Samsara End-of-Life Services

30/07/2025

Ever thought about becoming an end of life doula? Join Kate Wolfe for this important training!

24/07/2025

Funerals and memorials don’t have to be traditional. Making them personal is the magic touch.

16/07/2025

Some really great ideas for headstones.

Taking time to carefully consider how to design a headstone that showcases a special someone is important—and we're here to help with personalization ideas.

26/06/2025

Excellent VA benefit!

As an honorably discharged Veteran of the United States Armed Forces you and your spouse are entitled to free burial or cremation interment at a national cemetery as well as other funeral services worth up to $7,000 per person?

05/06/2025

Love this artist!

04/06/2025

30/05/2025

This looks like a great event with some amazing friends. Please consider attending!

There is still time to get tickets for for our upcoming event, and the price has been reduced to $25! Join us June 10 for a special viewing of the documentary “Goodboy” by Ashley Mosher, a touching story about the bond between a woman and her 15-year-old chocolate lab, and the layered grief of losing both her beloved dog and her father in the same year. Then. hear from an incredible group of panelists. They include:
• Cathy Wurzer (our founder), a broadcast journalist with MPR News and TPT - Twin Cities PBS
• Nina Guertin, end-of-life/death doula for both people and pets and founder of Tending the Spirit End-of-Life Doula Care
• MN Pets, a group of veterinarians who offer compassionate end-of-life care for pets
• Heidi Brenegan from Animal Emergency & Referral Center of Minnesota, which provides quality emergency veterinary care and runs a pet grief group
• Ashley Mosher, an award-winning Minneapolis native filmmaker and photographer
Get your ticket: https://www.endinmindproject.org/events/

01/05/2025

Go!

20/04/2025

Dementia should be seen. Sufferers supported.

“My father’s cognitive decline had an audience of almost everyone we knew, many of whom didn’t know about his diagnosis,” Angie Mazakis wrote in 2023. But the more he reached out to people—purposefully or not—the more she and her sister realized that his reality didn’t need to be concealed: https://theatln.tc/xv1wOr2g
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In the last six months of his life, dementia made Mazakis’s father deeply anxious and afraid to be alone. “My father’s social-media use reflected his constant state of agitation. He’d ping me endlessly on Facebook … But his frenetic posting also seemed to soothe him in real life; it gave him an outlet for his nervous energy, and a sense of being linked to other people. Still, I felt anxious about his more public online activity,” she writes. “It would have taken too much effort to alert every one of his friends of his situation. So we just let him continue to use social media, assuming that people would eventually ignore his posts.”⁠
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But that’s not what happened. Instead, they were mostly just concerned, and loving, and glad to still be connected to him. Once, about a month before her dad died, he video-called Mazakis through Facebook—something he had never done before. “‘I know you didn’t mean to, but I’m glad you called,’ I said. ‘Did you know you added six other people to this call?’ He didn’t. ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘we might have some visitors joining.’ One friend joined from North Carolina and talked with him for a few minutes. Before he hung up, he shared how much my dad meant to him. Then a friend who was driving through the mountains of Lebanon joined. ‘I love this man. I love your dad,’ he said. ‘He’s like a father to me.’”⁠
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“Dementia patients are so often hidden, whether in facilities away from their communities or more subtly—by people like me, keeping private the thoughts and behaviors of our loved ones that make us uncomfortable. That impulse, I believe, is often well intentioned; we just don’t know what people will think … But watching my dad’s friends react to his online activity, I realized I should have had a little more faith in their care for him, and the persistence of that care even when he didn’t seem like himself anymore.”⁠
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🎨: Jon Han for The Atlantic

19/04/2025

Such profound observations.

03/04/2025

Such an important topic and so often overlooked.

“The Tin Woman,” which opens Friday, explores the process of organ donation. The topic is personal for the play’s director.

27/03/2025

Animals and nursing homes are a match made in heaven.