By Diane Hullet

January 31, 2025

On episodes #167 and #168 of the Best Life Best Death podcast, I spoke with Sarah Kerr, a mentor and colleague whose work in soul-centered death care has deeply influenced my understanding of death and dying.

One of the first courses I took with Sarah, Awakening The Archetype of the Deathwalker, was a revelation. The language and framework she introduced resonated deeply, helping me make sense of feelings and experiences I had long carried.

In these excerpts from BLBD podcast #167, we explore:

• the Archetype of the Deathwalker;
• its role in cultures worldwide;
• how the story we tell ourselves about death impacts our experience.

___

The Call to Walk with Death

Diane Hullet: Sarah, I’m so excited to have this conversation today. When I first encountered your work back in 2021, I took your course called ‘Awakening The Archetype of the Deathwalker.’

I remember feeling an immediate sense of recognition—the language you used and the framework you provided, suddenly made sense of something I had felt but never quite put into words.

Sarah Kerr: That’s such a common response. A lot of people who take that course or hear about the Deathwalker Archetype experience this moment of clarity—like, ‘Oh, this explains something fundamental about me.’

An archetype is an energy that moves through people. It’s a universal pattern, something that exists across cultures and throughout history.

The Deathwalker Archetype has always been present in human societies, but in dominant Western culture, we don’t have a clear role for people who resonate with it. That often leaves them feeling isolated, uncertain about their experiences, or even ashamed of their connection to death.

People who carry this archetype often have a deep, lifelong attunement to death. They might have had significant transcendent experiences around loss, sensed when someone was going to die, or felt a calling to serve dying people and their families.

But because our culture doesn’t widely acknowledge or support this way of being, many of them don’t know where they fit. My work is about helping people recognize and honor that calling.

A Death-Illiterate Culture

Diane: That makes so much sense. I often talk about how we live in a death-illiterate culture. It’s not that we don’t see death—it’s in our media all the time. But seeing death isn’t the same as knowing how to engage with it in a meaningful way.

I love the simple phrase you use: ‘we can do death better.’ It’s something I repeat often because it so perfectly captures what’s missing in our cultural approach to death. We don’t hold it as a natural, integral part of life. Instead, we avoid it, or we medicalize it, or we frame it purely as something tragic. And that’s where the Deathwalker Archetype comes in—it offers a bigger lens.

For those who might not be familiar with the idea of archetypes, could you say a little more about what they are?

Sarah: Absolutely. Archetypes have been explored in depth by thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. They are like psychospiritual DNA—patterns that shape human experience, just as our physical DNA determines aspects of our bodies.

Archetypes aren’t just inside us; we also live within them. They pull us forward from the outside, while simultaneously expressing themselves through us.

Some well-known archetypes include the Healer, the Artist, the Warrior, or the Seeker. These are fundamental ways of being that show up in different cultures and historical periods.

The Deathwalker is one of those archetypes. It’s the energy of someone who moves between worlds—who is comfortable navigating the threshold between life and death, and who can guide others through that passage.

Recognizing the Deathwalker Within

Diane: I love that idea of being pulled forward by an archetype. How did you come to recognize the Deathwalker Archetype in yourself?

Sarah: It was a process, and it wasn’t always easy. In the early 2000s, when I began my doctoral studies, I went through a huge spiritual awakening. The world became very permeable to me—I started having intense experiences of knowing, sensing, dreaming, and being aware of things beyond ordinary perception. It was disorienting, and I didn’t have a framework for understanding what was happening.

At the same time, I wasn’t going crazy. I knew that. But my life was no longer operating on the same track as before. I felt like I had one foot in the ordinary world and one foot in something much deeper.

Much of my research during that time was about trying to make sense of my experiences. I came to understand that what I was feeling was part of a much older, broader human experience—one that had been named in different ways across cultures.

The term Deathwalker felt like the best fit for how I was moving through the world.

What Story Do We Tell Ourselves about Death?

Diane: You shared a video recently on social media in which you talked about how much the stories we tell ourselves matter.

I found that so moving because I think the story we tell ourselves about death is often not very helpful, and so people get stuck and they think it’s only horrible. Not that it isn’t difficult, not that it isn’t sad, but there’s another way to hold that—the whole framework can be bigger.

Sarah: Yes, we’re creatures of narrative. Everything in our world makes sense to us because we tell ourselves a story about it. The story we tell ourselves about death in mainstream culture is generally that it’s a physical experience. That we are bodies, and when our body dies, we are gone. That’s it.

And in the grand scheme of all the stories people through time have told themselves, we’re a minority to say that that’s how it is!

So I don’t think that’s an accurate way of understanding death or life or existence. I think we have physical bodies, but there’s a whole energetic dynamic, a spiritual dynamic happening.

We have souls, which are not the same as our bodies. When we’re alive, body and soul are together. As we die, body and soul separate, whether that happens slowly or suddenly. Body goes back to the land, but soul goes on. And what’s the story of how the soul goes on?

When we bring a frame to it that’s bigger than just ‘the lights go out,’ then we have a way to engage. We have a way to participate with this. We have a way to move into it and be in community no matter where the soul is.

And there are lots of different ways of understanding how the soul goes on. What matters is that people find a way that resonates with them.

I find that when I share this idea with clients and with students, a penny drops and they never think about death the same way.

But Is It True?

Diane: I remember you were telling me that somebody said to you, ‘Well, but is it true? Is that story true?’ And you said, ‘I don’t really care if it’s true or not.’

Sarah: That’s right. People ask me that all the time, you know, ‘how do you know that the soul goes on after death?’

My response is, it doesn’t really matter to me if that is true or not, because here’s the logic of this: I’m alive, I’m not dead, so I can’t speak from absolute personal experience there, but neither can anyone who holds the opposite position. So we’re kind of 50/50. It either is true or it isn’t.

But I actually think that there’s a little more evidence on my side, because of the transcendent mystical experiences people have, before death, as someone’s dying, and after people have died.

When I speak to a large group, and I ask, ‘How many people have felt connections to their dead loved ones?’ Two hundred people in an audience of 300 will put their hand up. It is a reality of our experience.

But it doesn’t really matter if it is true or not, because we need a story, and the story that nothing happens is not a very healing story. It causes a lot of dysfunction, a lot of pain, and a lot of suffering.

I prefer to hold a story that I find much more healing. And when we hold that story, and when we meet death and operate through that story, the beauty and the grace and the connection and the love and the stunning, open-hearted magic can occur. That all of that can happen is incredible.

So hands down for me, this is the path I’d like to follow.

And when I die, I might be surprised, but I don’t think I will be.

___

You can find out more about Sarah’s work and the various courses she teaches at sacreddeathcare.com. If you are interested in a deep dive into her work, consider joining the interest list for the Sacred Deathcare Guide Training https://centreforsacreddeathcare.activehosted.com/f/7

Sarah sacreddeathcare.com

Diane bestlifebestdeath.com