Rose Sexton

End of Life Doula, Registered Nurse & Author

Rose Sexton has spent more than forty decades as a nurse, drawn almost from the beginning to the edges of life, the places where people are most vulnerable, most themselves, and most in need of someone who will stay in the room.

She is a palliative care nurse and End of Life Doula based in Victoria, Australia, where she has built a practice grounded in the belief that dying is not a medical failure but a human experience that deserves honesty, presence, and care. She works with individuals and families navigating end-of-life, helping them find their way through terrain most of us would rather not look at until we have no choice.

But Rose has never been content to do this work quietly at the bedside and leave it there. She is also a performer, singer, actor, musician, and over the years she has come to understand that the arts and the death space are not separate territories. They speak the same language. She has brought them together deliberately, using theatre, music and humour to get communities talking about mortality before crisis forces the issue. The response, consistently, is that once people are given permission to talk about death, they won't shut up.

She is a mother of three and has lived and travelled widely, experiences that have shaped both her understanding of what matters and her ability to meet people wherever they are.

The Bird and Bee (Balboa Press, October 2026) is her debut book, a dual-voice memoir about her relationship with Bill Walsh, a guitarist, yoga teacher, and philosopher who was also her soulmate. Bill died in June 2019 after a second encounter with melanoma. Using cretive non-fiction, they together tell a story about love, dying, music, and what it means to stay present for another person all the way to the end. The book is not a grief memoir. It is an argument for a different relationship with death, and with life.

Rose is currently developing a body of work that brings these threads together: writing, speaking, performing, and advocating for death literacy in Australian healthcare and in the broader community. Everything, as she puts it, is harnessed.