What We Do
SOLADA is connecting compassionate, dedicated, service-oriented individuals who are promoting positive death literacy in word and action. We are co-creating a community around conscious living and dying to increase our capacity to serve and care for one another and our planet.
Our Purpose:
The purpose of SOLADA is to encourage open and honest discussions about the human experience of living and dying, and its relationship to love and grief. Our goal is to help create compassionate, caring communities that support individuals, families, and organizations during the transitions that accompany the dying process.
Presently, there is little to no safety net for individuals and their loved ones going through the dying and grieving process. Hospice provides valuable but limited daily support, and caregivers may have health issues of their own, making it difficult to provide appropriate care. SOLADA sees the necessity for communities, especially in rural areas, to unite in support of individuals, elders, and caregivers as they face health challenges and end-of-life needs.
Often the aging individual's personal opinions are ignored or undervalued, while excessive medicalization is emphasized as if aging, frailty, and death can be overcome. Our society’s tendency to evade death and grief issues can cause harm to individuals and families by failing to address the complex issues about quality of life related to medical issues and end-of-life care.
Aging and death are natural. The fact is, everyone and everything we know and love will die and we don’t know when. By embracing this reality openly and honestly, we hope to foster more enlightened, empowered decisions that honor the individual's vision of a positive death experience. By exploring burial approaches and other disposition options that honor body, mind, spirit and ecological awareness, we are able to understand how bodily remains can be handled in ways that align with our worldly values.
To help people in Southern Oregon experience a more expansive life and minimize suffering, SOLADA is hosting classes, workshops, and ritual events which promote positive death literacy and encourage healthy grieving. We are also creating a directory of individuals, organizations, and resources to serve people who need information or assistance with all phases of the living, dying, grieving and after-death process.
“Our collective inability to grieve properly is the cause of many of the social, cultural, and individual maladies that we are currently experiencing..”
— Martín Prechtel