A Guide to Creating Meaningful Ceremonies

With Amy Firth

"The traditional funeral model doesn't work for us, but I don't know what else is possible."

I hear this all the time, both online and in my local community.

And it always stops me, because of course you can't imagine what you've never seen. You can't dream into something nobody's shown you. If every funeral you've ever attended looked the same, why would you think to ask for something different?

This guide is my answer to that. Not theory, not vague inspiration, but real ceremonies, real families, real goodbyes, and a way of thinking that you can actually use.

FUNERALS REIMAGINED: A Guide To Creating Meaningful Ceremonies
$27 AUD / £14 GBP / $18 USD

What's inside:

Seven real ceremony example - to help you dream into what’s actually possible.

The three shifts that transform a funeral - my tried & tested process for designing an experience rather than following a template.

What's actually legal versus what's just industry custom. Much of what families assume is required is often not law at all. It's the way things have always been done in a particular place, which isn't the same as the way things must be done.

Real conversation starters. For anyone who's wanted to ask a parent or partner what they'd actually want, and never quite knew how to bring it up.

A reflection worksheet. Four questions to help you begin imagining a ceremony that would genuinely fit, whether you're planning ahead for yourself or for someone you love.

This isn't about rejecting tradition.
For many families, the chapel is exactly right. It's familiar, it's contained, and the formality holds people when everything else feels uncertain. If that's your family, this guide will still offer you things: ways to bring more of your person into a traditional setting, ways to involve the people gathered, ways to make even a conventional ceremony feel more true.

But for other families, and I meet them every week, the traditional setting feels disconnected from the person they're saying goodbye to. Something is missing, and they don't know what to ask for, or whether they're even allowed to ask.

If that's you, this guide is especially for you. Not because tradition is wrong, but because you deserve to know that something else is possible.

About Amy
Hi, I'm Amy. I'm an interfaith minister, funeral director, celebrant and ceremony designer based in the Blue Mountains, Australia.

For more than a decade I've held ceremony for people at some of life's biggest thresholds, weddings, funerals, naming days, memorials, across the UK and Australia. I host the monthly Blue Mountains Death Café, and I run The Visible Death Worker, a community for death care professionals building their practice with integrity.

I wrote this guide because I believe ceremony belongs to communities, not institutions, and that the way we farewell someone matters, not just on the day, but in the months and years that follow.

FUNERALS REIMAGINED: A Guide To Creating Meaningful Ceremonies
$27 AUD / £14 GBP / $18 USD

Instant access. Yours to keep. Thirty pages. One sitting to read, a lifetime to return to.