My Apprenticeship With the Afterlife

⚠️ Contains a personal story of suicide & tending the body after death.⚠️

This week marks the anniversary of the morning my death initiation began, my apprenticeship with the afterlife.

Four years ago, I woke to a rainbow over the ocean and the West Maui Mountains.
 

My phone was full of texts and missed calls from numbers I did not know. When I checked my messages, I learned that Tara, a longtime client I had not seen in some time, had taken her life. 

Without my consent, she had left me responsible for tending her afterlife through ceremony and serving as executor of her estate.
 

My Life Forever Changed That Day.
 

For two years, I tended the life she left behind while also walking through the veils of the unseen and supporting her journey on the other side.

Under fluorescent lights, her body lay beneath a sheet on a metal table, a tag on her toe.

Before I entered, the man there asked whether I had seen a dead body before. I had. He warned me that this would be different.

She had been frozen for a month.

I pulled back the sheet. Her eyes were sunken. Her hands were wrinkled and frozen in a grasp.

There were bruises and black mold on her skin. Her long purple hair was still soft.

For thirteen years, she had lain on my table while I tended her. Now I stood beside her body, preparing to find her on the other side.
 

I covered her again and prepared the room. I had brought plants, flowers, herbs, a drum, rattles, and bells. I turned off the fluorescent lights, burned the herbs, and rattled while her friend held her feet.

When I entered the journey, I found her stuck on an island of pain.

Everything she had endured seemed to be there with her. I knew how deeply she had longed for love, and how difficult it had been for her to let love reach her.

I sat beside the anger, sadness, hurt, and pain that had shaped so much of her life.

As we sat there, the room filled with presences. I asked who they were.

“We are the ancestors of all her lifetimes. We are here to help her find her way home.”

After some time, I felt a willingness emerge in her to let go.

A blue light surrounded her and the island, lifting what she had carried into the universal heart of compassion. I watched it rise until the island became a star.

Her friend and I both felt what seemed like a breath move through her physical body, followed by a final exhale.

I felt her leave with her ancestors, held in the love she had struggled to receive while she was alive.

Afterward, we covered her body with marigolds, rose petals, juniper, eucalyptus leaves, cinnamon, and hawthorn.

I sang, prayed, and anointed her frozen skin, tending her as I had so many times before.

This is part of my psychopomp work, helping the dead through their passage.

It is also part of what this experience taught me about the relationship between the living and the dead.

Death does not have to end the relationship.

You may still dream of someone who has died, speak to them in your heart, or find yourself wondering whether they are at peace.

There can be words you never said, forgiveness you still carry, gratitude you wish you had expressed, or a longing to feel their presence again.

Those relationships can still be tended through ceremony.
 

Prayer, offerings, and journey create a place for listening, honoring what was shared, and bringing care to what remains unfinished in your own heart.
 

Whispers Through the Veil is where you can bring what aches, what remains unfinished, and what is ready to be tended with the dead.

We will gather by candlelight to connect with our beloved dead and well ancestors through prayer and guided journey, creating space to listen, make offerings, honor what was shared, and tend what still lives in the relationship.

Whispers Through the Veil | Sunday, November 1st
5–8 PM Mountain Time | $88 for Non-Temple members
Ceremonial access will remain available for 2 weeks after the live gathering.