This is my ninth year in the deathcare industry, after starting out as a fresh-faced 25-year-old in 2016.
In those years I have answered the call many hundreds (thousands?!) of times, coming from people in the midst of the worst times of their lives. I have had the immense responsibility of doing my best to help these folks make decisions, plans, and compromises. Within the fog of their bereavement and my professional obligations, we have come together to do the best we can given the circumstances.
In 2019 I created DeathCare BC as a way to start getting information about the deathcare industry into the general public. Since then I have had the privilege of speaking at conferences, workplace lunch and learns, webinars, PROBUS meetings, book clubs, and niche events.
The goal has always been, and continues to be, to do absolutely everything in my power with the information I have to:
prepare my community for the inevitable
To quote myself:
“Look, none of us can know the circumstances of our death truly. We don’t get to know whether we will be caught in an avalanche, in our beds, surrounded by friends and family, unexpectedly in any manner of places. But you know what we can know? Exactly what will happen two hours, two days, and two weeks later, logistically speaking… The bureaucracy and logistics are knowable.”
- Myself, today (and for a long while now)
Humans are prediction machines. We have our big beautiful brains that spend a lot of their energy anticipating, calculating, and measuring for outcomes. Because of this we can also be fearful-ball-of-anxiety machines. Our fear of the unknown keeps us up at night and it can quickly become overwhelming.
I believe this fear of the unknown is what makes us so reluctant to have these conversations with death. It opens up all manner of questions that we are just not equipped or even able to answer. I have a tremendous amount of compassion for the reasons people avoid it.
That being said, what about all these know-able things?
What if we could say, “well I don’t know how I might die, but I sure do know that I have a neat little green burial and a bouquet of seasonal flowers bought and paid for, so that’s where this body of mine will end up”.
If that seems specific it is because it is, as those are the services I pre-paid for when I did my funeral planning in 2020. And you know what? I feel really good about it.
A lot of what we worry about is how the people we love will manage after we are gone. We are worried about whether they will be swallowed up in their grief, or if there are conversations we haven’t had the chance to have yet, or if we are going to miss out on some really incredible things. One of the hard parts is knowing that we won’t be there to comfort or guide them in their grief.
The next best thing for the first two hours, two days, and two weeks, is to have an excellent plan in place.
This year I am evolving the focus of my day-to-day services to working with individuals and couples to put thoughtful after-death plans together. Part of that is also being able to pay for these plans in the form of an insurance policy (with TruStage Life of Canada), which I spent a big chunk of 2024 getting licensed to do.
When I answer the call from a bereaved family one of the first handful of questions I will ask is if they have a pre-plan. The reason? Because it is the next-best-thing to having someone in the room telling you exactly what their wishes are, and it is paid for to boot.
My hope is that by making this offer and working with as many people as possible we can shift the way we approach the services of a funeral home.
Reducing the confusion of early grief allows the clouds to clear more quickly to allow all of the other emotions in. Going into a funeral home with notes written in your loved ones handwriting provides a comfort I cannot begin to describe here, one I have witnessed over and over again in real time.
As my friend Christa Ovenell says, don’t wait until it is raining to fix the roof.
My new home at www.emilybootle.ca is for the planning work I am talking about in this post.
DeathCare BC will continue to be the place where I focus my education efforts, especially empowering community deathcare on the local level. Bridging the gap between our healthcare system and the death system is a vital piece of this big puzzle.
As with so much in life, there is overlap and connection to be had everywhere.
Thank you for listening and reading along on this evolving journey.
Emily
(PS, if there is something you want to see/hear me write about please let me know!)
