Honouring death as a sacred part of life:
A glimpse of events over the years
Conversations in Conservation
November 2025
Conservation Burial Ottawa hosted a special movie screening of Death Out of the Shadows and Steelmantown followed by an engaging discussion on conservation.
This free event was a great opportunity to learn more about important environmental issues and connect with like-minded individuals. Conservation Burial Ottawa aims to inspire and educate on how we can align core values with decisions around disposition and make a difference in protecting our planet.
Return to the Earth
October 2025
How might our bodies nourish the world after death? How can we prepare for the natural return of all life to the earth?
It’s questions like these that formed the theme of our 7th Annual Autumn Showcase which explored dying, death, and disposition through learning, crafting, sharing, and reflection – an opportunity to imagine how our memories can weave into community and how we can speak of grief through art and ritual.
Photo credits to Andrienne Prest and Chelsea Hoagland
We gathered for a lively afternoon of connection among local community deathcare enthusiasts, along with:
- Local natural burial updates from Conservation Burial Ottawa
- Shroud creations by artist Diane Lemire
- Cardboard casket painting with Kayla Spagnoli
- Tahara demonstration by Rabbi Anna Maranta
- D is for Death alphabet colouring book
- Storytime and stone art by Heather Kirk and Sandra Spicer
- Shrouding instruction by Kelly Butler
Cemetery Plant Walks
Summer 2025
A free educational series led by local herbalist and botanical expert Amber Westfall of The Wild Garden, these walks are part of Conservation Burial Ottawa‘s effort to bring natural burial to Ottawa.
Natural (or green) burial is a form of disposition that reminds us how the ending of one can feed a sustainable future for others. It offers a meaningful choice, protects land, promotes biodiversity, and invites us into a deeper relationship with the natural world.
These walks offer an opportunity to learn about the rich biodiversity found in local cemeteries, as well as a gentle, meaningful way to connect with the land, the past, and the present while remembering our beloved dead.
Spring Social
May 2025
Our annual Spring event is for fellow deathcare practitioners, volunteers, and anyone curious about engaging in community around dying, death, and grief. This year’s gathering brought new faces and like minds to the intimate practice of shrouding and imagining our finitude, our eventual end of days.
After a shrouding demonstration by Rabbi Anna Maranta and Kelly Butler, we became a room full of seedpods, returning to the earth to feed the life to come.
A guided meditation on dying, death, and dissolution was an opportunity to reflect: What will be our legacy? What is it that we’re planting, nourishing, and what fruit will it bear? Seedpod is an apt description! To what do we give life?
Awakening to Meaning: Grief Into Growth
April 2025
Sorrow and pain might be our response to world news, or our personal struggles may be difficult to bear. But bearing them means being present to grief.
This was a day of grounding, grief tending, and honouring our full experience. The etymology of the word “heal” is to make whole, and this is the work; we put back together what is broken, find our way to whole rather than cured.
Shrouding Workshop
February 2025
En Terre Outaouais hosted an interactive workshop led by Kelly Butler which explored the art and beauty of shrouding and its role in natural burial.
Shrouding is one way that cultures around the world have tended to their beloved dead in preparation for burials.
Kelly spoke about the historical and cultural significance of shrouds, various types of shrouds, and shared a specific technique to demonstrate how the art of shrouding can transform grief into a tender act of care.
A Last Farewell: Home Deathcare Workshop
October 2024
At our 6th annul autumn event, local death doulas demonstrated how home vigils and home funerals can be a meaningful part of caring for a loved one at the end of life.
Included was a brief overview of legalities and rights of family-led deathcare in Ontario, the role of a death doula, and the importance of pre-planning and having conversations within one’s community to support empowered and informed decision-making at an incredibly challenging time.
Practical, ritual, and spiritual considerations illuminated how tending to a loved one after death can be a way of remaining present to this form of ending, as well as support the grieving process.
Learn to Shroud Workshop
September 2024
Instructors Rabbi Anna Maranta and Kelly Butler, MHSc, brought decades of experience in caring for the dying and tending the dead.
Through storytelling and hands-on demonstrations, this workshop explored the importance of shrouds in natural burial, as well as construction, types of material, and symbolic meaning.
This return to old ways allows us to engage with the reality of loss while stepping lightly on the earth.
Cemetery Plant Walks
Summer 2024
June 9th marked our our first cemetery field trip, “Life Among the Stones” with Amber Westfall of The Wild Garden. It took place at St. Brigid’s church cemetery and was both educational and delightful.
July’s outing found us with the flora and fauna of Beechwood Cemetery in Vanier and mid-August’s trip took us to Lanark Village Cemetery. We enjoyed beautiful afternoons with our beloved dead while also learning about our plant kin.
Historical Cemeteries: Art and Archaeology
May 2024
CDO hosted Dr. Robyn Lacy for her talk, “Historical Cemeteries: Art and Archaeology”. The presentation covered the care and preservation of historic burial grounds, both the exciting sleuthing and mundane maintenance. Also discussed was the aesthetic, cultural, and historical value of cemeteries, the science of protecting headstones, and how old graveyards put the conservation in conservation burial.
Cemeteries can be a site of interest for historians and archaeologists as they hold significance due to their age, cultural importance, ecosystems, and the individuals buried within them.
Spring Social
April 2024
Many fine folks supportive of this grassroots movement that advocates for family-led, environmentally sustainable, meaningful end-of-life care came together on April 27th to connect, reconnect, and review how CDO is working to restore death as a sacred part of life through efforts such as:
-Natural Burial
-Education & Advocacy
-Home Funerals
-Death Doula Services
-Celebrants/Ceremonialists
-Events, Admin & Communications, and more!
Natural Burial: A Capital Idea!
April 2024
We had over 100 registrants for this online presentation and discussion which explored natural burial and local initiatives. Our speakers included representatives from Conservation Burial Ottawa, Green Burial Kingston, En Terre Outaouais, and Green Burial Ottawa Valley.
Grief & Bereavement Resource Share
November 2023
Healing Together was a gratifying collaboration between Community Deathcare Ottawa and Champlain Hospice Palliative Care. Working in partnership, our afternoon of connection and care was offered to those who support their community in grief and bereavement.
We were joined by a wide array of skillful practitioners and care providers, including social workers, hospice volunteers, funeral directors, celebrants, death doulas, and bereavement counselors. We were delighted to welcome the many organizations who joined us to share resources; hospice programs, funeral homes, ceremonialists, and local bookstore Octopus Books – who arrived with a great selection of books on dying, death, and grief! Stars of the show were Beau and Diesel, two therapy dogs who demonstrated their expertise in canine comfort.
Kelly Butler and Debbie Charbonneau, members of Community Deathcare Ottawa, demonstrated body care and a home vigil. They created an invitation to imagine the potential healing and meaning-making found in family-led care. Guests were invited to participate in this timeless practice that is still alive and well in many cultures, and slowly being reclaimed by the deathcare movement.
In spite of the first bout of freezing rain of the season, more than 60 people joined us for this day of education, reflection, and building relationships. We are deeply grateful for their commitment to this important work. It was a wonderful opportunity to mix and mingle with local practitioners and continue building the web of resources in the Ottawa area.
Autumn Labyrinth Retreat
October 2023
Community Deathcare Ottawa and the Cathedral Labyrinth Guild came together to offer a gathering of personal healing and collective remembrance.
A symbol of life’s winding path, the labyrinth has been used for centuries as a tool of meditation, contemplation, and connection. With every step, we honoured the wisdom and resilience of those who precede us. We acknowledged our interconnectedness as we walked together.
Great Glebe Garage Sale
May 2023
It was a beautiful Saturday morning at the Great Glebe Garage Sale! So many treasures to be found, and Community Deathcare was there with the reminder, “you can’t take it with you.”
Donna Klassen of Earthbound Coffins joined us to talk about natural burial and how death can be an opportunity to support life. Biodegradable choices feed the earth rather than harm. As a local woodworker, Donna creates caskets made from sustainably harvested timber that break down to nourish the soil. The shavings can be used to line the casket.
Spring Social & Brainstorm
April 2023
Our April 1st Meet & Greet was a great success! On a truly Spring-like Saturday we met, mingled, and discussed many ideas about how best to focus energies as we work toward restoring death as a sacred part of life.
It was great to see familiar faces and new ones of those interested in supporting a grassroots movement that advocates for family-led, environmentally sustainable, meaningful end-of-life care. Whether a long-time member or newly curious, Community Deathcare Ottawa was delighted to be with you!
Community Vigil for the Rideau Canal Skateway
March 2023
Hosted by Heart Land and in partnership with Ecology Ottawa, this vigil at Patterson Creek offered up time and space to:
- Pause and acknowledge what is happening due to climate change
- Honour feelings related to this loss within the support of community
- Be with our uncertainty, not knowing what will happen in the years to come
- Question and imagine what is ours to do
- Nourish resilience and our ability to enact positive change
Canal Vigil in the News:
Riverside Grief Gathering
October 2022
Nestled in the trees of Strathcona Park on a beautiful autumn day, we acknowledged and honoured different forms grief through gently guided ritual, meditation, and movement.
Witnessed by each other, Mother Nature, and other beings of this place, we offered up our sorrows and asked the river to support us in lightening our load.
Great gratitude to all who gathered in this space for grief.
Home Vigil & Body Care Workshop
September 2022 (Montreal)
As part of the work Le travail que l’on rêve gratuit, presented in the exhibition The Radical Imaginary: Reclaiming Value, Debbie Charbonneau and Kelly Butler led a workshop on death care and home funerals which aimed to share knowledge and alternative practices to the conventional funeral industry.
Photos by Prune Paycha
Remembering: A Guided Journey
October 2021
As part of Community Deathcare Canada’s 3rd Annual Swan Song Festival, Carole L. Trepanier of “The Death of Me” facilitated a journey and spoke to the role of ritual and spirit work in community deathcare. As an animist ritualist, Carole specializes in spiritual healing, endings and awakenings—forms of Death. She led participants through a gentle remembering of the “micro-deaths” of their own lives which supported profound unburdening.
Mother’s Day Space for Grief
May 2021
Members of Community Deathcare Ottawa held space for an unscripted evening of conversation at a time of year filled with grief and sorrow for many. Participants expressed the relief of sharing stories around such a loaded holiday.
Valentine’s Vigil: Grief as an Expression of Love
February 2021
Community Deathcare Ottawa welcomed ceremonialist Carrie Fawcett to lead a ceremony in honour of a different face of Love. We gathered to acknowledge, share and deepen our understanding of grief as an extension of our love, a continued relationship after loss. Through music, poetry, creativity, and silence, we honoured our individual and collective heartache.
Honouring Our Grief
October 2020
An outdoor ceremony shifted online as Covid-19 continued to rock our worlds, and members of the community were welcomed into a circle of love and support. Live music and spoken word served as a balm on our hearts in this virtual gathering of remembrance and healing.
Movie & Discussion: Griefwalker
March 2020
This documentary introduced us to Stephen Jenkinson, once the leader of a palliative care counselling team at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Through his daytime job, he has been at the deathbed of well over 1,000 people. What he sees over and over, he says, is “a wretched anxiety and an existential terror” even when there is no pain. Indicting the practice of palliative care itself, he has made it his life’s mission to change the way we die – to turn the act of dying from denial and resistance into an essential part of life.
Movie & Discussion: In the Parlor – The Final Goodbye
February 2020
Rejecting the mainstream tradition of hiring funeral professionals to care for the deceased, families in search of a more personal and fulfilling way to say goodbye are taking an active role in caring for relatives who have died. Both a critical look at the American relationship with death and an inquiry into the home death care movement, In The Parlor: The Final Goodbye takes viewers on a journey where very few have gone, and challenges us to reflect on this uncomfortable subject, which so often is hidden away and ignored.
2019 Community Deathcare Expo
The time we came together with an interactive showcase of what is possible when death is honoured as a sacred part of life. There was a home vigil demo, death café, grief couch, casket painting, demo of Jewish burial practices, remembrance altar, mandala grieving ritual, grief phone, practitioner booths, and more!
“We’re all going to die.”
That was the provocative tagline on a certificate of membership being handed out at Ottawa’s first annual Community Deathcare Expo, held on October 19 at the Churchill Seniors Centre…
Image courtesy of Nicola Finch of Cariboo Community Deathcare
Postcards available for purchase here
Tahara: Jewish Funeral Practices
Anna Maranta and Judith Wouk educated people on the ritual practice of Tahara, the preparation of a body for burial in the Jewish tradition…
The Grief Phone
“Do you still have conversations with them in your mind? Is there one thing you wish you’d said before they died? What is the exciting news or secret worry you really want to share? Perhaps anger needs to be voiced. Or forgiveness. Or simply a name.”
Inspired by Itaru Sasa of Otsuchi, Japan, Space for Death erected an enclosure designed to give a voice to grief, to place a call to the great beyond.
Mock Home Vigil
The death of a loved one often turns our world upside down. Our hearts and minds sometimes need time to adjust to this new reality. We can support that process by spending more time with the deceased. What would be right for your family? A few extra hours together? A vigil at home? Perhaps even a home funeral?
Within a cozy home setting accompanied by beautiful music, Reclaiming Death demonstrated these legal and safe options that help us move forward in our grief.
“Here the family helps transfer ‘the body’. In those early hours, our hearts and minds struggle to absorb this new reality of loss. Having something to do is often a comfort to the bereaved. This is why family-led care can be extremely healing.” ~ Kelly Butler
Community Deathcare Ottawa 
