

I'm putting a prayer out that this offering is seen by the right people, and gets to those who need it.