Visible Fridays #1 · The Visible Death Worker

Visible Fridays #1

Hi team - ! Every Friday I'll drop a small visibility prompt here into the community. Not a homework assignment. Not a checklist. Just one practical idea, question or nudge to help you show up a little more clearly in the world this week. Some weeks it'll take five minutes. Some weeks it'll make you think for days. Either way - it's here when you're ready. Welcome to Visible Fridays!

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The List That Changed Everything 🐦‍⬛

One of the most-viewed pages on my website is a list.

Not a blog post about grief. Not a ceremony portfolio. Not a sales page.

A list of funeral venues in the Blue Mountains.

I built it over about twelve months - through conversations, site visits, and the slow work of getting to know the spaces in my community where people might want to gather and grieve. I added each venue when I'd either used it myself or felt confident enough to recommend it to a family. Some of them I'd walked through alone on a quiet afternoon. Some I'd stood in while a family said goodbye to someone they loved.

It cost me nothing to create. It took time - but the kind of time that was already part of the work. Getting to know my community. Understanding what was available. Being genuinely curious about the places people might choose for a farewell.

And then something interesting started happening.

Venues started contacting me. Asking to be added to the list.

Which means I now have a living, growing resource that positions me as the person who knows this landscape - literally and figuratively - better than anyone else in my area.

That is visibility. Not a Reel. Not a paid ad. A list that keeps doing its work long after I built it.

Here's why it works for visibility:

It brings people to my website who've never heard of me. They're searching for funeral venues in the Blue Mountains and they find me first - before they've spoken to a funeral director, before they know what they need... I'm already there.
It builds trust before anyone reaches out. A family who reads through twenty-two venues knows, before they contact me, that I am embedded in this community. That I know the people who run these spaces. That I've been in these rooms. That I'm not a stranger to this territory.
It starts referral relationships. Every venue I contacted to ask if they'd like to be included became the beginning of a professional relationship. Most said yes. Many of them now recommend me when a family asks who they should call.
The article translates beautifully into social content - I've made carousel posts featuring & tagging all the venues. I'd previously chopped it up into Part 1 & Part 2 as the list slowly built - and recently posted a full carousel of 17 venues. These posts have accrued about 9k views across Insta & TikTok.
And quietly, without me needing to say it directly, it shows who I am and what I believe about this work. The venues I've chosen are not just functional ceremony spaces. They're a bookshop with a secret garden. A vineyard in a valley. A community hall with a working pipe organ. A heritage house where the owner will put the kettle on. The list is a portrait of how I think about funerals - that they should feel like the person who died, not like a ceremony performed in a room chosen for convenience.

This week's prompt: What is your equivalent?

Every practitioner has a version of this - a resource that only you could compile, because it comes from your specific location, your specific relationships, your specific knowledge of the field.

It might be a venue list like mine. It might be a guide to the grief support services in your area. A plain-language explanation of the legal rights families have in your state or country that most of them don't know about. A list of the questions to ask a funeral director before you sign anything. A map of the palliative care services within an hour of your town.

Whatever it is - it should be something genuinely useful. Something a family would bookmark and send to a friend. Something that says, without you having to say it: this person knows this territory. I can trust them.

Ask yourself this:

What do people keep asking me that I could answer once, beautifully, in a resource that lives on my website forever?

That question is where your list begins.

If you want to see the full example: https://www.amyfirth.com/blue-mountains-funeral-venues

22 stunning locations, built through twelve months of community conversations and relationship building. Read it not just as a resource for Blue Mountains families. Read it as an example of what a genuinely useful, locally specific, values-led piece of content can look like - and what it quietly communicates about the practitioner who made it.

Then go build yours. 🐦‍⬛

Let me know your ideas or questions below... let's flesh it out together.

[Visible Fridays lands in the community every week - one practical nudge toward a practice that's findable, sustainable, and worth finding.]

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