2020 Q2+: End of Life Ceremonies During COVID-19

by | May 13, 2020 | 0 comments

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About the Presentation:

As COVID-19 continues, Celebrants are needed for more funerals and memorials that require additional considerations. We’ll discuss how death and mourning is different during a pandemic, how ceremonies and arrangements can be adapted, how to support grieving families, and how to practice self care throughout the process.

Resources included in slideshow:

Anita Peters

Anita Peters

Anita Peters has been a Humanist Celebrant endorsed by The Humanist Society since 2014.  In 2017, she was certified by InSight Institute, the organization training funeral directors, as a Funeral Celebrant. She is a founding member and on the Steering Committee of The Humanists and Freethinkers of Fairfield County, Connecticut. She brought the Death Cafe movement to Connecticut and regularly officiates at lifecycle events. She is the founder of the Humanist Celebration Project, which she introduced at the AHA 2019 conference at University of Miami (www.humanistcelebrationproject.org) She is a former board member of the Connecticut League of Women Voters. She describes her family as a cultural bouillabaisse:  “Within my immediate and extended family are Catholics, German Jewish refugees, Church of England and British Humanists, secular Turkish Muslims, Unitarians, agnostics, a Uruguayan atheist, a Sanskrit scholar.” She has a BA in Chinese Studies from Vassar College, an MIA from Columbia University and is a certified CT high school history teacher, specializing since 2010 in homebound instruction.

Beth Stokes

Beth Stokes

Beth Stokes is a funeral and life-cycle celebrant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She trained in funeral celebrancy at the Celebrant Foundation and Institute, and was last month re-endorsed by the American Humanist Society for a five-year term as a humanist celebrant. After seeking out green burial options for herself in 2005, she realized the death she sought was not complicated but almost impossible to achieve in the United States. In the ensuing years she became an advocate and educator for home funerals and green burials. She also recently began performing ecological grief ceremonies in Cambridge’s public spaces. 
Professionally she has held roles as a fiction & memoir editor, change management consultant, event designer, and information architect. Non-professionally she has been a rabble-rouser as board chair of a Quaker organization, guerrilla poet, amateur drummer, and motorcyclist.  She’s a single mom of two amazing quaranteen/tweens.