Gift
ILID · Birthday Death Care
A private grieftending session, gifted to yourself.
Built around your birthday.
See where a meaningful ending is still influencing how you live, and discover ways to tend what changed.
Birthday Death Care is a private session with me, a grieftender, built from ILID, my framework for tending the endings that don't get a funeral, a ritual, or a witness. It's a form of self-care, and it's also a form of communal care, because grief you don't tend to doesn't just sit with you. It moves through the people close to you too.
It's for a birthday that's marking more than another year of age. It's marking who is actually still here after everything this year took, changed, or asked you to let go of.
Grief rarely lives in one box with one name on it. Open it up and there's usually more than one thing stacked inside: not just the role that ended, but the relationship or the version of you that shifted along with it. Everyone around you is still just saying happy birthday, while you're standing in front of a storage unit nobody else can see.
Something in you survived this year, even if it doesn't look like who you expected to be by now. This session is where we find out who that is.
What tends to happen
Your actual life, instead of a script.
I bring years of study and lived experience with grief into this work, but I can't map out ahead of time exactly what will happen in your session. What I can tell you is what tends to happen. This whole offer, including the storage unit, came directly out of a real birthday session with a client. They worked through ILID and reached out afterward about what had surfaced for them. From there, we found our way to someone they needed to actively grieve and eulogize, and that turned out to be exactly the piece they'd been missing.
That kind of specificity only shows up in real time, listening to your actual life instead of a script.
The birthday threshold
Birthdays make grief opportunistic. A card, a call, a photo from last year, and suddenly you're tenderized by something you thought you'd already handled. That just means you're a person with a nervous system and a birthday.
By the end, you're not just more familiar with your grief. You're more familiar with your joy too, because the grief isn't standing in the doorway of it anymore.
You'll leave with real language for what's ending, and start trusting towards whatever this year is actually asking of you. You'll also leave with a practice, one you can use for yourself and for the people around you who are grief struck and don't have a way to talk about it yet. That's the difference between grief-struck and grieftending.
What's included
A two-hour session, held with care.
- 01One private two-hour Birthday Death Care session with me, your grieftender, Akilah S. Richards
- 02A guided ILID session built around whatever you're bringing into the room this year
- 03Real language for what's ending
- 04A short note before we meet, so you're not walking in cold
- 05A standing 30-minute follow-up call, yours to use anytime in the two weeks after, whenever the useful moment shows up
Investment
$1,800
Think of this like buying a really good bike, not a secondhand one off Craigslist, not the cheapest one at a big box store. You already know you're going to ride it regularly, so you invest in quality, and you actually learn how to use it. This is that kind of investment, in yourself.
This is what it costs to stop dragging the storage unit around for another year.
Reserve my sessionBook your Birthday Death Care session.
If you're ready for something deeper than a party this year, you can reserve your session here.
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After you book, I'll send you a note with next steps for scheduling and getting ready for our time together.