The people who hold space deserve a space of their own.

Every day across Canada, a quiet workforce shows up for the hardest moments in other people's lives. The funeral director who takes the 3am call. The palliative care nurse on her fourth night shift. The death doula sitting with a family through the last hours. The grief counsellor who absorbs a week of other people's sorrow and then drives home. The celebrant searching for the exact words a family cannot find themselves.

These professions rarely talk to each other. They train separately, conference separately, and carry the weight separately, even though they stand in the same rooms, serve the same families, and know the same truths about what this work costs. A hospice worker and a funeral director can serve the same family in the same week and never exchange a word.

In Good Company exists because the people who hold space for others deserve to have their own space held.

What this is

A professional network for everyone who touches death, dying, grief, and loss in a working capacity, across twenty corners of the field, from funeral service to perinatal loss support, from estate law to children's grief. It is a library of research and writing organized around the work you actually do. It is a weekly letter worth reading over your morning coffee. And it is an open invitation to build something together with colleagues you did not know you had.

Everything here carries a Canadian perspective. Most of the writing about death care, grief, and end-of-life work comes from the United States, shaped by American systems, American regulation, and American economics. Canada's realities are different, and the people doing this work here deserve writing that knows that.

Who is behind it

In Good Company was started by Phil Smith, a death care celebrant and writer based in southern Ontario. Through his celebrant practice, The Life Story, Phil has spent years alongside the families and the professionals this network serves, and writes weekly about the Canadian death care landscape. In Good Company grew from a simple observation made from inside the work: the practitioners who give the most are the ones with the fewest places to be held themselves.

Where it is going

Right now, In Good Company is forming. The library grows every week. The letter is beginning. Contributors are finding their way in. The full network launches in late 2026, and the people who join now are not early subscribers, they are the founders of whatever this becomes. It will be built by the people in it. That is the point.

However you arrived at this work, and whatever letters do or do not follow your name, you belong here. Come keep company with us.