Kirstie Celebrant

13/09/2025

What Saturday night looks like when it's your launch in 4 sleeps!

Are you following Dead Positive on socials?

Are you joining us on Wednesday?

Are you on board with our big bold compassionate revolution?

All the cool kids are.

Sending love as always xx

06/09/2025

Rambling on a Saturday?? What fresh madness be this?

Just felt like talking to you all. It's autumn isn't it? How does that feel for you?

Autumn has as many gorgeous glimmers as all the other seasons.
If you're struggling to see any though here are some suggestions of ones to try to spot -

⭐️The urge for new stationery- indulge it even if it's just a brand new single Bic. I usually try to only ever write with the legendary pens of Association of Independent Celebrants which are so lush whenever anyone signs their paperwork and comments on how nice the pen is i ask them to keep it - hence my dwindling supply - but I accidentally slummed it this week with a Bic that pixies had put in the kitchen drawer and the novel newness of it made me smile.

⭐️Super dry leaves looking up at you from the pavement. Scrunch them. Like deliberately stomp them. They're sad if you don't. It's what they've been looking forward to all summer. When you scrunch them with your feet remind yourself that very soon a day will come which is dry and bright and blustery and so many of the leaves will have bunched together all quivering with excitement as they wait for you to run through them up to your knees. When that day comes seize it. Like carpe it like you've never carpe-ed a diem before.

⭐️If you're reading this I'm assuming that the privilege of owning a phone is accompanied by the privilege of having a roof over your head. Blow your ceiling a kiss. Days are coming in which the wind and rain will test your walls and windows (accidental metaphor for life) and you'll be able to snug up. There are few joys in life greater than being able to snug up.

I forced myself to find such glimmers this week. Sometimes it's a week more emotional than others. That's just life, not necessarily work-related.

For me the seams of this week strained against the feels - difficult conversations - facing sad realities of ageing parents with my siblings - supporting a friend whose dad stopped breathing - supporting another in delivering a funeral for her son who had - laughing my head off with a couple I'd just married - pretending I was my mate's assistant Little Wonderland Photography- Cheshire eventhough all I was doing was holding the bride's champagne - looking at my husband and feeling my veins run with gratitude - the complete satisfaction of making a dress - excitement plotting treats for my baby's 18th - bafflement having been given the finger by a passing motorist - sheer relief of the antibiotics kicking in and my mouth infection fu***ng the f**k off - the flags, so many confusing flags ....

Then last night I watched the news. I try not to. I more of a radio person. But the unfolding of the latest events in the life of my hero Angela Rayner felt seismic to me. I am sad for her. Cross with her. Furious at the system of misogyny and class snobbery that was always in the blocks about to pounce. And then I saw Gaza.

If you're not sad, or scared, or raging, or baffled, or frustrated then you are not listening.

If you are listening and it feels overwhelming, coz how could it not, remember this ...
if each one of us commits to open heartedly ensuring that we do as little harm as possible, if each one of us focuses on that above all else and is quick to apologise the second we realise we did otherwise, we have the power to change it all.

There ends my TED talk.
Thank you.
You're appreciated more than you know.
Sending love x

03/09/2025

20/08/2025

TW

Teeny little short read but an enormously impactful description of grief.

"Right now, in this very, very moment ..."

Is surely the only opening to an answer when a grieving person is asked how they are.

Hats and gloves and all other accessories off to Aubrey Plaza. She'll always be Janet Snakehole to me.
Sending love x

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/aug/19/aubrey-plaza-husband-jeff-baena-death?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social_img&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwQ0xDSwMShA9jbGNrAxKDtWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEew9oYG8KcKwr4f-Az76fkSR8bR-fKaU6MpFRby4PUQRSd_jJzgnxcM5sHN5c_aem_5p4zlgS-h0u6JPyWvuaLGw =1755625993

Actor opens up about death of her director husband Jeff Baena, referring to her grief as ‘a giant ocean of awfulness’

19/08/2025

Tis already the time of year in which I cannot be trusted in Hobbycraft.

Or B&M.
Or The Works.
Or The Range.

I'm only doing it coz I've a launch party to decorate.......

Sending love x

19/08/2025

Whilst the sun's shy here's something cheering to look ahead to .......

Been beavering away all year to make my cic Dead Positive something that will really support our community as we live, die, mourn, celebrate and grieve and we're finally ready to launch.

We are so excited to show you what we've got.
You'll also have the chance to hear the other worldly wonderment that is the sound of Kathy Halter music- pretty sure she was found under a toadstool and will heal your heart.

Totally free but limited tickets.
Can't wait to see your beautiful faces and to hug your heads off xx

It's our dead exciting launch! We've live music, loveliness, & so much life-affirming uplift you'll wonder how you ever lived without us.

14/08/2025

Soz about the sweat moustache / upper lip glitter x

13/08/2025

Little update you beautiful, wonderfully kind pixies?

So... referring back to today's unpleasantness.

The person in question was at the centre of a family turmoil. I knew that at the time.

I've re-read the email communications from the time and am actually proud of the way I dealt with the turmoil as it was occurring.

I'm hoping this little video helps others to avoid this.

To stress:
The only person who can make decisions about a funeral is the informant.

The informant is the person who signs the paper work to book the funeral.

This can be Literally. Anyone.

For example.
If someone close to you dies and you have a large family but none of you have the financial means to pay for that funeral and your next door neighbour fronts up the cash and signs the documents it does not matter what you or anyone else says or asks for, the people hired to arrange that funeral can only take instruction from them. The informant. Not our decision. Just the rules.

There's a commonly held assumption that this is down to the next of kin. Not so.

As this horrible situation demonstrates, it's never fair to shoot the messenger.

This is the situation behind my horrible review. A review I won't now be asking to be taken down. It can stay there. I have nothing to reproach myself for. I acted in that situation from a place of love and kindness as I always do.

If you're ever tempted in a moment of hurt though, to lash out at someone in this way, please find another way to make yourself feel better.

Building a business as a truly independent celebrant, not reliant on the whims on any funeral director, is almost impossible.

If it wasn't for the unwavering emotional and financial support from my family, my own sheer unnerring certainty that this is my path and the utterly beautiful amazing people who trust me with their dead people and with their own hearts I would have packed up long ago.

It's understandably difficult to build a reputation.
It's terrifyingly easy to destroy that for someone.

I'll shut up. I'm going to sit in my garden. And I'm sending you all love xx

10/08/2025

Good Morning beautiful 😍

It's been so long since I've rambled that I'm not brimming with confidence that any of you are still there (hence the shameless dog click bait when this post isn't even about dogs- except in the way that all life is about dogs of course).

It's been a time.

You'll mostly know about how my work inadvertently flipped upside down overnight towards the end of last year. It's a painfully necessary truth to say that it's taken me the best part of these almost 12 months to recover.

There are, it turns out, enormous blessings to be had in the rug being pulled from under you though.
Work has changed so much.
But the core has only galvanised stronger than ever it was.
Only made me much much better equipped to do what I do.

Much earlier this year I was invited to embark on a journey-to-funeral unlike any others I'd been blessed to have been part of before.
Two incredible people reached out to ask me to be alongside them as they supported someone they loved as they died. Neither knew when that death might come, perhaps we had 6 months if the universe allowed.

One was the daughter of a dying mum.
The other the husband of a dying husband.

One exhaled their final breath on 7th July, the other on the 8th.

It is the most astonishingly humbling experience when someone (a stranger) taps you on the arm (digitally or over the phone) and invites you in to share the rawest most heartbreaking journey of their life.

An experience which grabs by the shoulders your confidence, your vulnerability, your resilience, your professional knowledge, your love and your own trust in yourself, and challenges all of those things to give as freely of your own heart as you can manage.

It is as terrifying as it sounds.
It is also profoundly beautiful.

It takes a bit of recovering from.

So I've reconnected with the yoga mat in a whole new way (hot yoga - why am I always last to realise?🤣)
I've doubled down on the kindness, especially the kindness to myself - see above.. who knew that was a thing 🙄?)
I've been centring back to the moment at every opportunity.
And building for what's next.

There's sooo much excitement to come...

We finally give Dead Positive an official launch in September (are you following us on socials?)

We're also expanding our training to give more organisations and businesses the opportunity to become a Dead Positive Workplace (some big names in the pipeline).

I'm continuing to support those who reach out in honouring the end of their person's breath.

Delivering a workshop at a national conference for the professional body I'm a member of Association of Independent Celebrants

Finishing another book and......

GOING BACK TO UNI!

PhD research starts in October and I am beside myself. This certainly calls for a new pencil case.

Ahhhhhhhhh ...That feels better.

Thank you thank you thank you from the prints of my toes for being there and for being interested.

I'm (predictably and wholeheatedly) sending love x

Ps in a world in which AI makes us suspicious of our own eyeballs. Bing is actually clutching a ball with teeth on in his chops.
I would never photoshop my dog.
We do not body shame in my house.
Not even when someone manages to steal the last of the incredible home made foccacia (not home made by me obvs, but by my daughter's gorgeous friend Sophie).
Not even then. x

23/02/2025

It's National Funeral Planning Awareness Week which, in all honesty, is news that was brand new to me this morning. Any excuse though, eh?

Could I start the week asking for a small favour please? Would you be able to share my page?

Each week I seem to have a conversation with a new person who has been in someway disappointed or frustrated by their experience of a funeral. Sometimes it's been 'fine' but in the breathing space which has followed 'fine' hasn't really felt good enough.

Every week someone will say that they wish they'd known about all the options in advance.

In indulging in a little share you'll be helping me to spread the word so that more people can look back at the funerals they've organised with that real sense of rightness.

It's absolute gold to feel that you've done the right thing. And an absolute balm to your relationship with your grief and your ongoing relationship with the person who has died.

Thanking you and sending love as always x