Where the River Meets the Grave: A Doulapalooza Guide Map to New Orleans
Created for Death Care Workers, by Certified Death Doula Jade Adgate
Illustrated guide map of New Orleans created by Certified Death Doula Jade Adgate for Doulapalooza, highlighting cemeteries, shrines, and sacred remembrance sites for deathworkers and visitors.
New Orleans has always been a city that remembers. The dead are never far here; they linger in the wrought iron, the waterlines, the second lines. This October, I returned home to speak at Doulapalooza, sharing a talk called Where the River Meets the Grave: Remembrance, Connection, and Resilience in New Orleans.
That conversation was about how this city keeps the threads between worlds intact; how mourning, music, and memory weave together into a practice of resilience. For those of us called to end-of-life care, New Orleans offers something rare: a culture that treats death not as disappearance, but as relationship.
To accompany that talk, I created a Guide Map to New Orleans for Deathworkers: a walking companion for those who want to see, feel, and learn from this sacred geography for themselves.
A Map for the Living and the Dead
The guide traces my favorite sites of remembrance, from the tombs of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 to the quiet altar of St. Roch, from Congo Square to the oaks of City Park. It’s part pilgrimage, part invitation.
Each stop includes notes on history, ritual, and reflection prompts drawn from my death literacy curriculum. Where can we see resilience in ritual? How do cities remember? What does care look like when it’s built into the bones of a place?
Whether you’re a practicing death doula, a student of the work, or simply someone who’s curious about how communities tend their dead, this guide offers a way to walk through New Orleans with both reverence and awareness.
A City Between Worlds
New Orleans is my lineage. My ancestors arrived here by ship in the 1700s and were buried in this soil long before I understood what it meant to keep vigil. Every time I return, I feel that thin place between past and present, between water and stone.
It’s why this city continues to teach me: about endurance, belonging, and the art of tending what endures.
For me, this guide map isn’t just about places; it’s about perspective. It’s a reminder that remembrance is a kind of activism. The way we honor our dead says something about how we live.
Download the Guide
You can download the full Guide Map to New Orleans for Deathworkers below. Print it, fold it, bring it with you; or use it as a companion to your own contemplative journey through this city or any place that holds your dead.
[Download the Guide Map → www.tinyurl.com/ffneda]
In Closing
May this map help you find what’s sacred in the ordinary,
what’s still alive in what’s gone,
and the way home, again and again, by heart.
Jade Adgate is a Certified Death Doula, writer, and founder of Farewell Fellowship, Farewell Education, and The Farewell Library — an integrated ecosystem for end-of-life care, death literacy, and community learning based in Nashville, Tennessee. Through her bedside work, teaching, and writing, Jade helps others live, grieve, and remember with intention.
