About

We live in an era of escalating upheaval and crisis. To navigate these times, we need to get better at ‘hospicing’ the systems, behaviours and ideas that are no longer working for us. We need to cultivate more meaningful relationships with endings.

Drawing on the garden as a metaphor, the Tending to Endings deck helps us see endings as part of life’s natural cycles. It offers imaginative yet grounded ways into difficult situations and conversations, whether personal, collective, or systemic. And hopefully, it offers us a little agency — a reminder that whatever our circumstances, we can choose how we tend them.

This deck is for anyone who encounters endings and transitions. In particular, it may be useful to people who hold space for others: facilitators, educators, organisers, artists, celebrants, coaches, consultants, community leaders and others who regularly accompany people through change.

You don’t need to be an “endings expert” to use it; you do need enough care and curiosity to host real conversations about loss and change.

About the makers

We are three UK-based collaborators — Ally Kingston, Will Brown, and Heather Knight — with backgrounds spanning design, creative strategy, facilitation, end of life care, and gardening.

We came together in a shared sense that our dominant culture of western modernity lacks competency in facing or processing loss, death and decline.

Drawing on the growing field of collective imagination, we sensed a clear preference to imagine the new into being — but a reluctance to do the counter-work of dreaming the dying “out of being”. This tool aims to provoke us all into occupying that space. As a bias disclaimer, the ecological metaphors in this deck reflect gardening and land stewardship practices in the UK.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support of the Collective Imagination Practice Community, who believed this tool had value for our times when we applied for seed funding in 2024.

To the original members of the Death & the Collective Imagination huddle cohort — Justin Adams, Natalia Eernstman, Devyn Harris, Hilary Jennings, Stella McKenna, Naomi Alexander Naidoo, Diane Ragsdale, Amiera Sawas, Caroline Wilkins and Selam Zeru — thank you for your enthusiasm, questions and guidance as this project took shape.

This work stands in a rich lineage of thinkers and sense‑makers, including Dougald Hine, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jem Bendell, Nate Hagens, Sophie Strand, Kate Raworth, Tyson Yunkaporta, Cassie Robinson, Jeremy Lent, Geoff Mulgan, Laura Storm, Martin Shaw, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Michael Pollan, and Sue Stuart‑Smith, and many others whom we don't have space to acknowledge here.

Their writing and practice have helped us imagine endings as part of living systems rather than only as failure or collapse.We are also grateful to communities working at the edges of endings — Camille Acey and the Hospicing & Composting Community, Joe Macleod and Endineering, and Louise Armstrong, Iona Lawrence and the Decelerator — for giving us platforms to share our thinking with like-minded folks.

Thank you to all those who have trusted us with their stories of loss, and to the early testers who were willing to experiment with the cards in their groups and organisations. And to the 500+ people around the world who took a chance on the prototype deck, and offered such generous encouragement and feedback.

Finally, to our own loved ones, who made this work possible around day jobs, caring responsibilities and our own endings — thank you for the patience, honesty and shelter you offer.