Until the End

Three Ways the World Remembers the Dead

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 15:32:44 GMT

The history behind fall’s days of remembrance, plus five ways to honor your dead

If the dead could come home for one night, who would you set a place for?

Halloween, Día de los Muertos, and All Souls Day fall back to back, from October 31 to November 2. Three traditions from three different cultures turn toward the dead at the same time of year, and each one grew out of the same pull toward remembering the ones who came before us. If you read last month's post on fall grief, you know the season pulls us toward endings. These three traditions are where that pull has been given a place to go for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years.

Samhain and the Origins of Halloween

Long before Christianity reached the British Isles, the Celts observed Samhain. It ran from sunset on October 31 to sunset on November 1 and marked the end of the harvest, the start of winter, and the Celtic new year. The Celts understood this as the time when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. Ancestors could visit, and families gathered, feasted, and lit bonfires to welcome them.

As Christianity spread, the church set All Saints Day on November 1, and the night before became All Hallows' Eve. Over the centuries the name shortened to Halloween. Some of the customs we associate with Halloween, like costumes, bonfires, and treats, trace back to those older gatherings.

All Souls Day

The Catholic Church observes All Souls Day on November 2 to remember all the faithful who have died. Prayers are said, candles are lit, and masses are offered for souls understood to be in a period of purification after death. In many Catholic communities, families visit the cemetery, clean and decorate the graves, and spend time with their dead.

All Souls Day is a solemn day. It gives the living a set time to remember the people they have lost, and a reminder that they too will one day be remembered.

Día de los Muertos

Día de los Muertos began thousands of years ago in the Indigenous cultures of what is now Mexico, where death was understood as part of the cycle of life and the dead remained part of the family. When Spanish colonization brought Catholic practice, those Indigenous traditions blended with All Saints Day and All Souls Day. What came out of that blending is observed across Mexico and in Mexican communities around the world today.

Families honor children who have died on November 1 and adults on November 2. They build ofrendas, altars decorated with photographs, candles, marigolds, and the favorite foods and drinks of the person being remembered. Marigold petals are often scattered in a path to the altar, and their color and scent are said to guide the dead home. Pan de muerto is baked, sugar skulls are made, and families gather at the cemetery to eat, play music, and tell stories into the night.

The dead are treated as guests who return home for a visit. Día de los Muertos is a celebration of life and memory with its own history, separate from Halloween.

What the Three Have in Common

Each tradition holds the same idea: the dead are still part of the family, and this time of year is when we make room for them. Most of the year, grieving people are expected to carry it privately and get back to normal quickly. These traditions set aside days on the calendar when remembering is expected, out loud and in company.

Many of us grew up with only part of this. Halloween arrived as costumes and candy, All Souls Day belonged to practicing Catholics, and Día de los Muertos was something to watch from the outside. The teaching underneath all three is available to anyone who wants to remember their dead.

What Goes on an Ofrenda

An ofrenda is an altar, built within the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos to welcome the dead home. Those of us outside of that tradition can build an ancestral altar that is similar to an ofrenda, and the elements below can guide either one.

A traditional ofrenda is built in layers, and each item has a job. Photographs show who is being remembered. Candles light the way home. Marigolds, with their bright color and strong scent, call the dead toward the altar. Water is there for the thirst of the journey, salt for the body, and copal incense carries prayers upward. Papel picado, the cut-paper banners, moves in the air to show that the dead are present. The favorite foods and drinks of the person, along with pan de muerto and sugar skulls, make the table feel like a welcome.

A first altar can be much smaller than that, and most of the meaning comes from the choosing. A photograph, a candle, and the cup of coffee they drank every morning make a complete altar.

Ways to Remember Your Dead

Choose what fits your life and your family.

Build an ancestral altar. Gather photographs of the people you have lost, their favorite foods and drinks, a candle, and flowers, marigolds if you can find them. Set everything where you will see it each day. The ofrenda belongs to the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos, so learn where it comes from and honor it as that tradition. Your altar can draw from it while honoring your own lineage.
Talk to them. Light a candle and talk to your dead out loud. If your family's names were lost to the transatlantic slave-trade, migration, or time, light a candle for the ones you cannot name.
Spread their legacy. Tell the stories of someone you've lost, especially to young ears. Stories are how our ancestors remain part of the family tapestry.
Visit a place they loved. Go to their favorite restaurant, or get out to their favorite type of nature.

Honor whatever emotions surface when sitting in remembrance. It won't always be tears, sometimes it will be laughter, anger, or even peace. Remembering the dead is one of the oldest grief practices we have, and it is always available to you but this week, its normalized across many cultures. You can spend ten minutes with a candle or an entire evening with a table full of photographs and letters.

Next month, we will talk about getting through the holidays when someone is missing from the table.

Who is on your altar or in your heart this year?

Until the end,

Kema

Fall Grief: Why This Season Feels So Heavy

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 20:11:23 GMT

Why fall stirs up old losses, and what to do with them.

October arrives and our bodies sense things beginning to shift. The light is changing, leaves are turning and falling, and the air smells different. Everything around us is dying, and our nervous systems respond whether we notice or not.

Fall is the season of orderly, natural death. Leaves brown and drop, plants die back, animals prepare for winter, and the earth turns inward. Cultures across the world have long understood this as the time when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. Our ancestors built entire calendars around this thinning.

We now live in a culture that spends the entire year avoiding this. Death has been moved behind hospital doors, mortuaries, and closed-casket etiquette. Fall pulls it back into view whether we are ready or not. Our body's response will show up in small ways.

Fall tends to feel like:

Heaviness that settles in your chest with no reason attached.
A pull toward scary movies, ghost stories, and heavier music.
An urge to declutter and let go of what is no longer useful.
Old photos, songs, and people showing up in your thoughts.
Fatigue that lingers even after a full night of sleep.
Conversations with friends that circle the same old losses.

If you live somewhere without falling leaves, the same pull arrives as days become shorter and the climate becomes wetter. Whatever form it takes, this season is asking us to look at what is actually there. Fall is also when many people feel transitioned loved ones more acutely. A scent from the kitchen, a certain song on the radio, or the first cold morning of the year can put a person who died long ago right back in the mind's eye.

Many of us were raised in families that turned away from grief and endings. When the autumn season demonstrates death and impermanence, we tend to fill our calendars, reach for coffee at 9pm, and doom-scroll until we fall asleep. We watched the adults around us handle it that way, so avoidance became the way we learned to cope.

Death-work has shown me that the grief we carry tends to surface when the world around us starts modeling an ending. What feels like a heavy mood in October is often grief finally finding room, and the season is giving it permission to take up space. Losses that we never acknowledged, like a friendship that ended or the version of you who died with a move, a graduation, or a child, sit in the body until something makes space for them. Fall makes that space.

Trees offer an example worth studying. Before a tree lets go of a leaf, it pulls many of the nutrients back into itself and stores what it needs for winter. Then the leaf falls and decomposes in the soil that will feed the next season of growth. This entire process happens in plain sight and on a schedule. The tree stays steady through all of it because releasing is how it is able to return in the spring.

The same order works for humans. We keep what the ending taught us, let the rest fall, and what falls becomes fertile soil for whatever is next. Releasing can be as small as donating the clothes from a chapter that closed, deleting a contact you keep scrolling past, or finally saying the goodbye you have been rehearsing in the mirror. The act of going through with the release signals to your body that the ending is real.

What to do with fall grief

Fall could be a season we work with since it innately teaches us how to release and prepare for the deeper work of winter. The weeks between now and January ask more of a grieving person than any other stretch of the calendar. Not only because of the environmental reminders, but also because culturally, this is when we naturally spend more time with family and friends. From fall breaks, Halloween and Día de los Muertos to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. These are already emotion-filled days. When you add in grief and loss, it tends to magnify everything.

Here are a few ways to work with fall grief. Start small, and pick the one that feels doable.

Sit outside. Leave your phone inside and sit outside for thirty minutes, if the weather permits it. You can be barefoot in the grass, swinging on a porch swing, or swaying in a hammock. Stay in one spot and observe how the nature around you is moving through the autumn season.
Circle the hard dates. Go through your calendar from now through the new year and label the dates you already know will be hard, like birthdays and death anniversaries of people you miss, the first holiday after a loss, or the day the divorce was final. Decide ahead of time what you will do on those days and who you will be with.
Use the pause. Holidays put us in rooms with people who can remind us of loved ones or push every button we have. Before you say or do something in the thick of it, ask yourself: if they died tomorrow, would I regret this? Then respond the way you would feel good about later.
Choose a practice. Journaling, making art, writing a poem, dancing in the kitchen, or sitting with a cup of tea all count. Put it on your calendar, even if it is only twenty minutes on a Sunday.
Say it out loud. Tell yourself or someone you trust what you are grieving. Naming it is the first step toward integrating it.
Create a ritual. Write what you're ready to let fall away on a piece of paper and keep it where you can see it for a week. Then bury it and let it become part of whatever grows there next.

Every one of these can be done alone. Some grief also needs other people. If you are carrying something the world has no language for, The Unseen Mourning is a six-week group for people integrating grief in community. Join the waitlist for the next cohort at https://www.unpluggedcr.com/unseen-mourning

On Halloween I will write about the three ways the world remembers the dead, from Samhain to All Souls Day to Día de los Muertos. For now, let whatever bubbles to the surface this fall ease you into this new era of honoring death and integrating grief.

What is ready to fall in your life right now?

Until the end,

Kema

What Happens When You Feel Someone Leave

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:51:37 GMT

[Excerpt from Where the Light Comes In]

Around 10 p.m., my phone rang, and suddenly, an uneasy feeling washed over me. I picked up, almost instinctively, and asked, "What's wrong?"

On the line was the girl Erin had been dating. She quickly explained that Erin had passed out, prompting her to call 911. Erin had come to briefly, but now the EMTs were working on her, and they were on their way to the hospital. She wanted to keep me informed and promised to call back once they arrived.

I hung up, aware that five sets of concerned eyes were fixed on me, waiting. My throat tightened as I struggled to find words. No one asked questions; we all seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. The seconds stretched into what felt like hours as I stared at the phone, willing it to ring again, bracing for whatever news might come next.

I didn't dare to move from the couch. I didn't trust my legs to carry me. Instead, I just sat there, clutching Nico against my chest, too anxious to even look at him properly, as if holding him was the only thing keeping me anchored.

45 agonizing minutes later, it rang. It pierced through the stillness and sent a shock through the room. Everything fell deathly silent as I answered, all eyes on me, everyone holding their breath. I pressed the phone to my ear, and the quiet that followed felt surreal, the kind of silence that only deepens the blow.

She could barely get the words out, but she didn't need to. I knew. I felt my insides twist as the reality settled in, each of her labored breaths like another knife twisting in the wound. I hung up without saying anything else, my heart a void.

I haven't been the same since that night. For years, I didn't have language for what happened in the moments before that second phone call. I knew, before she said a word, and I have never been able to explain how.

It turns out this has a name.

It's called a Shared Death Experience, or SDE. Dr. Raymond Moody, the researcher who coined the term "near-death experience" decades ago, later turned his attention to accounts like mine. He spent years collecting stories from people who were nowhere near their loved one's physical body and reported sensing the moment of death anyway. His research became the book Glimpses of Eternity , and it was the first time I saw my own experience reflected back at me in someone else's careful documentation rather than dismissed as coincidence or grief playing tricks.

An SDE can present as a physical sensation, a pain or pressure in the body that mirrors what the dying person is going through. Sometimes it presents as a shift in the room, or in reality itself, the way I felt it. It can also show up a wave of peace that arrives from nowhere, disconnected from any news yet received. In other instances, people report something more vivid: a sense of traveling briefly with the person who is dying, perceiving light, or feeling surrounded by a presence that wasn't there a moment before.

These accounts share a shape, even when the people telling them have never spoken to each other, live in different countries, and hold entirely different faiths or if they have no faith at all. What strikes me most, reading through these accounts, is how consistently people describe not wanting to say it out loud at first. There's a kind of shame attached to it, a fear of sounding unstable or grief-stricken beyond reason. I understand that fear because I ruminated on my own experience for a long time before I gave it any language at all, and even longer before I said it to anyone besides my husband and best friend.

A few ways people have tried to explain it

There is no single accepted answer, and I don't think there needs to be one. However, a few threads are worth naming, because each one holds a piece of the truth as far as I can tell.

The neurological and psychological explanation that grief sharpens attention. People who are deeply bonded to someone may become highly attuned to subtle cues, tone of voice, timing, the small details that slip past us on an ordinary day. Memory also has a way of reorganizing itself around a moment once we know what that moment meant. Some researchers see SDEs as the mind's way of making meaning under extreme emotional weight, a kind of retroactive pattern-finding that happens once we already know the outcome. This explanation is comfortable for people who want a grounded, biological account, and it may well be part of what's happening. It doesn't fully satisfy me, but I hold it as an honest possibility among several.

The consciousness explanation .

Other researchers and philosophers propose that consciousness may not be strictly local, bound to one body in one place at one time. If minds are connected in ways science does not fully understand, a sensed shift the moment someone dies would not be so strange. This remains a minority position in mainstream science, but it has not been dismissed either, and serious researchers continue to study it. Something is happening in these accounts that a purely mechanical view of the mind struggles to fully explain, and I think that gap is worth exploring rather than rushing to dismiss.

The spiritual explanation.

Long before anyone gave this a clinical name, most cultures and faiths already held the belief that a person's spirit or energy can be felt at the moment it leaves the body. Grandmothers and elders in almost every tradition would tell you they have always known this, without needing a research paper to confirm it. Many West African and diasporic traditions speak of the ancestors making themselves known at the veil. Many Indigenous traditions describe the same. Western science is only now catching up to naming what a great deal of the world never doubted in the first place.

I do not know which of these is true, or if the real answer is some combination none of us have even considered yet. I have made peace with not knowing. What I know without question is that on the night my sister passed on, something moved through me before I had any reason to know it should, and that experience reshaped how I move through the world and how I do this work today.

I think about the version of me who sat on that couch, waiting for the phone to ring, and I wonder if some part of her already knew what the rest of her hadn't caught up to yet. I wonder how many of us carry these moments without ever naming them, filing them away as strange or unexplainable and moving on because there's no room in an ordinary day to sit with something that doesn't fit.

If this has happened to you, I'd like to hear about it. We are not as separate from on another as the physical distance between us suggests. I felt that truth the hard way, and I have spent every year since trying to help other people feel less alone in it.

Until the end,
Kema

Back To School Blues...

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:54:00 GMT

What disenfranchised grief actually feels like.

Back to School Blues…

The kids have gone back to school, and many of the parents I know are having a rough time. It shows up as a heaviness on the first day, a tightness in the chest when they see the empty seat at the breakfast table, an ache that says something has ended. Their kid is still alive, healthy, and theirs, which makes the whole thing confusing. What is there to grieve?

Is it the version of that kid who existed all summer, or the version of themselves that got to be the fun parent all summer long? Something nostalgic ends when the first-day-of-school photos get posted on social media, even though outwardly this new beginning is being celebrated.

This is rarely, if ever, called grief, and it is happening to people all around you right now.

Most of what we grieve in a lifetime has nothing to do with a death or break-up. People walk around carrying endings that no one else will acknowledge. Marriages die before the divorce is filed, friendships dissolve through slow drifts, and the version of you who existed before the diagnosis, the move, or the child comes to an end. These are endings that shape your life, and somehow they are expected to happen without pause or recognition.

There is a term for this. Grief researchers call it disenfranchised grief, grief that does not get social recognition because the loss does not fit what we’ve been conditioned to picture when we hear the word "grief." No one brings you a casserole when your youngest starts kindergarten. You don’t get flowers your friend of fifteen years just stops texting back. You are expected to celebrate and be happy when you retire from the career that shaped a large part of your identity, or when your last kid drives off to college and the house goes silent in a way it has never been silent before. The loss and grief are real but for some reason, world has yet to create a container for it.

Here is a short list of some of the unseen griefs I hear about most:

Empty nesting, when the last kid leaves and you have to reinvent yourself.
Friendships that fade through years of growing apart.
Getting married and feeling as though you’ve lost your identity.
Surviving a diagnosis or accident and the person you were before didn’t.
Elders who are alive but no longer recognize you.
Changing careers or even getting promotions.
Retiring can expose where one may have made their work, their whole life.
Losing a pet can be treated as smaller than it was, when pets are family.
Moving to a new state, or country can sound exciting but also comes with grief.

None of these losses get social acknowledgement and often, you can be made to feel as though you’re being unreasonable. Yet every single one of them changes a person the way loss changes a person, reshaping how you move through your days, what you have capacity for, and who you understand yourself to be.

This is grief the world has no language for. It lives underneath your skin while everyone around you asks why you are so tired, showing up in the doom-scroll through your phone at midnight, the tears after a completely normal day.

Death-work has shown me that the grief we ignore accumulates. It stacks up in the body and nervous system the same way any unprocessed grief does. I think of grief like a stone. In the beginning, when you carry it in your pocket, it’s heavy and oddly shaped. You feel every edge of it as it changes your gait and rhythm as you move through the day. Over time, you build the tolerance and strength to carry it. It’s always with you and you can reach into your pocket, pull it out, and admire what it taught you, then put it back. What you can’t do is pretend it’s not there. Grief you ignore doesn’t disappear, it just gets heavier and less visible, right up until the moment a nameable grief arrives. Then every unnamed grief bubbles up to the surface. Suddenly the weight of everything you have been carrying bears down on you all at once.

Part of what makes disenfranchised grief so heavy is that it asks you to do the work of grieving while also convincing yourself that you are allowed to grieve. You compare your loss to bigger losses and tell yourself other people have it worse. You minimize what happened because it does not look like socially a acceptable grievance. That comparison is not protecting you, it’s keeping the grief exactly where it has been, unnamed and unattended.

The way through this work begins with naming the grief. Saying out loud, alone or with someone you trust, that something has ended and you are grieving it. That single sentence, "something ended, and I am grieving it," does more than most people expect. It gives the pain a shape you can finally look at, work with, and set down when you are ready.

Try that this week if you are a parent whose child just walked into a new grade or whose baby is now driving. Try it if you are caring for a parent who is disappearing in front of you one memory at a time. The same invitation is open if you are the person carrying an ending nobody else knew about.

Call it what it is: grief.

The fourth cohort of The Unseen Mourning begins this soon, a six-week group for people integrating grief in community. It was built for exactly this, the losses that do not get a funeral, a card, or a day off work, the ones you have been carrying alone because no one told you that you were allowed to call it grief. If you have been carrying something the world has no language for, this is what it was built for.

What ending are you carrying right now that nobody else knows about?

Until the end,

Kema

Welcome to Until the End | A Death Doula's Blog on Grief and Endings

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:52:37 GMT

A Death Doula's Blog on Grief and Endings

My mentor Jasai had beef with one of the traditional wedding vows. You know the one: "till death do us part." To her, it was all wrong, so she proposed an edit, "Until the peaceful end."

Her position was simple, death is not the end of a marriage. A marriage can end long before someone dies, through resentment, anger, or choosing to stay in something that's slowly killing both parties. Instead of waiting for death, she wanted to end things peacefully and on purpose, while there was still dignity and love, before bitterness took over.

'Until the peaceful end'

This is my motto as an end of life doula. I hope to teach others that endings don't have to be tragic. They can be honest and chosen while there is still peace in the room.

This blog is called Until the End for that reason.

Why this blog exists

You might be here because you're grieving someone. You might be here because you're facing your own mortality and don't know what to do with that. Maybe you lost a job, a relationship, or a version of yourself, and you're trying to figure out how to integrate that loss into who you are becoming. In addition to exploring those things, you'll also learn what a death doula is and what I specifically do in that role.

Whatever brought you here, this is the place where we discuss the topics most people avoid. Conversations around death, grief, losses, and transitions are the conversations that matter most because the key to living well is buried in the discourse of these subjects.

Who I am and what I do

My name is Kema. I'm a death and grief doula, and the person you come to when you need guidance in the space between what was, what is, and what's becoming.

I stand in the gap, at the threshold of transformation and transition. Whether that's someone physically dying or shifting out of a role, relationship, or outdated version of themselves. I am there and help people honor what existed and get ready for what's to come.

Welcome to Until the End .

Until the peaceful end,
Kema

Until the End

Three Ways the World Remembers the Dead

The history behind fall’s days of remembrance, plus five ways to honor your dead ﻿

Samhain and the Origins of Halloween

All Souls Day

Día de los Muertos

What the Three Have in Common

What Goes on an Ofrenda

Ways to Remember Your Dead

Fall Grief: Why This Season Feels So Heavy

Why fall stirs up old losses, and what to do with them.

What to do with fall grief

What Happens When You Feel Someone Leave

[Excerpt from Where the Light Comes In]

Back To School Blues...

What disenfranchised grief actually feels like.

Back to School Blues…

Here is a short list of some of the unseen griefs I hear about most:

Call it what it is: grief.

Welcome to Until the End | A Death Doula's Blog on Grief and Endings

A Death Doula's Blog on Grief and Endings

'Until the peaceful end'

Why this blog exists

Who I am and what I do

The history behind fall’s days of remembrance, plus five ways to honor your dead