This week I completed advanced end-of-life doula training in Melbourne. Over six days, I sat in a funeral home, stood beside an open grave, and washed the bodies of two women I had never met. I came home each evening tired and more certain that I had chosen the right work.
The training was Legends Advanced Training, run by Preparing the Way in partnership with Natural Grace Holistic Funeral Care. Libby Moloney, the founder and funeral director of Natural Grace, led the week with Helen Callanan of Preparing the Way. Most of it took place at Lonergan & Raven Funerals in Clifton Hill, with a day at Springvale and a day at the Fairfield space where Natural Grace keeps its mortuary and vigil room.
Before I go further, I should say that I work with Preparing the Way. I am not a neutral reviewer, but everything that follows is what I felt and believe.
What the advanced end-of-life doula training is
An end-of-life doula is a non-medical companion for people who are dying and for those close to them. People can engage a doula at any stage: while planning ahead, after a life-limiting diagnosis, at the end of life, or after death. Doulas help with advance care planning, sit vigil, support families through the days after a death, and help them make choices about body care and funerals. The role sits alongside palliative care, funeral directors, and celebrants, and borrows its name from the birth doulas who do similar work at the other end of life.
Preparing the Way trains doulas through a Foundation Workshop and a four-day Intensive Course; graduates are called Legends. This advanced week is open to Legends, people who have completed the End of Life Doula Skill Set (four nationally accredited, end-of-life doula-specific units), or those who hold the Certificate IV in End of Life Doula Services. This is not an introduction to doula work. It assumes you know the basics and builds practical, hands-on skills on top of them.
Natural Grace is a holistic funeral service that supports home-based death care, where families keep a person at home after death and care for them there. Its team brought years of lived wisdom to the week, and most of the practical teaching came from them.
The shape of the week
We began on Sunday afternoon with introductions. One by one, each of us went to the microphone and said who we were, where we were from, where we were in our doula work, and where we wanted to go. On Friday, we went back to the same microphone to share what we had learned, and those two moments framed everything in between.
Monday focused on funeral planning and arrangements. Libby opened with her own take on a SWOT analysis, which she calls FLOW: fabulous for strengths, learning for weaknesses, opportunities, and wonder for threats and risks. Melanie Cookes spoke about her first client as a doula, and how she leaned on more experienced colleagues to get through it. Libby then took us through Australia’s funeral landscape, from corporate players to independents, and explained confusing processes like prepaid funerals, pre-arranged funerals, and funeral bonds in plain language.
On Tuesday we took a coach to Springvale Botanical Cemetery. Leah Slee, Manager, Partnerships and Programs at the Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust, led our visit with real warmth. At a training grave, Tom, from the cemetery’s graves team, taught us about the equipment and practices that keep mourners and staff safe at the graveside. Then we visited the crematorium for a witnessed cremation, where families can watch the coffin enter the cremator. Some of this echoed what I saw at Fawkner Memorial Park on Dying to Know Day, and it was good to see it again from a different angle.
We also visited a chapel and learned how to use those spaces, and Belinda Jane Video spoke about filming and livestreaming services. Throughout, Libby brought us back to ritual, ceremony, and making these experiences more gentle for people. Back at Lonergan & Raven, celebrant Yvonne Adele spoke about ceremony creation.
Wednesday was body care day, and my favourite. I’ll come back to it.
Thursday was given to lived experience. Ashleigh Dodd spoke about honouring babies who die, and the care and preparation that work requires. Nicole Grundy spoke about voluntary assisted dying (VAD), drawing on her father’s experience of using it. VAD has been legal in Victoria since 2019, and Dying with Dignity Victoria campaigned for it. Chantelle, whose mother died earlier this year, told us how she brought her mum home after her death with Natural Grace’s help. That evening we all walked to the pub for dinner, and I spent much of it talking with Nigel Davies, the managing director of Lonergan & Raven, who is generous with what he knows and very funny behind a face that often looks a little grumpy.
Friday morning covered the coroner and the coronial process, which begins when a death is unexpected, violent, or unnatural, or follows an accident or injury. We spent the rest of the day on questions and closing reflections.
Caring for the dead
On Wednesday we went to Fairfield, where Natural Grace has a tenancy in one of Lonergan & Raven’s buildings. The public side is small and homely: a sitting room with a kitchen, a vigil room, and a room for family meetings. Behind it are offices and a display room where families can see coffins and their prices. Further back, a large shed-like open space holds the mortuary and the refrigeration. Equipment of every kind lines the space, and a large roller door lets hearses come and go as they bring bodies in and take them out. We split into small groups and rotated through mortuary care, home-based death care, and transfers and equipment. The families of the people we cared for that day had permitted us to learn alongside the staff.
My group started in the mortuary with the mortician, Samantha (Sam) Townsend. The room was smaller than I expected, with shelves of supplies such as towels, gloves, aprons, cosmetics, and clothing, a washing machine, and a sink. The metal mortuary table on wheels stood in the middle, and Sam positioned it so its drain sat over the floor drain. I had braced myself for the smell of chemicals or decay, and there was none. A body that is kept cold and cared for well doesn’t smell, Sam told us.
The funeral team calls the people in its care guests. Our guest, an older woman, came from the hospital and had been in refrigeration. Sam showed us how to roll a body to one side, then the other, to remove the body bag. We saw what illness and dying can leave behind: fluid still seeping from the body, and tears in fragile skin.
Sam showed us how to ease rigor mortis, the stiffening of muscles after death, by massaging the limbs. It took more pressure than I expected, and Sam compared it to the work of a good massage therapist. She removed our guest’s hospital gown, rinsed her gently, and handed us washcloths and a bowl of warm water with disinfectant soap. Wearing gloves and aprons, we washed her, and Sam shampooed her hair. We patted her dry so we wouldn’t damage her skin. Her body was cold and wet, and I had wondered how I would cope. Washing her felt special.
At the end of the day, Sam invited us to see the people we had cared for, dressed, with hair and makeup done, and ready for their families. Our guest looked beautiful. Sam told us she had been the most difficult of the day because of the damage to her skin.
The second rotation, with Libby, covered home-based death care. Here a woman lay on a bed in the vigil room in a short white house coat, and we followed a similar process with a softer, more domestic feel. This is the care a doula might give in a family’s home in the hours after a death. Libby uses a beautiful bowl, sweet-smelling soap, and dark blue-green towels, because white looks clinical and bright colours can be alarming. We felt how rigor had mostly passed, how one elbow moved more freely than the other, and how heavy a leg is when you lift it by the ankle. We washed and dried her, and then anointed her with oil.
Libby also showed us how to keep a body cool at home. The torso needs the most attention, because most of the fluids and smells come from there. Some doulas use a dedicated cooling machine, which is expensive, but Techni Ice can do the job too. She also talked about how to prepare a family and walk them through each step, so nothing takes them by surprise.
The third rotation, with Nigel, covered transfers and equipment. We began in a meeting room, where he gave us a short history of the funeral industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, corporations bought up much of it, and death care became more medical and standardised. As Melbourne’s oldest surviving independently owned funeral service, Lonergan & Raven offers families an alternative, with personal care and room for natural and family-led funerals.
From there, we moved through the display room, where he showed us coffins ranging from elaborate and expensive to plain. Then we went into the shed, among the hearses and equipment. He showed us how a funeral home moves a body from a small flat or down a staircase with no lift, and why he still prefers some sturdy metal equipment from decades ago. Nigel also walked us through the forms and procedures that follow a death, and how they differ between hospitals, aged care facilities, the coroner, police, and GPs.
The old work of washing and anointing
I didn’t expect body care to feel so meaningful. Enjoy is a strange word to use, but I did. Washing a stranger’s body, easing her fingers open, and drying her skin with care felt spiritual to me, and quietly beautiful.
Many readers will know that this is very old work. In ancient Greece, the women of a household washed, anointed, and dressed the dead before laying them out for mourning. Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and many other communities still wash their dead as a sacred act. For most of the twentieth century, people in Western countries handed this work to professionals behind closed doors. Home-based death care gives it back to families, and doulas help them do it.
I loved the anointing. Libby keeps her oils and soaps in a beautiful box, chosen with care because she is sensitive to many scents. Seeing it made me want to put together my own box of ritual supplies, with a lovely bowl, soft coloured towels, a soap that smells good, and oils for anointing. I love ritual, and I could see a doula offering families small bedside ceremonies as part of body care.
When I got home on Wednesday, I washed and put on whites. In Lukumí practice, white cools and clears, and after a day spent close to the dead, it felt right.
What I learned
When my turn came at the microphone on Friday, I said that I can do more than I thought. I came into the week unsure how I would handle seeing and touching a body. I left knowing that I have the practical skills for body care and the emotional steadiness for it. I could wash a body in a family’s home, and I could offer ritual alongside that care. Where I am not the right person for a task, I now know who to call.
That leads to my second lesson: no doula should work alone. Melanie’s story on Monday showed this. Facing a complicated first case, she rang the people she knew, and they came. Over the week, I met funeral directors, a mortician, celebrants, and experienced doulas. A doula with a team behind her can say yes to far more.
My third lesson shocked me. Victoria doesn’t license funeral directors. Under the Funerals Act 2006, a funeral provider must add its details to a public register, offer a basic funeral, publish its prices, and follow rules on prepaid funerals and complaints. The Act sets no training or qualifications. Doulas have no registration or required training at all, beyond a general code of conduct for unregistered health workers. Almost anyone can watch a few videos and call themselves a funeral director or a doula.
Some doulas are working to change that. Holistic End-of-Life and Death Care Australia (HELD), a national peak body for doulas and holistic deathcare practitioners, is building professional standards, a code of conduct, and credentialing.
The gap shows up in practice. Plenty of Australians reach adulthood without seeing a dead body. In my experience, viewings are less common in some families, particularly those of English descent, while many Irish, Greek, and Italian families have kept the custom. Sam has noticed the same pattern among the families she works with. I’ve been attending open-casket funerals since I was a child, but for a few people in the room, Wednesday was their first time with the dead, and I was glad they had such careful teachers.
This matters for families. A doula who will care for your person’s body after death should have done this work before, under good guidance. If you are choosing a doula, it is fair to ask about their training and their experience of after-death care.
The systems around death have their own gaps. The paperwork is harder than it should be. Each hospital and aged care facility uses its own forms, and a single missing signature can hold up a family. Ambulances, rightly, put the living first, so they rarely transport a body. These gaps leave grieving families exposed, and they make a well-trained doula more valuable.
Two kinds of knowledge
Some doulas help people write their plans and complete an advance care directive, and that work is valuable. If you want to wash a body at home, support a family through a coronial process, or stand with them at the graveside or the crematorium, you need more. You need two kinds of knowledge.
The first is technical and logistical. You need to know how cooling works, how a body changes in the days after death, what paperwork a death requires, and how cemeteries, crematoria, and funeral homes run. This week gave me that knowledge from the people who do the work every day.
The second is harder to teach. It is a temperament, a sensitivity, and a way of being present. My pastoral and spiritual care training sits here: attentiveness, good communication, and the ability to stay steady beside someone in grief. It lets a doula make every step as gentle as possible for a family.
Preparing the Way builds both. Its Foundation Workshop and Intensive Course lay the groundwork for presence, and this advanced week added hands-on skills that set its doulas apart. I would recommend it to any Legend who feels called to after-death care. It was one of the most meaningful weeks of my working life, and I am grateful to everyone at Preparing the Way, Natural Grace, and Lonergan & Raven who made it happen.
Want to know more?
If you’d like to talk about how an end-of-life doula could support you, someone in your care, or your organisation, I would be honoured to hear from you. I can help with advance care planning, keep company with someone in their final days, and support families with after-death care at home. Learn more about my End-of-Life Doula Services in Melbourne and online.