Death Care at Home
Death Care at Home with Nicole
End of Life Doula
Funeral Celebrant
Holistic Family Led Funerals & Memorials
Cooling Plate Hire
Safe & honouring a loved ones body to stay at home after death for a slower more personalised and meaningful goodbye.
With Death Care at Home, we offer after death care cooling that empowers choice and meaningful experiences.
Founder Nicole Grundy, invites you to ‘think about things differently’ and offers to help people with the tangible and emotional resources, knowledge and confidence to provide their loved ones with options around a safe and gentle choice to rest at home after death. For a time bespoke to you, that supports mourning and physical connection with our deceased and in creating preplanning end of life choices. We are passionate educators and advocates for this approach to family led death care, which allows the caregivers and families to be physically present after death for a period of time that is not rushed and is safe. Often a match making combo for people who feel cheated of goodbyes when their person’s preference is for a direct cremation. We believe there is time after last breath to be with our loved ones before the call to direct cremation or any funerary call into final disposition.
Through personal experience and explanations from our families who share in this option, healing begins when supported in creating an individualized time to say goodbye at home. Our Founder Nicole calls it ‘The In-between’ Time, the time from last breath to uplift, a unique intimate space that often is overlooked and rushed due to the nature of her Generation X death literacy and personal wiring.
Through the use of cooling plates individuals and families can experience this unique model of care that offers people the ‘inbetween’ phase to say goodbye in a way that is authentic and will have an immense impact on long term grief.
Our goal is to contribute to the community and personal shift in, autonomy, choice and options in how modern Australian society experiences a return to at-home after death care; supported by trained professionals and where death care options are personalised for today’s modern world.
Through our work in the death care space and experience supporting families with this advocacy, we have learnt that how we say goodbye and interact with a person’s last hours has a deep and profound affect on how we live today,.
Cooling plates are for hire in the Melbourne and Geelong region, to find out more information on hiring click here.
Home Death Care and Cooling Bed Rental in Melbourne and Geelong
Home Death Care and the rental of Cooling Beds offers a moment of pause and choice. It can provide an alternative to traditional funeral home services, and can be provided to private homes, your holistic or independent home funeral provider, End of Life Doula, and Palliative Care services.
A Return to Tradition
Contrary to the common belief that individuals must be embalmed and rushed from their place of natural death, it's both legal and possible for families to personally attend to their loved ones from the moment of their death until their final arrangements are organised and your loved one is ready to be either buried or cremated. This support is readily available and shifting the conversations in how we better serve our families.
The Benefits of Home/Family Death Care
Home or family-centred death care underscores the importance of families staying close to their departed loved ones, being actively involved, and maintaining control during the days that follow. This approach offers a beautiful, healing, and forms the basis of Holistic Funeral Family led death care.
What Does Home/Family Death Care Include?
It encompasses various critical aspects:
Washing and Preparing the Body
Dressing the Body
Cooling the Body
Holding Vigil - having the space to allow family and friends to visit and say goodbye
To ensure the safety and integrity of Home Death Care we offer Cooling Beds for rent. These Cooling Beds allow your loved one to remain at home, adhering to Australian mortuary standards, for up to three days or even longer.
A Cooling Bed, also known as a Cooling Plate or Cooling Blanket, is a compact refrigeration unit that circulates coolant through a metal plate or blanket upon which the deceased is placed. While ice or techni-ice can be used, a Cooling Bed offers a non-invasive and user-friendly option, allowing you more time to focus on your goodbye. We're here to educate and empower families who wish to attend to their own loved ones using a rented Cooling Bed.
We can understand if you feel overwhelmed, we can attend to your home, help you with your loved one and prepare the cooling plate, we can assist you to create a space to say goodbye, where you can stay with the deceased, knowing you are caring for them until the last moments and giving you the necessary time to move through the stages of trauma, despair, and the gentle beginnings of acceptance.
These stages often entail the washing and preparation of the body and inviting others to bare witness to their loved one who has passed, allowing for an experience of deep love and loss. When the body is in the family's care, all of these stages can take place.
Embrace Home Death Care.
Choosing Home Death Care allows families to experience gratitude for the intimacy, connection, and sense of purpose that arises from this organic practice. It invites family, friends, and the community into an authentic and healing after-death care experience in a familiar and safe environment, with care performed by loving hands.
Death Care at Home
Holistic Family Led Funerals and After Death Home Care support.
When friends & families live around the world, getting back for the funeral is a stressor, but before that many people want to see their person but the idea of seeing them in a ‘viewing room’ on a dictated and paid for time scale is not palatable , nor is faced with the possibility of not having the ability to see their person due to some Direct Cremation protocols. We are here to help explore the continuity of care that seamlessly links End of Life Doula support into Funeral Director supports.
We are in Melbourne, Australia, in the AEST timezone.