Reverie is a death doula and threshold practice, founded to reduce suffering around death and to use mortality to deepen our relationship with life.
We offer emotional, spiritual and practical support through three pillars: planning and support around a dying process, living with mortality, and grief and loss.
Services are in English, in person on Madeira or remotely worldwide, including the UK. We work closely with Madeira's international community, who face an unfamiliar system when it comes to death, dying and loss here.
We hold this heavy subject with the lightest of touches, and do not advocate a specific doctrine. We are open to all religious views and philosophies.
As Reverie grows, we intend to establish the Reverie Foundation, a charitable arm providing low- and no-cost end-of-life support.
Leila Simpson has spent her career driving change at the level of society, community and the individual. Her work has influenced policy in multiple countries, and she is a committed advocate for the vulnerable. After running her own organisational change consultancy recently, she now feels called to work in the deepest liminal space of all, between life and death, and is fascinated by the meeting point of science and spirituality.
Before founding Reverie, Leila spent ten years leading patient advocacy work, organising patients to address systemic barriers in accessing appropriate treatment. In 2025 an industry association recognised her with an Unsung Hero Award. That experience of standing alongside vulnerable people as they navigate complex medical, legal and political systems is central to how she now supports people through the practical and emotional maze of dying. Her training includes a Foundation Diploma from Living Well Dying Well, a UK association for death doulas.
Drawn to Madeira, Leila founded the island's first Death Café in Funchal in August 2026. She believes Madeira has an extraordinary heritage as multiple ancient cultures' heaven of the blessed, and shares the island's hidden mythological past through her Madeira Mysteries walking tours.
Kathy VandeLaare has come to help birth Reverie as Strategic Partner after meeting with Leila at Death Café Madeira. She strongly feels it is her life purpose and calling to help Madeirans and expats towards Good Deaths.
Kathy brings a thorough understanding of navigating the seemingly impossible, drawing from vast personal experience with death and near-death encounters. She has mourned her adult son, her father when she was 19, both her best friends, and her mother. After five weeks of marriage, Kathy’s soul partner Jim suffered the first of two Near-Death Experiences. Through this long, dark night of the soul, and deep processing of the subsequent fear surrounding death, Kathy has experienced the opening of her third eye, witnessed awe-inspiring signs from departed beloveds, and restored her inner peace to find true healing.
Professionally, Kathy spent 33 years creating beautiful, emotion-provoking event spaces and has a passion for food, travel, spiritual growth, stirring music and theatre. She lends her expertise to Reverie to create beauty, connection and honoring of the death and grief process.
Australian-born Romeow is the true master of zen. He is an experienced therapy cat and used to regularly visit care homes in the UK. He only lost his zen there once when he mistook a resident's porcelain cat figurine for an actual cat...! Leila can bring him along on visits in Madeira upon request.
Are you curious to find out more? Do you want to collaborate with Reverie? We are listening.
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