Olivia Bareham

Olivia Bareham is a death midwife and interfaith minister based in Los Angeles. She began working as a minister of healing in the late 1980s, sitting with many people at the end of their lives, and came to see the deathbed as a place where a calm, loving space matters greatly. After caring for her own mother's body at home in 2005, she founded Sacred Crossings in 2007 to support families who want to keep a loved one at home through the vigil and funeral. In 2016 she co-founded the Sacred Crossings Alternative Funeral Home, which offers home funerals, green burial and burial at sea.

Through the Sacred Crossings Institute for Conscious Dying she trains death doulas and death midwives in four levels, from facing one's own beliefs about death to after-death body care, funeral rites and burial rituals. Classes run as live two-day webinars and as four-day in-person trainings in Los Angeles. She also hosts a free monthly online gathering, Ask the Death Midwife, for people who are dying and those caring for them, writes the blog Diary of a Death Midwife, and has published an advance death care directive booklet for planning one's own funeral wishes.