Hi, I'm Zenith.

Founder & EO of The Natural Death Care Centre charity, Australia. 

As a Deathwalker, a Celebrant and an educator I am fortunate to be at the forefront of reclaiming dying, death, body care and ceremony back into our own hands and hearts for over 30 years. I work with dying people and their families and friends, individuals and communities to help them achieve a more holistic and beneficial approach.

This often includes walking with and guiding people to die well, to accompany well, family-led after-death body care, creating meaningful and appropriate ceremony together. It also includes pre-need information, training, and education for anyone who is or will be impacted.

It is important and beneficial to be as familiar and prepared as possible before, during and after death, even in cases of sudden death and those involving trauma.

When I began, I was very hands-on, assisting people to do everything themselves. I was young and considered to be a maverick. Now after over 30 years, I am fortunate to have lived and contributed long enough to see a people-focused global shift on death, and am now regarded as a pioneer.

It has been an honour and a privilege to support and guide so many courageous and capable people who wanted a hybrid of old family-led traditional ways blended with a more contemporary understanding, something sacred and secular.

With a legal and welfare background, I've become a community resource, assisting people to know and use their legal rights, and co-create their own social rites of passage, work towards cultural change for better and continual end-of-life and after-death care. I have learned about the subtle emotional journey underlying the practical layers we are more familiar with. 

I now speak and teach both nationally and internationally, and my work may best be summed up as assisting people to die well, and assisting those left behind to have a healthier healing bereavement, with no or few regrets. If you are seeking training forged in real experience, depth and integrity then you are in the right place. Like many before you, you are in caring and expert hands.

For both death and marriage, I work with people, couples and families. In my personal and professional life, I am well aware families can be biological by blood relationships, but they can also be chosen, forged through love, deep friendship and through experiencing life or death together. We honour families however they are forged and grown. Love is all there is.

Marriage

As an authorised Civil Marriage Celebrant in Australia, I bring the same depth of experience and wisdom to celebrate love for all couples. Having married over 2,500 couples, I have found less is more, and to let love simply speak for itself by staying in the emotion of the moment, celebrating relationships, families and commitment.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, I am particularly delighted to be able to marry absolutely everyone at last.

Delve deeper…

Co-author of the book The Intimacy of Death and Dying, Patron of The Good Funeral Guide, UK, and the subject of the international independent documentary, Zen & the Art of Dying. Featured in the award winning documentaries TENDER and Laura’s Choice. A TEDX Byron Bay speaker and much, much more.

Creator of the annual Vagina Conversations event, a fundraiser for Women's Services, consisting of women and people telling their own vagina stories, exploring the interconnectedness of life, sex and death.

Feminist, dancer, swimmer, liver of life, and proudly a previous Byron Citizen of the Year.