Danna D. Schmidt

Master Life-Cycle Celebrant®  
Ordained Wedding Officiant  
Funerals/Memorials Specialist  
Certified Grief Educator/Tender  
ADEC-Certified Thanatologist®  

Author Archives: Danna

How to Leave a Sexy Corpse

Life is short. Drive fast. Leave a sexy corpse.” Stanley Hudson, (The Office; Season 8, Episode 15) I am all about the first and final words in this motto…and perhaps less about the driving fast part these days. Life itself drives fast enough – way faster than we might like. And yet knowing this, most of… Continue Reading

The Great Wheel

Looking up at La Grande Roue de Paris (April 2016) How to make sense of death and make peace with life in the midst of the mysteryand inevitable suffering that death brings? That is the question on my mind today as I consider five family deaths and a multiplicity of lesser joys and sorrows, losses and… Continue Reading

News & Musings

I really had the best of intentions to update my blog more. Sigh. For a peek at some of my ceremonial distractions these past months, however, have a look at my inaugural issue of Waypoints…in which I wax poetic about weddings, poignant about the season of my father’s dying, and prophetic about honoring your own… Continue Reading

Patriot Games

“I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride. I am from the dirt under the back porch. (Black, glistening, it tasted like beets.) I am from the forsythia bush the Dutch elm whose long-gone limbs I remember as if they were my own.”George Ella Lyon, excerpt from “Where I’m From”   Where I’m from, we… Continue Reading

Here Comes the Sun

   “We like the things that summer brings. It brings the sun. It brings the heat. It brings the things we like to eat.”Alice Low, Summer Summer is coming, summer is coming! We feel it in our bones, we see it in the sky and we know it to be so in our restless, vagabond hearts. The sun has been… Continue Reading

Say it RITE…the Ceremonious Way!

NEWSLETTER