#79: Remembering Death & Honoring Life with Erin Merelli of Deathwives

In this episode of the Women’s Moon Wisdom Podcast, Rebecca Rankin sits down with Erin Merelli, a death doula, ceremonialist, and co-founder of Deathwives, an organization dedicated to changing the way we approach death, funerals, and grief. Erin shares her profound insights on end-of-life care, community grieving, and why preparing for our own death can bring more intention and connection into our lives.

Erin discusses the growing trend toward green and eco-friendly funerals, highlighting how they offer a meaningful, environmentally conscious way to honor life. She also explains the concept of home funerals, giving families a compassionate, personal option to care for their loved ones at home. 

Throughout this conversation, Erin emphasizes that by embracing death as a natural part of life, we can build a more intentional, mindful approach to our living days and support our loved ones in transformative ways.

Key Topics Covered in This Episode:

• Erin’s journey into death work and how she became a death doula
• The mission of Deathwives and the services it offers
• The process and significance of home funerals and why families are increasingly choosing this option
• What it means to have a green or eco-friendly funeral and how it benefits both the planet and those left behind
• Simple ways to start conversations about death and end-of-life choices with family and friends
• How we can each bring more intentionality to life by embracing and preparing for our own death

About Erin Merelli:

Erin is a death doula, educator and public speaker from Colorado, meandering her way through the country to expand our minds' narrative on death and dying. Her message is simple but not easy: We are all going to die, and to manage that well we need to talk about it. Erin is Co-Founder of the Deathwives, a training community providing a wide range of accessible death education to families and professionals, and most recently, founder of Death Ed with Erin, where she takes the work on the road and brings students into next-level sojourns of the soul. Erins’ work invites us to consider mortality in individual, communal and environmental contexts. She teaches about the autonomy of death, the expression of grief, functional deathwork, burial practices, and the diversity of deathcare throughout culture and history. Erin has trained many hundreds of Death Doulas through her programs, and remains grateful for the media's reception of this message that our dead belong deeply to us. Her voice has been featured on TedXMileHigh, PBS, Forbes, Comedy Central and many publications and podcasts, and she is grateful and satisfied to see this movement reaching the mainstream.

Connect with Erin: