Dead Good Legacies

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Dead Good Legacies

Back our first picture book *The Midnight Moth* on Kickstarter. We need to raise £5k in 30 days. alternative funerals, eco-funerals, DIY acts of remembrance).

It's all or nothing: if we don't hit target, we don't get the funding! Thanks for your support, loads of great rewards on offer, including the book! ❤️ Dead Good was co-founded by sisters Katy Vigurs and Lindsey Vigurs in 2018. Dead Good provides a range of creative and imaginative ‘death positive’ services. ‘Death positive’ means talking openly and compassionately about life, death, dying, grief,

and remembrance rituals. Dead Good's services include advance funeral planning, 'Get Mortal' parties, living funerals, memorial events, personal legacy projects, and wider death education (e.g. Our aim is to support you to participate creatively, emotionally and physically in creating meaningful legacies, rituals and farewells. We will help you to work out how you want to be remembered and what personal legacies you want to leave behind. We work with the living, the dying and the dead; with individuals, families, groups of friends, and organisations. Dead Good is based in Sunderland (UK) and covers the North East England region for face-to-face work. We offer most of our services online too.

02/09/2026

KV has been awarded $500 by Drop Dead Generous to take a ridiculously beautiful and colourful cardboard coffin on an adventure in the North East of England.

She’ll be taking the cardboard coffin to places you wouldn't necessarily expect to encounter a coffin. She's hoping to take it on buses and the Metro, across the River Tyne on the Shields Foot Ferry. As well as to the beach, into parks and other public spaces around Sunderland and the wider North East.

People rarely get the chance to be curious about coffins. This will open up opportunities for impromptu community conversations.

We're currently in the planning and preparation phase. There's lots to consider as we want the adventure to warmly invite conversation rather than be experienced as a shock-factor stunt. It's a fine line to navigate.

We'll share more details soon.

Thank you to Drop Dead Generous for funding this unusual little adventure.

Love you bye

30/08/2026

Three years ago, we started inviting people to make their own headstones from hardboard and collage. We thought of them as a kind of modern memento mori. A playful, crafty way of bringing our own mortality into view while we're still alive. We still believe in that. But increasingly, it doesn't feel like enough. It feels disconnected from the wider losses in the world.

How can we practise being with mortality now, without also acknowledging the enormous losses happening beyond our individual human bodies?

Floods. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Habitats disappearing. Species vanishing. Communities losing homes, livelihoods, landscapes and lives.

Planet grief is real.

And there is something important we don't want to blur here. Death is part of life, yes, but ecological collapse on this scale isn't just part of life. Some endings belong to life. Some endings are being made. They have histories. Causes. Politics. Economics. People who profit. People who hold power. And people who contribute least to climate collapse while living with some of the greatest consequences.

So now our headstone markers ask: What are we losing?
A species. A river. A tree. A landscape. A familiar season. Clean air. A home. A future you thought somebody else would inherit.

And then something else.
Because we don't want to make mini memorials to ecological catastrophe and leave it there.

What if the front of the headstone said:
HERE LIES…
And the back asked:
AND SO WE WILL…
A demand. A refusal. An act of protest. Something we will change and carry together.

Memorial becoming manifesto.

Perhaps this is where our modern memento mori practice is heading.

Away from only contemplating our individual deaths and towards something more collective, ecological and political.

We start this practice with a group of young people Just Let Your Soul Grow, Community Garden next week.

Love you bye

26/08/2026

We love festivals where the person you watched on stage in the afternoon might be sitting next to you eating breakfast the following morning.

Small festivals. Niche festivals. Festivals where nobody gets whisked away to a VIP bit afterwards. Everyone together.

Because over a weekend, something starts to happen.

You keep bumping into the same people. Conversations get picked up again. Something you heard in a session turns up over dinner. Somebody shares a story that changes how you think about it.

An idea rarely leaves a festival as it arrived.

We’re interested in these temporary communities. In what happens when the usual divisions between performer and audience, expert and participant, start to become permeable.

This is one of the reasons we’re excited about The Sondering.

We’ll be joining a panel to discuss rewilding deathcare, hosting a ritual with The Midnight Moth, and offering a self-guided mortality wander for people to take out into the landscape.

And then we’ll be around. Joining in. Taking part in other sessions.

Eating together. Wandering together. Wondering together.

No VIPs. Just humans.

See you in the Lake District in September?

Love you bye.

23/08/2026

One of our favourite things about reading The Midnight Moth with families is finding out what children think is important.

And today at Just So Festival the children in the audience had questions.

Why did Lindsey let the moth fade away?
Why did LV choose a moth?
What exactly are M***a and Luno?
Why have you made a massive moth head out of junk?

We loved these questions because they opened up so much of what sits underneath the book.

The Midnight Moth is a story about loss. We wanted to make something that invites children to wonder what we might do when someone we love is no longer here.

And then, today, we got to take that beyond the page.
We read together. We talked. We made moth puppets. Children asked brilliant questions. And naturally there was an enormous moth head made out of stuff that would otherwise have been thrown away.

This is increasingly what we think death literacy can look like. Creating playful, imaginative opportunities to encounter it. To rehearse being around endings. To discover that we can make, participate, wonder and respond.

And mega kudos to LV for making the moth head, mothlet puppet and the beautiful blue dress she wore.

Thank you, Just So Festival. Thank you to the families who joined us this morning. Thank you to How Brave Is The Wren for selling copies of the book and stickers.

Love you bye.

22/08/2026

There’s something quite surreal about seeing The Midnight Moth as a finished book out in the world doing the ordinary work of being a book on a shelf.

Nestled between books by other illustrators and writers.

Chosen by independent bookseller How Brave Is The Wren

Waiting for a child or grown-up who might know absolutely nothing about LV, DEAD GOOD, or the long back story of how it came to exist.

The cover holds its own among all that colour of the other books.

And knowing its history makes that black rectangle on the shelf feel enormous: a story LV carried for years, something that nearly didn't exist at all, now sitting there waiting to be discovered by people neither of us have ever met.

It feels like a threshold crossed. The Midnight Moth has a life beyond us now.

We are starting to stock the book with independent bookshops and libraries.

We will also be making it available through our website in October.

Here's to the Moth being out and about helping to rewild deathcare in the community with children at the heart of it.

And as ever, biggest thanks to our 152 magnificent backers who helped us make The Midnight Moth from dream to reality.

Love you bye

21/08/2026

Why do we take a picture book about death and ceremony to family festivals?

Because festivals are temporary spaces where ordinary rules loosen a little. People come ready to encounter things they weren't looking for. To play, make, and wonder. To try something new.

And this makes festivals unusually good places to talk about rites of passage.

Families can stumble across The Midnight Moth without having chosen to attend something labelled death, grief or bereavement.

Death gets to sit alongside food, music, nature, performance, storytelling and play.

Children can be infinitely curious. They can invent a ceremony, make something, ask an unexpected question, talk about a dead beetle or someone they miss.

And because festivals are intergenerational, those conversations happen between children and their grown-ups. They can also travel home with them too.

We can play with and rehearse some of the things humans do around death before we actually need them. A little bit of familiarity before farewell.

That's why we love bringing The Midnight Moth to festivals.

And this Sunday morning, we'll be bringing it to the Just So Festival. Come and find us. Meet the Midnight Moth.

Love you bye.

Just So Festival

18/08/2026

On Sunday LV & KV will be together again, this time appearing at the brilliant JUST SO FESTIVAL in Cheshire! I'll be reading our recently published mortality picture book *The Midnight Moth* to a family audience and bringing along my massive paper maché moth head and hand sewn moth cape for folk to try on. I'll stick around to do a book signing and make some mini Moth paper puppets too.

Come and see us! We'll be in the Craftivism area. Sunday 10.45am. See you there?

Love you bye

16/08/2026

We’re big believers in imagination, play and rehearsal.

Rehearsing being around death in our own lives (in playful & imaginative ways) has fundamentally changed our relationship with mortality.

And as the DEAD GOOD SISTERS, we support others to do this too.

A lot of our work happens in physical and virtual spaces with other people. But we know not everyone can get to an event or group activity.

And sometimes you don’t want to sign up to a session. You want something you can explore at home, at your own pace, or bring to a conversation with your people.

We’ve turned parts of our practice into digital resources you can download, print, scribble on and use.

They’re places to start changing your relationship with mortality and death culture.

You’ll find our digital downloads through the link in our bio.

Love you bye

Address

Sunderland

Website

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deadgood/the-midnight-moth-an-illustrated-picture-book-by-dead-good, https://linktr

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