Michelle Sponseller Celebrant / Officiant

06/02/2026

The funeral home needs the obituary by tomorrow, and you're the one staring at a blank screen, trying to sum up a whole person in a few hundred words.

If you've ever been handed that job, you know it's harder than it looks, especially when you're grieving. The facts come easily enough. It's everything that made them who they were that's hard to fit on the page.

My new post is a gentle, practical guide to writing an obituary that actually sounds like the person: where to start, the small details that bring someone back, and how to write honestly about a complicated life.

Read it here: https://www.celebrantmichelle.com/post/need-help-writing-an-obituary-a-celebrant-s-guide-to-honoring-a-life-in-print

And if the words just won't come, you don't have to do it alone. Helping families put a life into words is part of what I do.

What's one small detail about someone you loved that a list of facts would never capture?

05/28/2026

Hiring the right person to lead an end-of-life ceremony is one of the most important decisions a family makes.

And almost no one is taught how to do it.

So I wrote a guide.

What to look for in a celebrant, what questions to ask, what happens on a first call (a Zoom from your kitchen table counts).

Swipe through for the highlights, or read the full post on the blog: https://www.celebrantmichelle.com/post/how-to-hire-a-funeral-celebrant

Save this. Share it. Send it to a friend. This is one of those things people only think about when they need it, and by then they're already in the middle of it.

Funeral directors in Central Michigan, there's a section for you too.

05/27/2026

Hiring the right person to lead an end-of-life ceremony is one of the most important decisions a family makes. And almost no one is taught how to do it.

So I wrote a guide.

My new blog post walks through what to look for in a funeral celebrant, what to ask, and what happens on a first call (a Zoom from your kitchen table counts).

Read it here: https://www.celebrantmichelle.com/post/how-to-hire-a-funeral-celebrant

Funeral directors, there's a section for you too.

05/26/2026

Some seasons in this work hold more weight than others, and these past weeks have been full ones.

I had the deep honor of standing alongside five families as they said goodbye to the people they loved most, three at funeral services, and two at graveside services held in the weeks and months that followed a passing.

🌿 A woman who lived ninety-four years with her hands in the soil, born in Detroit, shaped by her German roots, and who built a garden paradise that now grows in the yards of everyone she loved. [Obituary: https://www.ppvfuneral.com/obituaries/Erika-Offenbacher?obId=47141683]

🦅 A father of seven, grandfather of twelve, who carried the eagle's teaching of love in everything he did. A man whose hug came a beat longer than you expected, whose door stayed open, and whose voice, saying "Hey, Babe" still echoes for those who loved him. [Obituary: https://www.clarkfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Frederick-Red-Bennett?obId=48302583]

🔥 A fiercely loyal woman with a laugh that filled a room and a quiet, steady devotion to caring for her people through their hardest seasons. Her love showed up by showing up, day after day. [Obituary: https://www.clarkfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Gwendolyn-Lee-Bean?obId=46365762]

🛻 A man known across Mid-Michigan as the one who could always find the right part. Forty years behind the counter. A cardinal tattooed on his arm for the wife he loved for forty years. And a daily phone call that always ended the same way: "What's for supper?" [Obituary: https://www.clarkfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Raymond-Frederick-Faber?obId=48341858]

☀️ A gentle soul who never spoke a word but communicated love in every way that mattered, through his eyes, his smile, his laugh, his hugs. A man whose family was built not by choice, and who taught everyone around him how to find joy in the simplest things. [Obituary: https://www.clarkfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Ronald-Wedge-Jr?obId=48188676]

Five lives. Five entirely different stories.

To every family who let me sit with you, listen to your stories, and stand beside you in your most tender moments, thank you. This work is sacred. And it is the honor of my life to do it.

🕊️ Michelle

05/26/2026

I can't wait to start teaching the end-of-life ceremonies course in July!

Not all meaningful work begins with a career plan.

Sometimes it begins with a funeral that didn’t feel personal.
Sometimes it begins with caregiving, loss, hospice work, or being the person everyone turns to when life gets hard.
And sometimes it begins with a quiet feeling that there has to be a more human way to honor a life.

Our next End-of-Life Celebrant Cohort begins July 5.

Over six live online sessions, students learn how to create personalized funerals, memorials, and celebrations of life rooted in story, compassion, and connection.

🕯️ Sundays from 3p–5p EST
🕯️ July 5 – August 9
🕯️ Live online cohort

✨ Learn more: https://www.celebrantacademy.org/end-of-life-celebrations

05/20/2026

You've probably been to one.

The funeral where the officiant kept calling him Robert when everyone in the room had only ever called him Bob. The memorial weeks after the cremation that felt like it had been thrown together that morning. The eulogy that was just a list of dates and job titles.

The strange, hollow feeling on the drive home.

If you've ever left a service feeling like the person you loved wasn't really honored, you're not alone. And you're not wrong. In our work, that has a name. We call it a bad goodbye.

I wrote a new piece on why it happens so often, what's actually missing, and what a meaningful ceremony looks like instead, whether you're planning a funeral, a memorial with cremains, a graveside, or a celebration of life held weeks or months later.

Read it here 👉 https://www.celebrantmichelle.com/post/bad-goodbyes-why-so-many-of-us-leave-funerals-and-memorials-feeling-like-something-was-missing

05/19/2026

"Maybe it started at a funeral. You were sitting in a folding chair, listening to someone you’d never met read your aunt’s biography like a LinkedIn profile, and a small, clear voice in the back of your mind said: I could do this. I’d do it differently."

There’s a difference between being curious about ceremony work… and feeling quietly pulled toward it over and over again.

This new blog by Michelle Sponseller for Celebrant Academy is for the people who can’t quite stop thinking about end of life celebrancy. The ones who have sat through a funeral and thought, “There has to be a more human way to do this.”

It’s honest, thoughtful, and beautifully written. And I think a lot of people in this field, or considering it, are going to see themselves somewhere inside it.

A few lines that stayed with me:

“Curiosity is a guest. It comes, looks around, and leaves. A calling is a tenant. It moves in, sets down its bags, and starts opening the windows.”

And this:
“People don’t stumble onto pages like this by accident.”

If you’ve ever wondered whether this work might be for you, this is worth the read.

Read the full article here:
Ceremony Work: How to Tell If It’s Curiosity or a Calling
https://www.celebrantacademy.org/blog/Ceremony%20Work:%20How%20to%20Tell%20If%20It%E2%80%99s%20Curiosity%20or%20a%20Calling

05/15/2026

People often ask me what a celebrant actually does.

Here's the simple, honest answer: I tell the story of a life.

When a family loses someone, a parent, a spouse, a child, a friend, there's a moment where the practical questions take over. Where will the service be. Who will speak. What do we do about flowers. And underneath all of that, there's a harder question almost nobody says out loud: who is going to stand at the front of the room and make sure this sounds like the person we loved?

That's the work I do.

An end-of-life celebrant is a trained, certified professional who creates and leads personalized funerals, memorials, and celebrations of life. I sit down with families and I listen. To the stories. To the laughter that surprises everyone, including the people telling it. To the contradictions. To the moments your loved one would have wanted remembered, and the moments only the people in that room will ever know.

Then I write the ceremony. Every word, from scratch. No template, no script. Just the truth of who the person was, told well.

Whether your loved one was deeply religious, spiritual-but-not, walked away from a tradition years ago, or never had one at all, a celebrant can build a ceremony that honors them honestly. We work with funeral homes, or directly with families, or both.

If you've ever left a funeral wondering why it didn't feel like the person you came to honor, this is what myself and other EOL celebrants are trying to change.

I wrote a longer piece this morning that walks through everything: what celebrants do, how we differ from clergy and funeral directors, when hiring one makes sense, and what to expect if you reach out.

Link in the comments. 🕊️

05/06/2026

we did the math so you don't have to. 🥰