Dallas Black | Funeral Celebrant / End-of-Life Doula / Cross-Cultural Death Practices Explorer /Educator

Death is my compass, my measure, my mirror.

My sister died, and growing up, we weren’t to talk about it. I tiptoed through childhood, convinced that if I exhaled her name, my mother might break, or I’d tip the fragile balance that kept things from falling apart.

Beyond the front door, the rules reversed. I grew up inside the belly of the beast—a hard-edged rehab centre—the alternative to a cell or a coffin.

I was the director’s child, skipping down corridors filled with lives carrying stories too heavy for their bones. Some fought for life, others begged for death.

At home, grief was a maimed creature without a mouth. In rehab, it grew teeth and howled through the walls. At five, I knew: death isn’t always feared—sometimes it’s begged for.

I first held death in my hands in my teenage years, wrapped in twisted metal. I tried to breathe life into my friend, but death arrived immediately. As I sat by his open coffin for days, I began to understand that death can be our greatest teacher—if we’re willing to stay with it, and listen.

Then, the two people I loved most died within days of each other: Nan died of brain cancer, Pop of a broken heart. Before Nan died, she whispered to me, between morphine-laced exhales, a vision of how my life would unfold. Some inherit jewellery or land. I inherited a detailed blueprint for a life she said I’d live, spoken in a palliative care room where lilies tried to outmatch antiseptic. Her last words became my compass—the architecture for my life. Not knowingly followed, only recognised in hindsight—my life had unfolded across the veins of my Nan’s blueprint — as if she’d stitched the path beneath my feet before I knew how to walk it. I wonder if she’d caught a glimpse of the life waiting for me. I feel their guidance still, and believe that we continue, in ways we can’t always see.

Musings on my own mortality multiplied the year I became bound to a hospital bed, unable to walk or move. I floated above the wreckage of myself—bones wrapped in skin that no longer obeyed. Around my bed, I saw women in red cloaks form a circle, their voices rising in hymns and prayers. I’ve come to know that unseen hands hold us when everything else falls away. 

During lockdown, my beautiful ex-partner died by suicide. Death is sometimes mercy in disguise. Her funeral felt broken. They got her name wrong, played music she would’ve rolled her eyes at, and everything was beige, for a woman who was anything but. It wasn’t the farewell she deserved. That moment changed the course of my life.

Hers wasn’t the first suicide to touch me, nor the last.  I’ve sat with people for their final breath, cut ropes from necks, seen people jump in front of trains, and pulled more people from car wrecks than I think is normal. I’ve looked into eyes that had already decided—glazed yet blazing, haunted and holy. Watching people decide when they’ve had enough reshaped my relationship with death. Whether sudden, prolonged or chosen, painful or peaceful, there’s something soft about holding faith that we’re folded back into the infinite heart of love.

I’ve come to believe our souls circle back. I feel I chose this life before I was born—my family, my country, my circumstances, my gayness. Here with purpose, a contract to fulfil. I’ve stood in places I’ve never been and felt them remember me; met strangers with heart-expanding, soul-level recognition. We become, evolve, and return again and again—stripped of name, skin, and memory, but never light.

I sense what happens when we die is written on the body— the way it loosens its grasp and flows back to source. I see beauty in the way the body caves, becoming dappled with shifting shades. Life’s fading palette holds a raw honesty in the way the body returns. A sacred collapse. A reunion with everything.

I don’t see death as an end, but a return—to source, to truth, to love. I believe we dissolve into pure awareness, a frequency beyond form, a state of perfect knowing and being. We are light, wrapped in temporary flesh. I imagine the body’s last breath is the first exhale into everything.

—Dallas Black (2025)

Editor’s Note: Dallas Black is a funeral celebrant, end-of-life doula, cross-cultural death practices explorer, and educator. Currently completing a Master of Thanatology, she is committed to advocacy, policy reform, and death work for those who live and die at the margins. Her work focuses on improving equitable and compassionate end-of-life care for marginalised and underrepresented communities, including the homeless and prisoners. Dallas also facilitates Deathflow, an immersive workshop that combines movement (yoga), mindfulness, and reflections on mortality, and SHIfT HAPPENS, a school-based program she developed to help young people navigate grief and loss.
Further information: www.dallasblack.org

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