Rebecca Lyons, known to many as Bec, is a funeral director, End of Life Doula, educator, author and long-time advocate for more personal, family-led approaches to death care.
Bec hails from the Blue Mountains in NSW but made Tasmania her home in 2006. Over her career she has worked in various industries including finance, real estate and the law, but in 2011 she found her path into the funeral industry and stayed there until mid-2017.
During that time she worked across the many roles offered in the contemporary funeral industry; including pre planning, administration, mortuary, funeral arranging and directing. Retraining as an End of Life Doula and becoming an independent Funeral Director, she has worked in home based death care and family led funerals ever since.
Bec spent years actively working to educate the community through You n’ Taboo, which is the education and advocacy service she co-founded with Edwin in 2016.
In 2018 they began Solace End of Life Services, a local Tasmanian funeral home. Later that year, Bec was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to undertake international research and report on ‘the human relationship to death and ceremony through alternate technologies and approaches’. A link to her Churchill report can be found by clicking here.
It was the findings from her Churchill research that led her to gather people to form the Australian Home Funeral Alliance, a charity that was co-founded in 2020 by some brilliant people eager for change.
Bec’s Churchill research finally culminated in her book, A Heartfelt Undertaking, and then in 2022 she was selected to give a TEDx Talk on home funerals.
Bec has been the President of the Natural Death Advocacy Network since 2020.
In her spare time, she enjoys reading, singing, a good massage, writing, photography, attending the theatre and travelling but what makes her most content is time with her family and chosen communities.
She loves being out in the community raising awareness, promoting honest conversations and advocating for positive change.
The subjects of death and dying, natural burial and the DIY approach to death care are her passion and she loves being out in the community raising awareness and promoting good honest conversations, she is a dedicated advocate for positive change.