About Death Fest
AN ANNUAL EVENT, AN ONGOING COMMUNITY:
Death Fest is a day-long event offered on the first Sunday of November, and a local community exploring mortality together.
As an event, Death Fest offers a day of educational and experiential workshops, self-reflection, and creative expression focused on the experience of being mortal humans who love and grieve together.
The experience extends into a year-round community through regular events including film screenings, discussion groups, and ongoing education.
A DAY AT DEATH FEST:
We open and close in a circle of communion. In between, we learn, restore, expand our knowledge and awareness, reflect on our experiences, hold grief close, sing, connect, and create. We share a meal, honor our ancestors, listen, open, celebrate, and breathe, all in the embrace of the season and the land.
Attend engaging workshops, visit the collective Ancestor Altar, take a silent journey in the woods along the Grief Walk, explore resources at the Library, go beyond words at the Art Tent, and more.
PAST WORKSHOPS:
Climate Grief: Journeying from Allowing to Action
Discussing the Elephant in the Room: Conversations about End-Of-Life Care
Grief Embodied: a performance installation
Grief, Pen, Paper: Writing Our Way Through Grief
Home Funerals: Reclaiming After Death Body Care
How to Support People Who Are Grieving
Medical Aid in Dying: An Option Virginians Want
Natural Burial: Simple, Clean, Green
Near Death Experiences
Open to the Mystery: A Guided Death Meditation
Singing at the Bedside: The Threshold Singers
Tending the Heart: Herbs for Supporting Grief
The Art of Grief: movement and creativity
Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED)
What Happens As We Die? A Hospice Doctor Explains Physical Changes at End of Life
THE TEAM:
This event is a shared endeavor among three local organizations: Woven Roots Collective, Hospice of the Piedmont, and Panorama Natural Burial.
Woven Roots Collective is a local non-profit offering a seasonal cycle of opportunities for people to come together for education, connection, healing, and inspiration, nurturing social and ecological resilience through collaborative projects and educational events.
Hospice of the Piedmont is a community-based nonprofit that has offered expert hospice care to families in Central Virginia for over 40 years.
Panorama Natural Burial opened in spring of 2023 as our community’s first natural burial ground, offering an option for a more intentional and environmentally-conscious disposition method.
