Bonita Ralph

I am a Death Educator, Family Support Practitioner and advocate for community-led death care. My path has been shaped by 25 years in youth and family support, community development and lived experience as a carer, interpreter and advocate, as well as being a CODA (child of deaf adults).

I have also worked as a Holistic Funeral Director, primarily caring for babies and children, specialising in home-based death care, extended vigil and family-led care. My greatest learning has come from sitting beside grieving people and walking with communities through the rawness of loss. It has shown me that death care can be relational, embodied and deeply human, giving families the information, support and time they need to slow down, make informed choices and feel into what they need.

In 2018, a grieving teenager asked me, “Why don't we have death education at school?” That question has stayed with me ever since. It crystallised something I had been seeing through my work: we need to give people the knowledge and confidence to understand death, make choices and support one another before they are confronted with profound loss.

Today, I am a Family Support Practitioner at Very Special Kids, a paediatric hospice, walking alongside families from diagnosis through to grief and bereavement. I believe the time between a death and the funeral is crucial for maintaining bonds and beginning integration. Yet after-death care sits in an overlooked space between healthcare and the funeral sector, where families and professionals can lack shared information, education and support.

My Churchill Fellowship will allow me to learn from international hospices and bring back best-practice guidance for after-death care in paediatric palliative care. Beyond paediatric hospices, I hope this work will inspire better after-death care across the funeral sector, adult palliative care and for families whose child dies suddenly and unexpectedly.