Kelly Butler

For more than three decades, Kelly Butler (MHSc) has guided families through the tender space of bereavement, including hospice, hospitals, and funeral homes. Certified in Trauma-Informed Mindfulness and Mindfulness Informed End of Life Care, a student of Francis Weller and the Orphan Wisdom School, and a facilitator of Joanna Macy’s “The Work That Reconnects,” Kelly has many tools to help others navigate the personal and collective experiences of grief, loss and uncertainty.

To provide support through life’s challenging transitions, she leads workshops and grief rituals that offer transformation of complex emotions and the profound experience of loss. Rituals, as well as mindful movement, help reweave relationships and return to ourselves. Her mission is a return to wholeness, to rediscover the ways we are woven together.

Heather Martel

Heather plays a role of connecting people and coordinating resources. She is CDO’s webmaster, provides administrative and event support, facilitates Death Cafes from time to time, and is very interested in how conscious engagement with life’s little deaths can help prepare us for the inevitable.

Certified by Donna Belk’s Beyond Hospice End-of-Life & Home Funeral Guide program in 2016, Heather’s support work draws on a background in event coordination, student academic advising, and experience in hospice, funeral, and mental healthcare settings. As a long-time practitioner of the healing and contemplative arts, she has an endless curiosity around what becomes possible when we make space for death.

Debbie Charbonneau

As a Death Doula, Debbie combines her abilities, knowledge, and experience to guide those who wish to explore and engage with the cycle of life, dying and death. A graduate of the Contemplative End of Life Care Program of the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Toronto, as well as the Algonquin College Palliative Care Certificate program in Ottawa, Debbie weaves formal education with hands-on experience garnered over three years of volunteering in hospice. She also has extensive studies in global shamanic and wisdom practices, including certification as an Archetypal Consultant through the Sacred Contract Program at CMED Institute.

Debbie’s services include practical as well as heart-centered end of life conversations, meditative work, and other wisdom and energetic processes. Just as each person’s journey is unique, so is the environment that is co-created to meet the needs of the individuals involved.

Anne Pitman

Anne Pitman (M.Sc., Pain Care Yoga Teacher and Certified Yoga Therapist C-IAYT), is the Director of the School of Embodied Yoga Therapy and has over 35 years’ experience teaching somatic movement in Ottawa and speaking worldwide in support of Yoga Therapy integrated in healthcare. She is a graduate and ongoing scholar at the Orphan Wisdom School, a human-making, village minded school attending to dying in a death-phobic culture.

As a practicing one-on-one Yoga and Grief Therapist at the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre and in private practice, Anne has extensive experience compassionately accompanying people living in difficult times (acknowledging pain, anxiety, PTSD, cancer and trauma); to create embodied practices in the midst of it all; to live deeply, willingly, and respectfully; and to tend to the path for some, in their ending days, to die well.

Anna L. Maranta

As a creator of sacred spaces grounded in the values of radical compassion, listening, and hospitality, Anna aims to serve as a conduit for healing presence at the crossroads of life.

As wisewoman and ritualist, she facilitates and co-creates rituals and ceremonies including Jewish and Interfaith marriage and separation rituals, mikveh rituals for life transitions, Blessing Circles for parents-to-be, Shalom Brit, Interfaith Baby Namings, many other rites of passage, and mourning rites including Memorial services, coinciding with Shloshim or with the end of the year of Mourning, possibly coinciding with Unveiling. Anna also provides education, mentoring, and support to those on a spiritual journey, including education in preparation for conversion to Judaism.

In deep awareness of the interconnectedness of all, she seeks to connect, bridge, and weave together folks from all wisdom traditions.

Andrienne Prest

When death is unexpected, or planned, Andrienne Prest, Funeral Officiant, will script and officiate a gathering with distinction, conducting as the designated non-griever while carefully attending to meaningful ceremony.

Whether you need to arrange a traditional funeral, memorial, or end of life celebration ~ perhaps in advance of MAID, Andrienne brings a range of non-denominational observances.

Carole Trepanier

Carole L. Trepanier is an animist ritualist and global transition consultant who specializes in endings and awakenings. A small-town Franco-Ontarienne trained in Indigenous community care and counselling, Carole worked for over 20 years in community/international development engaged in holistic community care and transition/loss work around the world.

Profound life initiations sparked a return to direct Spirit engagement, deep explorations of transition through traditional ceremony/practice, Ancestral lineage healing, focused ritual training, and a renewed service to all Life. Carole’s ritual offerings include energy healing, light trance journeys, trauma/grief work, unburdening ritual, spiritual death planning, death rites, psychopomp, home funerals, Ancestral Lineage Healing, Spirit engagement, and Earth transition/Earth-honouring ceremony.

Amber Westfall

Amber is a registered herbalist, plant-lover, medicine maker, seasoned gardener, and wildcrafter. The intersections of herbalism, sustainability, environmental ethics and social justice are deeply rooted in her work. 

As a passionate educator eager to invite people into relationship with plants, Amber has led “Life Among the Stones”. Conservation Burial Ottawa hosts these walks as 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.

Kyla Carson

Kyla Carson is a psychotherapist, family therapist and spiritual counselor, with experience in palliative care. She offers compassionate care to both English and French speaking individuals as well as families.

Kyla has also worked with Bereaved Families of Ontario as a clairvoyant medium, reconnecting people with their loved ones.

Michelle Olmstead

Michelle is a Death Coach and community advocate based in Ottawa. With a background in funeral services, English studies, and death doula training, Michelle is passionate about offering empathetic support to people as they prepare for death, recognizing how overwhelming and tender that time can be. Her work focuses on advance care planning and creating supportive spaces where people can explore dying, death, and grief with openness and understanding.

She brings both professional training and lived experience to her practice, drawing on years of supporting families in funeral care and continuing her education through programs in trauma-informed care, bereavement, end-of-life, and community engagement. Michelle believes that death is not only an ending, but also a deeply human experience that connects us all.

Virginia Thurston

Virginia (Ginny) Thurston is a Registered Psychotherapist and Art Therapist, and music teacher specializing in complex grief and loss, as well as trauma therapy. She invites her clients to think of her as someone walking alongside – we all have what we need within us to be well, but it’s all too easy to lose track of who and where we are in times of profound loss. Ginny can bring along some maps and a compass in the form of practices and knowledge that guide you on your way. If you drop something, like hope or courage, she can be there to pick it up and keep it for you, and hand it back to you when you’re ready.

Ginny finds peace and joy on the darker paths of life because it is there that the human spirit we all share shines the brightest. She feels honoured to walk with others on their healing way.

Erin Bidlake

As a death doula, community deathcare advocate, and hospice volunteer, Erin Bidlake’s work is grounded in the belief that greater intimacy with death awakens greater intimacy with life. She graduated from the Beyond Yonder Virtual School for Community Deathcaring in 2018 and went on to complete a graduate diploma in Supportive Care and Spirituality in Palliation from Saint Paul University in 2021.

Erin is also a registered psychotherapist through Saint Paul University’s MA in Counselling and Spirituality program, with specializations in grief and end-of-life concerns.

Tiana Dargent

Through Queer Community Deathcare, Tiana Dargent shares knowledge and resources with 2SLGBTQIA+ community members on all aspects of death, dying, and grief, and aims to aid in the transformation of deathcare spaces to allow all people access to exceptional, personalized, and compassionate care.

Queer Death Salon is a community space for all 2SLGBTQIA+ people to come together to discuss death, dying and grief. It is a facilitated drop-in discussion space, with the purpose of building connection, skill, and resources.

Chrystal Toop

Chrystal Toop is an Indigenous storyteller, author, and community educator.
​She is a founder of collectives, a public speaker, and grassroots organizer sought out for her lived expertise. Chrystal shares insights as an generational residential school survivor and Registered Social Services Worker. 

Her deathcare offerings include the Indigenous Death Collective, which provides peer accountability and support to cope with vicarious trauma and caregiver burnout, and the Indigenous Death Worker Collective, which is an ethical, grassroots body of oversight​ for Indigenous death doulas in Canada.

Death Doula Ottawa

Death Doula Ottawa provides support from diagnosis to death through knowledge of the dying process, by offering loving care, a listening ear, heartfelt dialogue and counsel with a human touch. Their doulas are trained to support you by sharing their knowledge on the process and experience of dying, based on current and traditional practices.

Robin Macdonald

Robin Macdonald is a spiritually-rooted facilitator, moving at the intersections of social justice, earth care, spirituality and mental health.  Part of the Scottish-Irish diaspora living on Turtle Island, Robin is a restorative justice practitioner, communal grief and Work that Reconnects facilitator, Yasodhara Yoga teacher and writer. Core to her work is the role of community in healing and thriving.

The Work That Reconnects is a body of teachings and group work that helps participants transform despair and apathy, in the face of social and ecological crises into action for social healing and collective thriving. The process leads to a fresh way of seeing the world as our larger living body. 

Carrie Fawcett

Carrie Fawcett is a Ceremonialist, certified Life-Cycle Celebrant, and Sacred Circle Dance facilitator, trained in funeral celebrancy through the OBOD School of Celebrancy. She helps clients commemorate the unique life of a loved one by co-creating end-of-life ceremonies, including funerals, memorials, celebrations of life, committals at graveside or elsewhere, or other ceremonies of their choosing. 

As needed, she can be a facilitator, an attentive and sensitive interviewer, a creative writer, a public speaker, and a ceremonial leader. The ceremony creation process starts with a free initial conversation and is typically followed by a family and friends planning meeting; answering guided questions; the creation of a ceremony from a combination of stories, music, readings, poems and more; a ceremony overview presented for client approval; coordination and support of speakers as needed; and the shared experience of the ceremony itself.

Julie Keon

Julie is many things: a Grief & Bereavement Counsellor (RSSW), certified Life-Cycle Celebrant, end-of-life doula, death educator, published author and a mother to her daughter, Meredith, who is medically fragile. Her specialized care includes private counselling with a focus on dying, death, loss and grief, custom and meaningful funerals/celebrations-of-life, a unique, a 6-week death preparation course to help healthy mortals confront and prepare for their inevitable demise and grief workshops/circles and educational sessions for groups and organizations.

Julie also fills a niche in her community as an end-of-life doula for those choosing MAiD and the families that care for them. Embodying knowledge and experience (personal and professional), Julie weaves humour and authenticity into all her offerings.