A few years ago, driving home from a family holiday, Bonita Ralph turned around to look at her three kids strapped into their car seats and thought, “What if I died? What would happen?” She realised, with total clarity, that she had no idea. She wouldn’t have known how to care for someone she loved after they died, or what was even possible.
That question sent her down what she calls “the rabbit hole”: into death doula training, into a decade as a Holistic Funeral Director specialising in home-based death care and infant loss, and eventually into her current work as a Family Support Practitioner in a paediatric palliative care hospice. In this week’s episode, Bonita and I talk about all of it: home vigils, family-led funerals, the myths that still shape what people think is or isn’t possible after someone dies, and why she believes, without hesitation, that death education belongs in schools.
Sitting down to write this, I realised how many threads from Bonita’s conversation run straight through other guests I’ve spoken with this season. It turns out a lot of people are circling the same truth from different directions.
Who’s actually allowed to support you
Bonita described something she calls the concentric circles of support: picture a bullseye, with the dying person or the immediate family in the centre, then rings of people around them, closer friends, then wider community. The rule, she says, is that support only flows inward. You can offer support to the ring closer to the centre than you, but you take your own grief outward, to the people further from the loss, not onto the family who are already carrying so much.
It’s almost the same model Professor Samar Aoun described a few weeks ago, when she talked about building a caring network of around ten people before you ever need one, so that no single person, usually a wife, a daughter, a mother, is left carrying the whole load alone. Samar’s research found that most people cope with grief through family, friends and ordinary community, not professionals. Bonita’s circles are the same idea in practice: know where you sit, and show up accordingly.
Both of them are pointing at the same gap. Have we quietly convinced ourselves that death and dying need to be handed over to professionals, and in doing so have we lost some confidence in each other?
The grief nobody prepares you for
Bonita spoke about how invisible infant and child loss can still be, how some families intuitively know how to make space for a baby who died before they could ever meet the wider family, and how many others simply don’t have the words. That absence of language isn’t new to this podcast. Larissa Reinboth, founder of Possum Portraits, told me that one of the cruellest myths is that grief should be proportional to how many weeks a pregnancy lasted, as though there’s a hierarchy of who’s allowed to be sadder. Robyn O’Connell, who lost her daughter Rebecca Jane to SIDS at nine months old, put it even more plainly: people avoid bringing up a loss because they’re worried it will upset the parent, when the truth is the parent was already thinking about their child. You’re not reminding them of anything.
Bonita’s version of this is a story about a woman in her nineties at a death cafe, who left her husband’s bedside five minutes after he died because no one told her she was allowed to stay. Nobody meant any harm. It’s just what happens when the things that need saying go unsaid.
Death education is not a school subject, it’s a household habit
The question that eventually became “Death Education,” Bonita’s platform, came from a teenager at a letterbox, asking her why death education wasn’t taught at school. It’s the same instinct behind Larissa’s children’s book, The House in Ollie’s Tummy, and Robyn’s What Happens When You Die: A Child’s Questions Answered. None of these are about protecting kids from the truth. They’re about giving kids, and the adults around them, the words to use before the moment they need them.
Bonita’s point about home-based death care carries the same logic. Most people don’t know that a body can stay at home for days, or that they’re allowed to ask for a shrouded cremation, or that “we’ve never done that before” from a funeral provider is not the same thing as “you can’t.” You deserve to know what’s actually possible before you’re standing in a funeral home trying to make decisions in the worst hour of your life.
Remember; you may not be ready to die, but at least you can be prepared.
Take care,
Catherine
