At Be Ceremonial, we believe in the power of ritual. We also believe that every significant life transition deserves to be marked with intention, dignity, and love, including medical assistance in dying (MAiD).
Rather than viewing MAiD as something to be feared or stigmatized, we see it as an opportunity to honour someone’s autonomy while creating meaningful moments for both the dying person and their community.
In recent discussions about Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), including a recent Atlantic article we don’t agree with, there has been a troubling tendency to reduce deeply meaningful experiences to sensationalized narratives. While critics focus on statistics and policy debates, they often miss the profound human truth at the heart of these journeys: when someone chooses MAiD, they are exercising one of the most fundamental human rights—the right to self-determination in their final chapter.
The Power of Ritual in End-of-Life Transitions
Ritual has always been humanity’s way of making meaning from the inexplicable. When we face the magnitude of death—whether sudden or chosen—ceremony provides a framework for processing emotions, expressing love, and creating connection.
For those choosing MAiD, ritual becomes even more powerful because it allows for intentional preparation and conscious participation in one’s own farewell.
Dr. Sarah Kerr, a ritual healing practitioner and founder of the Centre for Sacred Deathcare, has developed what she calls a “MAiD countdown ritual” that beautifully demonstrates the healing potential of ceremony. This practice involves placing candles on an altar to represent the days remaining before the MAiD provision. Each morning, the person lights a candle, states the number of days remaining, and sets an intention for how they want to spend that day before blowing out the flame.
As Dr. Kerr explains, this ritual helps people emotionally and psychologically prepare for the approaching date. “When you see 10 candles, 9, 8, 7, it gets real in a different way,” she notes. This practice supports people to arrive at their chosen day feeling prepared and integrated, ensuring they are ready on every level for what they have chosen.
Living Funerals: Celebrating Life While Present
One of the most profound ceremonial practices emerging in end-of-life care is the living funeral or living wake—a celebration held while the person is still alive to participate. These pre-death ceremonial farewells have been coined living wake, celebration of life, friendship service, living tribute, reminiscing party and sendoff.
The core concept of a funeral for the living is the same as that of a traditional funeral — to offer a time and place for friends and family to gather together to honour a loved one. The primary difference between the two is whether or not the ceremony is held before or after the beloved person has died.
Living funerals offer something traditional funerals cannot: the opportunity for reciprocal exchange. The person being honoured can hear the eulogies, share their own reflections, and participate in their own celebration. For someone who has chosen MAiD, this becomes particularly meaningful as it allows them to orchestrate their farewell with full agency and presence.
Micro-Rituals: Sacred Moments in Everyday Dying
Not every meaningful ritual needs to be a grand ceremony. Some of the most powerful moments happen in the small, intimate gestures that families create together. These might include:
- Daily intention-setting: Beginning each day by stating one thing you’re grateful for and one thing you hope to experience or accomplish
- Memory collecting: Creating a practice of sharing one cherished memory each evening, allowing stories to be witnessed and preserved
- Heartfelt exchanges: Taking turns offering words of appreciation, forgiveness, or love to one another
- Sacred object creation: Working together to create something that will carry forward the person’s legacy—a quilt, a photo album, a recording of their voice.
These micro-rituals acknowledge that dying is not a single event but a process made up of countless moments, each deserving of attention and reverence.
Supporting Communities
When someone chooses MAiD, their decision impacts not just themselves but their entire community of family and friends. Ritual provides a way for this community to process their own complex emotions while supporting their loved one’s choice.
It’s important that these ceremonies create space for authentic expression and genuine connection, rather than being used to manipulate people, relationships or emotions. The goal is to honor the dying person’s wishes while allowing their community to participate meaningfully in whatever way feels right for them.
Some communities find healing through:
- Storytelling circles: Gathering to share stories about how the person has impacted their lives
- Creative collaboration: Working together on art projects, memory books, or video tributes
- Gratitude practices: Creating rituals that focus on appreciation rather than loss
- Forgiveness ceremonies: Offering opportunities to heal old wounds and express reconciliation
The period immediately after someone dies—whether through MAiD or any other cause—is sacred time that deserves ceremonial attention. In our death-phobic culture, we often rush to “deal with” the body and “move on” with logistics. But ritual invites us to pause, to witness, to honour what has just occurred.
Addressing the Critics: Dignity in Choice
Critics of MAiD often focus on abstract policy concerns while missing the lived experiences of real people making real choices about their own bodies and lives. In The Atlantic article, they reference us in an almost mocking tone: “For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses.”
To some, this might seem commercialized or trivial. But to families seeking meaningful ways to honour their loved one’s choice, these tools can be lifelines.
The reality is that choosing MAiD is often the result of careful consideration, extensive consultation with medical professionals, and deep reflection on what constitutes a life worth living. When someone makes this choice, our role as a community is not to judge but to support—and ritual provides a framework for that support.
Creating Your Own MAiD Ceremonies
If you or someone you love is considering or has chosen MAiD, here are some ways to integrate meaningful ceremony into the experience:
Before the Decision:
- Create regular family meetings for open conversation about end-of-life wishes
- Establish rituals around medical appointments to provide comfort and grounding
- Begin legacy projects that can be worked on together over time
After the Decision:
- Consider a living funeral or celebration of life while the person can fully participate
- Establish daily or weekly rituals that mark the remaining time with intention
- Create opportunities for individual family members to have special time with their loved one
In the Final Days:
- Design a countdown ritual similar to Dr. Kerr’s candle practice
- Plan the specific atmosphere you want for the MAiD provision: music, readings, who will be present
- Create small ceremonies for saying goodbye to specific people, places, or possessions
After Death:
- Plan an immediate mourning gathering for those who wish to be together; create space for the grief before rushing into the celebration of life.
- Create a small ceremony for significant moments like the first meal shared without your loved one
- Plan a funeral, memorial or celebration of life that reflects your person and how they lived their life.
The Path Forward: Compassion Over Judgment
The conversation around MAiD often becomes polarized between those who see it as a compassionate choice and those who view it as problematic. What gets lost in these debates is the human reality: real people facing real suffering are making deeply personal decisions about their own lives and deaths.
Our role as a society, and as family members, friends, and caregivers, is not to impose our values on others’ choices but to offer support, love, and dignity throughout the process. Ritual and ceremony provide tools for doing exactly that.
When we honour someone’s choice to pursue MAiD with thoughtful ceremony, we accomplish several important things:
- We affirm their autonomy and dignity as a human being
- We create meaningful memories for their loved ones
- We model a healthier relationship with death and dying for our communities
- We demonstrate that death—however it comes—can be met with grace, intention, and love
A Call for Sacred Witnessing
The debate about MAiD will continue in policy circles, medical conferences, and newspaper editorials. But beyond the statistics and regulations are human beings navigating one of life’s most profound transitions. They deserve to be met with compassion, not judgment; with ceremony, not bureaucracy; with love, not fear.
As we continue to evolve our understanding of death and dying in the 21st century, let us not lose sight of what truly matters: creating space for each person to live and die according to their own values, surrounded by love, and honoured with the dignity that every human life deserves.
Whether through a simple candle lighting, an elaborate living funeral, or quiet moments of connection between loved ones, ritual offers us a way to transform what could be a clinical procedure into a sacred passage. In doing so, we honour not just the choice to die, but the choice to live fully until the very end.
If you or a loved one is considering MAiD and would like support in creating meaningful ceremonies around this transition, Be Ceremonial offers resources and guidance for designing personalized rituals that honour your unique journey. Visit our app to explore ceremony ideas that can bring meaning, connection, and healing to this profound passage.
Some resources to explore here in Canada: Bridge C-14 and Dying With Dignity
