We are delighted to welcome Lashanna Williams to the Living/Dying Project Speaker Series. What would it mean to reclaim death as a deeply human practice of care rather than a clinical event we outsource to institutions? Join Lashanna Williams, Executive Director of A Sacred Passing and death care practitioner, for an intimate exploration of how we tend to one another at life’s most vulnerable threshold. Kristin Singer, Living/Dying Project’s Board President, will be in conversation with Lashanna.
Drawing from her work building access-focused, anti-racist end-of-life care in Seattle and beyond, Lashanna invites us to reimagine death not as something with “super sharp edges all of the time,” but as a passage that can be softened through presence, planning, and community care. She’ll share insights from training hundreds of death care providers, creating safe physical spaces for people exercising end-of-life choices, and rewriting death care training to honor the many ways people want to be cared for, not just one dominant cultural norm.
In communities where death often arrives through trauma, violence, or sudden loss, planning for death becomes what Lashanna calls “a dare to dream.” Vulnerability around dying is precisely what builds trust and love. Through stories from her practice and provocative questions about what truly matters at the end of life, Lashanna will explore how death care practitioners serve as companions in this threshold space, as witnesses who help people articulate and honor what they want.
This conversation will touch on the intimacy of planning conversations that go beyond legal documents, and why softening our relationship with death is about collective health and community care.
Lashanna is an intentional tender. A tender of people and spaces, a recovering corporate employee and avid learner. A mistake maker, community lover, consensual hugger, garden witch, and mother; a midwest-grown University of Michigan graduate, published author, artist, facilitator, and holder of heavy things.
Creating space for belonging is at the core of their work, from teaching medical professionals to working with youth, from shrouding a community member to hand-grinding herbs for tea.
Lashanna lives and works in the intersections of death, art, education, and love. As a member of multiple community and national boards, she gathers, guides, and supports efforts to remain purposeful, creative, sustainable, and free from the anti-Black patriarchal Western structures currently in place. Lashanna is a Scorpio, which means they were born an agent of change and has lived that life.
Lashanna runs A Sacred Passing (ASP), a 501C-3 nonprofit. Please check out ASP’s community events page. Their book clubs and webinars are great! https://asacredpassing.org/community-care-events
