Nicole Cleave and Michelle Honey went to school together. Years later, Nicole helped Michelle plan her funeral.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
The title ‘death walker’ may conjure horror character visions, but the role is designed to alleviate fear, not create it.
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Just as a birth doula supports a mother through pregnancy and birth at the beginning of her child’s life, a death walker comforts and guides people practically at their end of their lives.
Death is a natural part of life’s cycle, and though conversations about it can be uncomfortable, Nicole Cleave says they are essential.
“We’re still very much a death-denying society,” Ms Cleave said.
“I think if people had conversations (about their deaths) beforehand — if it was part of their language — it would be easier when the inevitable comes.”
If you don’t choose how you’re farewelled, someone else will be choosing for you, but the send-off is only one aspect of the journey.
“Planning your end-of-life wishes is one thing, and planning your funeral is another thing,” she said.
“And I see people consistently not want to deal with any of it, but someone is going to deal with it; that’s also inevitable.”
Ms Cleave is highly spiritual.
She doesn’t buy into the theory that death is the end of life.
“I very much believe in life is a journey and death is part of that, or death is a journey and life is part of that; it doesn’t matter which way you look at it,” she said.
Her conviction helps her bear the emotional load of working with grieving families day in, day out, and showing up as the best, most supportive version of herself for each of them.
“I need to be empathetic, but I don’t take it on,” Ms Cleave said.
“I very much believe in us as spirits and that the spirit lives on, and we’re still connected and we can still have conversations and communication; life is just different.
“So, I’m able to sit in that space knowing ... it’s not the end.”
Nicole Cleave is a funeral planner, director and death walker.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
Despite standing firm in her feelings, her opinions aren’t something she shares unless someone asks for them.
Ms Cleave was drawn to becoming a death walker after wanting to advocate for people facing death and support them through it.
“If someone said to me, ‘What happens when I die? What physically happens to me, what happens next? If I’d passed away at home, then what?’” she said.
“Well, I couldn’t help them with that; I had no idea.”
In a move that could have easily been mistaken for morbid curiosity given the nature of the industry, she began volunteering at a funeral home and in a mortuary to learn the process.
By extension, she became a funeral director.
“My passion is still with dealing with the dying, with having that conversation around the education,” Ms Cleave said.
She recently helped the late Michelle Honey, a much-loved Shepparton mother and former classmate of Ms Cleave’s, plan her funeral after she had received a terminal breast cancer diagnosis.
“She didn’t want to die and she was very vocal about that,” Ms Cleave said.
“She sat there and she said, ‘I’m not going anywhere’, but she was being practical. She was intellectualising the fact that, ‘okay, it’s going to happen at some point’, so I just walked through that process with her and recorded all of her wishes.
Those proactively authoring their future death stories have autonomy over being buried or cremated, who they want involved in their service, which songs they’d like played, whether they want a religious or civil service, what they want to be remembered for.
Details from preferred coffins and flowers can be recorded, down to whether you’d like memorial cards and order of service booklets, photos in the newspaper or to have your service live-streamed on the internet.
“If you don’t make those decisions, people are going to make those decisions for you,” Ms Cleave said.
“And most of the time, they don’t know what they are because the conversation’s never been had.”
∎ To learn more about putting dying wishes in place and Ms Cleave’s journey as a death walker, tune into the latest episode of the Digging Deeper podcast.
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