Though Onie Tibbitt’s background is in Environmental Education, Conservation Science and Zoology, she has been a celebrant since 2013. Onie travels the length and breadth of the country conducting weddings, funerals, baby namings, and family celebration ceremonies and passionately believes that families should be able to decide how and where they choose to mark the momentous occasions in their lives, however big or small, religious or secular, traditional or unconventional. She is also co-founder of KnotStressed Therapies in Edinburgh, providing therapies, training and workshops.

Onie is currently writing a series of eco-fiction books and eco-games for children, which we hope to be able to place in our respite caravan.

We are so thrilled that she has written this special Guest Post for our blog.

“Great losses will always be with us, shaping us, sculpting our view of the world, touching on all that we do. Every one of us will experience the anguish, heartache and trauma of death in our own way - whether we have personally lost a loved one close to our hearts, witnessed the death of someone we know, or felt the impact of death on those we care about. There is no rule book for grief. ”

— Onie Tibbett

For the past 15 years, through my work at KnotStressed Therapies, I have supported pregnant women and their families through pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period. It is work I cherish and find incredibly rewarding. However, working with life - helping couples to feel calm and confident during pregnancy and for the birth of their baby - inevitably means also confronting death. Over the years, I have worked with families who have tragically experienced recurrent miscarriage, the stillbirth of their baby, or the sudden and unexpected loss of a loved one. There are no words for the suffering that these families have endured. At times, when I was fairly new to this work, I seriously considered moving away from birth work. I felt utterly powerless to ease the pain these families were experiencing in any meaningful way. I doubted my own abilities and wondered what, if any, comfort I could possibly offer other families going through similar unimaginably challenging times.

I became a Life Celebrant, in part, because I felt compelled to find ways to help others facing the confusion, anxiety and anger that often accompanies death. I also became a Life Celebrant to search for meaning in death. By offering support to bereaved individuals and families, I hoped to make peace with my own mother’s early death from cancer, to come to terms with the death of my 17 year old school friend in a car crash, to better comprehend the deaths of my grandfather, father and aunt. As a society, we are getting better at talking about death, at being open about the cascade of feelings that can overwhelm a person who has either been forced to confront their own mortality or who has experienced the loss of someone close to them. It is not an easy task but there is great comfort in the sharing of experiences, the normalising of the harsh reality of death - it is after all a natural part of the cycle of life. How we, as humans, cope with these transitions, how we support each other through them is so important. Coming to terms with death is enormously challenging and everyone will find their own ways to cope with the devastating impacts of loss.The work of charities such as Anam Cara Fasgadh is incredibly important in raising awareness of these issues and providing a space for bereaved families to come together in grief.

My roles as a Life Celebrant, Pregnancy & Postnatal Massage Therapist, and a Birth Worker go hand in hand. It is an enormous privilege to support families through life transitions, especially those life transitions that can shake the foundations of a person’s world, unroot their sense of self, and challenge their ability to cope. At times, as a therapist, my role is to simply to listen, to acknowledge their feelings, to provide a safe space for any emotional release that is needed. At other times, perhaps during a massage, it is to help bring some grounding and calmness, to begin the process of enabling the bereaved person to take some time for themselves for rest, sleep and self-nurture. For families who have experienced great loss, planning a funeral can feel like a momentous challenge - just one more trial to get through. As a Life Celebrant, I seek to ease that process. I help families to find the right words to come to terms with their loss and to honour their loved one in their own unique and personal way.

It can take years, decades even, to get to the point where we might consider in our hearts that we have made some kind of peace with the death of our loved one. Despite this, it is always incredible to me seeing how bereaved individuals will often pour their grief into something beautiful and inspiring - whether it is supporting others, running marathons, writing, painting, climbing mountains, music, walking in nature, or singing. It brings to mind an insightful quote by the ecologist and writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer: “I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.” I couldn’t agree more. However hopeless and insurmountable it may feel at the time, I truly believe that the best antidote to death is the continuing and whole-hearted affirmation of life. By finding ways to channel our grief into love, to look outwards and onwards, to help carry each other through the dark times, to find ways to self-nourish and be kind to ourselves and others, to live fully… then we can at least hope to find some workable understanding with our grief as we continue to journey through life. Thank you so much for inviting me to write a guest blog on your site. I hope that these words of reflection will bring some comfort, or may be of interest, to the families reading.

Guest Post by Onie Tibbitt, Life Celebrant and Co-Founder of Agnostic Scotland, and Co-Director of KnotStressed Therapies

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