EP 245: The Contrast Is the Gold - Death Nesting, the Vortex, and Why Deathcare Belongs to the Village with Anne-Marie Keppel

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Anne-Marie Keppel, death doula educator, founder of the nonprofit Village Deathcare, and author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, about what has and has not shifted in the culture since she wrote the book. Anne-Marie traces the origin of Death Nesting back to her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, a Meals on Wheels director, and to the elderly homeless man she looked after through Vermont winters; work she did because she wanted to. They look at the 1920s as the demarcation point when care left the home, when antibiotics became a god and the hospital became the authority realm, and at what has been lost in the handoff from family to funeral home. Anne-Marie makes the case that death curiosity is healthy, that it is okay to want to see and touch a dead body, and that fewer than half of the 500 students she has taught ever have. She describes the vortex that opens when someone is leaving their body, why timing matters more than ceremony, and why she considers the celebration of life a travesty when it replaces mourning rather than following it. The conversation goes into difficult territory: what care workers have reported feeling after a medically assisted death, the sense of severing and whiplash, and Kimberly's parallel that you can die and death does not happen. They talk honestly about suicide, about normalizing the thought rather than exiling it, about the scammers now working the death doula platforms, and about why people who long for death often do not know what dead actually is. The episode closes on professionalization: why she calls the business plan death doula training a lost opportunity, why she teaches citizens rather than experts, why the hairdresser who talks about dying with people in her chair is doing death doula work, and why the point is to give all the knowledge and wisdom, everything you've got, away. If any of this landed close to home, you don't have to sit with it alone. In the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, day or night.   BIO Anne-Marie Keppel is an international speaker, award-winning author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, and founder of Village Deathcare 501c3, whose inspiration and purpose is incorporating deathcare into community. Of Irish Celtic and Finnish Sámi (indigenous Finno-Ugric) roots, she draws from her work as a death doula, nurse assistant, life-long meditator, Reiki Master Teacher and mother of three. She leads retreats and talks in Vermont, across the US, in Ireland, England, Costa Rica and Mexico on death, dying, healing and intuition. She lives in Vermont where she practices meditation, magic, community deathcare, trains her Siberian Husky (nonstop) and delights in her family's love.   WHAT ANNE-MARIE SHARES Why she wrote Death Nesting from a place of genuine care and not a business plan, and how she only later realized she had accidentally built a business model The basic physical skills nobody is taught anymore: how to transfer someone from bed to chair, how to protect your own back, how to hold a body that cannot hold itself Her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, and director of Meals on Wheels in Montpelier, Vermont Caring for an 89 year old homeless veteran through Vermont winters, and what it taught her about doing the work when nobody is filming The 1920s as the demarcation point: hospitalization, antibiotics as the new god, and the hospital as a god realm where we send our loved ones away Why death curiosity is healthy, and why it is okay to want to see, touch, and smell a dead body That fewer than half of the 500 plus students she has taught have ever seen a dead body, at every age including into their sixties The vortex that opens when a person is leaving their body, why others feel it whether or not they know it, and why it stays open afterward Why the celebration of life is a travesty when it replaces the funeral, and why timing is the thing that matters What people have told her after being present a