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What if death was not something to fear—but one of life's greatest teachers?
In modern culture, death is often hidden from view, outsourced to professionals, and experienced in isolation. Yet for most of human history, dying, grieving, and caring for one another at the end of life were woven into the fabric of community life.
In Dying Together, death educator and community practitioner Lee Warren explores how reconnecting with death can help us reclaim something many of us are longing for: deeper belonging, stronger relationships, and more meaningful ways of caring for one another.
Drawing on more than three decades of experience in intentional communities—including her years at Earthaven Ecovillage in the Southern Appalachians—Warren shares a compassionate and practical vision for bringing death back into the center of community life.
At the heart of the book is a remarkable period known within Earthaven as "The Death Years," when six community members died over the course of two years. What emerged was a living curriculum in communal death care—one that revealed how mortality can become a powerful teacher, helping people cultivate connection, resilience, and collective wisdom.
Combining personal stories, practical guidance, ritual, reflection, and community-based approaches to caregiving, Dying Together offers a path toward a more conscious and life-affirming relationship with death.
What You'll Gain
- Practical tools for community-based death care and end-of-life support
- Guidance for creating meaningful rituals around dying, grief, and remembrance
- Greater confidence navigating grief, loss, and mortality
- A deeper understanding of death literacy and death-positive culture Insight into home funerals, green burials, and community-centered mourning practices
- New ways to foster connection, belonging, and mutual care during times of loss
- A grounded framework for creating more death-aware and compassionate communities
Death and Grief Were Never Meant to Be Faced Alone
Rather than treating death as a private event or medical problem to be managed, Dying Together explores village-inspired approaches that bring caregiving, grieving, and remembrance back into community life.
Through stories, contemplative practices, and real-world examples, Warren demonstrates how facing mortality together can strengthen relationships, deepen resilience, and help communities rediscover their capacity for care.
This is not simply a book about preparing for death.
It is a book about learning how death can teach us to live more fully, love more deeply, and belong more completely.
A Different Kind of Book About Death and Dying
Many books about death focus on individual grief, medical planning, or spiritual theory.
Dying Together takes a different approach.
Rooted in the lived experience of intentional community, it explores how death can become a catalyst for connection, collective healing, and cultural transformation.
By weaving together death literacy, community caregiving, ritual practice, ecological awareness, and embodied wisdom, Warren presents a vision of mortality that is both deeply practical and profoundly human.
Who This Book is For
- Caregivers and end-of-life companions
- Death doulas and death educators
- Readers interested in conscious dying and death-positive culture
- Community organizers and intentional community members
- Those exploring grief, ritual, and collective healing
- Sustainability and resilience practitioners
- Readers seeking practical and spiritually grounded approaches to death and dying
- Anyone longing for greater belonging, connection, and care at the end of life
About the Author
Lee Warren is a death educator, somatic practitioner, and end-of-life preparation guide with more than 30 years of experience living in intentional, land-based communities. Drawing on decades of work in community caregiving, grief ritual, green burial practices, and death education—including her years at Earthaven Ecovillage—she helps people develop a more conscious, compassionate relationship with mortality.
Dying Together is an invitation to see death not only as an ending, but as a teacher, a gift, and an opportunity to strengthen the bonds that make us human.
Any book about dying in which dying people might actually recognize their labor, their heartbreak, their fears, is a useful book, for them and for those who love them. And any book that extends that death wisdom to the wider culture is a called-for book. This is one of those.
— Stephen Jenkinson
Dying Together is a luminous invitation to restore the communal practices of care, grief, and reverence that once held us through life's final threshold. Through story, practice, and lived wisdom, Lee Warren shows us how accompanying one another through dying, grief, and remembrance can awaken a deeper intimacy with life itself. Her reflections illuminate how tending those who are dying together deepens our shared humanity.
— Aditi Sethi, MD
Lee Warren brings a compassionate and experienced lens to the tender yet practical work of community-based death care. Dying Together is a much-needed book that reminds us how to heal and share both our lives and deaths—not as isolated individuals, but as neighbors helping neighbors.
— Dr. Mallory McDuff
Wisdom traditions around the world turn to death as a potent ally for living well. In this inspired and accessible guidebook, Lee Warren helps us to prepare for our own return and to assist those we love in becoming healed and vibrant ancestors.
— Daniel Foor, Ph.D
Death is a subject that most of us prefer to sweep under life's rug until the inevitable is upon us. Lee Warren's Dying Together: The Art of Community Death Care challenges us instead to see the end of life as a rich opportunity to live more fully, and to strengthen our bonds with those we love. Warren urges us to reframe death as "an active surrender," without glossing over the reality of grief and loss. She guides us toward accepting and even thriving amid the uncertainty that is life. Weaving together hard-won practical experience with deep reflection, she has birthed a brave, important, and wonderful book. Essential reading for anyone who has or will cease to exist in our bodily form—that is, for each and every one of us.
— Andrew Lawler
I read Lee Warren's Dying Together in small bites, sandwiched between academic work and the rapid-fire, high-stress American news cycle of 2026. I noticed a consistent pattern: returning to Warren's words felt like easing into otherworldly meditation. My shoulders relaxed, my breathing got deeper, my reading slowed down, and my center of gravity seemed to drop. If my experience is any indication, Dying Together has the potential to root the reader in a slower, more meaning-infused life, regardless of how close to or far from our own deaths we are.
— Yana Ludwig
Lee Warren has achieved what few authors on this topic manage to do. In Dying Together, she honors and educates about the sacred space of liminality that the dying process offers while, with clarity, wisdom, and seasoned insight, sharing practical ways to bring death care into our families and communities. Her writing arises from a deep well of personal, spiritual, and community practice. This book belongs in every home, library, school, and place of worship.
— Kat Maier
Community deathcare is the answer to our impending hospice crisis, and this book offers a compellingly original path forward.
— Scott Kirschenbaum
I have sat with many clients terrified of death or full of guilt and regret around loss. Lee Warren brings grief and death into a place of beauty and meaning—and shows us that learning to live well together and dying well surrounded by belonging are the same journey. I will be recommending this book to everyone.
— Ann Kelley, Ph.D
At a time when isolation seems to be growing through the cascade of changes at the surface of our lives, there rises in many of us a deeper longing for real and vulnerable connection—both in our living and in our dying. In these pages, Lee Warren speaks to that longing from inside her own experience of its fulfillment—in the tender, shared terrain of living with the dying in community. She reminds us of what humans once knew: that death can be a shared passage, transformative not only for the one departing, but for every person in the circle supporting them. Her poetic and intimate prose draws us into that circle, and carries us through visionary yet deeply remembered possibilities and practices. From the moment her words touch our hearts, we are changed, both in how we live and how we will die.
— Kim Rosen
Death—and all the trappings that modern culture has attached to it—was one of the last taboo subjects in "polite society" until very recently. This book invites us to reconsider what we think we know about the processes and possibilities and invites its readers into a garden of ideas and considerations. In Warren's deft hands, this universal journey unfolds in the tenderest care and in beauteous revelations. Highly recommended.
— H. Byron Ballard
Note to Reader
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Song Death Taught Us to Sing—Together
Section I: Reclaiming Death's Wisdom
Introduction to Section I: When Death Becomes the Enemy
1: The Queen of Death
2: The Loss of Death's Wisdom
3: Death as Teacher, Death as Gift
4: Getting to Know Death
5: How Nature Sees Death
6: Where Death Still Belongs
Section II: The Villager's Guide to Death and Dying
Introduction to Section II: Keeping Company with Death
1: Setting the Stage for Dying Together
2: Walking Each Other Home
3: Caring for Our Own at Death
4: Intimate Farewells
5: Honoring Our Beloved Dead
6: Returning the Vessel
7: The Healing Potential of Shared Loss
Section III: Befriending Death by Preparing to Die
Introduction to Section III: Learning to Die Before You Die
1: Planning Your Departure
2: The Case for Minimal Intervention
3: The Right to Die
4: Turning Inward
5: Courting the Infinite
6: The Many Faces of Death
7: Cultivating the Qualities of a Good Death
8: Embodiment Practices
Section IV: Following the Breadcrumbs to Community-Based Dying
Introduction to Section IV: Skeleton Woman
1: Anatomy of Our Transformation
2: Find the Village, Build the Village, Die in the Village
3: Nurturing the Emerging Village
4: From Caregivers to Care Teams—Tuning in to the Medicine of Death
5: The Four Guiding Pillars for Community-Based Death-Care Models
6: The Art of Dying
Notes
Index
About the Author
About New Society Publishers