Seattle Is Changing the Conversation Around Death

Woman in a flowing dress walks along a beach at sunset near Seattle, with waves, rocks, and mountains in the background under a cloudy sky.

Celebration of Life Seattle

Photo courtesy of Celebration of Life

This post is sponsored.

Death is one of life’s few certainties, yet it remains remarkably difficult to talk about.

Across Seattle, a growing network of practitioners, advocates, and entrepreneurs is trying to change that. From grief walks to death doulas, Seattle is building a new language around loss, and one woman wants to bring more of that conversation into the open.

Woman with long blonde hair stands indoors near large windows in Seattle, wearing a sheer long-sleeve top and high-waisted white pants with hands in pockets, changing the conversation through her confident and modern style.

Colleen Coleman

Photo courtesy of Colleen Coleman

Colleen Coleman’s relationship with grief began abruptly. Her father died suddenly when she was 29, leaving behind the kind of disorientation that can follow a major loss: life continuing around you while your own has completely changed. In the years that followed, Coleman lost both of her grandmothers and then her best friend.

Rather than becoming easier to explain, grief became something she wanted to understand more deeply. Today, she is a Seattle-based business owner, speaker, and grief advocate, an end-of-life doula trained through INELDA, a graduate student in thanatology, the academic study of death and bereavement, and an evidential medium trained at the Arthur Findlay College in England. Before entering the death-and-grief space, she spent twenty years in corporate brand strategy.

Those seemingly different worlds now intersect in Celebration of Life Studios, the public benefit company working to change the Western narrative on dying and grief. The initiative aims to shift the narrative and provide the tools needed for change.

For most of the last century, Western grief care has been organized around resolution and stages that people are expected to move through to succeed in grief. Research replaced that model thirty years ago. Since 1996, bereavement scholars have understood that the people who do best after a loss do not sever the relationship. They carry it forward in a changed form. Coleman’s work starts there: the relationship does not end; it changes form.

Maybe the point isn’t becoming comfortable with death. Maybe it’s becoming less afraid to talk about it before we have to.

“There are so many things we simply don’t say about death,” Coleman says. Her work challenges the idea that grief follows a clean timeline or that maintaining a connection to someone who has died means a person has failed to “move on.”

Woman in a white suit speaks into a microphone at an indoor Seattle event. Several people are visible in the background, engaging in conversation.

Colleen Coleman

Photo courtesy of Meraki Creates

Coleman is not alone in asking Seattle to think differently about death. Across the region, Tamara Kubacki of Listening to Grief leads grief circles and walks; Derek Dizon’s A Resting Place centers community and immigrant experiences of loss; A Sacred Passing provides education around end-of-life choices; and Katrina Spade’s Recompose helped make Washington the first state to legalize human composting.

Together, their work suggests something larger is taking shape.

On October 10, Coleman will bring these conversations into a larger public setting with the Celebration of Life Seattle gathering. The day will include discussions and resources spanning grief therapy, end-of-life care, estate planning, death doulas, and other forms of support. The day closes with an evening of mediumship.

Coleman invites you to come as you are. Honor who you are missing.
Learn more: celebrationoflifeseattle.com