Except in Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nebraska, and New York, there are no laws that prohibit a family from taking over care of a loved one from “last breath to final resting place.”  For those interested in the natural burial process, that means a home funeral.  Washing, dressing, and generally tending to the departed’s remains—for up to three days before transporting the deceased to the site of the actual burial—is work best compared to caring for a helpless infant right after birth (sans the joy, of course, and requiring plenty of dry ice).  Often, families who decide on a home funeral may also decide to get the help and expertise of a “death midwife.”

In looking around for more information on “death midwifery,” I came in touch with Rev. Joellyn St. Pierre of Virginia Beach.  St. Pierre, an ordained interfaith minister, is a different kind of death midwife all together.

“I create a sacred space for the dying," she explains, "which allows them to transition peacefully and with grace ‘unto the farther shore.”

Originally a Broadway performer in the 1970’s, St. Pierre (whose credits include “A Chorus Line,” “Pippin,” and nearly a half dozen others) saw many of her fellow actors die of what was then a mysterious new disease—AIDS.  St. Pierre remembers how, back then, nobody knew exactly what caused AIDS or how it spread, only that if you were male and homosexual that you were at great risk.  There was such an embarrassing social stigma surrounding AIDS that many of those stricken with the disease often cut all contacts with family and friends and simply went into hiding to wait for a death they knew was eminent.

Such was the case with St. Pierre’s best friend of seven years who she found dying in a Michigan hospital in 1991.

“After Broadway, I moved to Florida where John and I wrote songs and played music.  We worked the Palm Beach nightclub scene for years until one day he just disappeared.”

At his bedside during those final hours, St. Pierre remembers John hooked up to tubes and machines.  He could not speak.  But soon St. Pierre began to feel as if they were having an almost telepathic conversation.

“We talked like that for some time.  Then his voice started fading until it finally disappeared.  And just like that all the machines went dead.  I was holding his hand and felt something, like a thousand bees in my hand—as if his soul and spirit were passing right through my hand.”

St. Pierre says she saw John’s energy, like a cyclone, lift up from his belly and away from his body.

“The experience had a profound effect on me,” she says.  “I found myself falling into a dark, abyss of grief.”

St. Pierre tried to learn everything she could about death.  She became a hospice volunteer, worked for AIDS organizations, home health care services, and, finally, the palliative care unit of Norfolk General Hospital.

“I guess I was always searching for a more profound way of communing with the dying,” she says.  This lead her to “the art of death midwifery.”

Now St. Pierre is called when death is eminent.  Almost always, the scene is an ICU—“Places filled with adrenaline, fear, and anxiety,” she says—where the patient is almost always hooked up to machines, far from lucid, and often in a coma.
With her presence, touch, music, along with “intuitive and energetic techniques” she now teaches in her lectures and workshops, St. Pierre seeks to create a bond with the dying, to create a calming place amidst the chaos.

“This art I teach actually goes back a long way in eastern religions,” she says.

According to St. Pierre, the goal of spiritual death midwifery is to “empower one who is dying, one who is most vulnerable and fragile, in making this a conscious transition filled with peace and poignancy.  Living life well is an art.  How we die is no less so.  We need never fear death, the ultimate transition, when we know that we are safe, supported and surrounded by love.”

St. Pierre is currently putting the finishing editorial touches on a book—The Art of Death Midwifery.  In the meantime, for more information, check out her website www.deathmidwifery.com.