Meet Michelle Sponseller: A Michigan Funeral Celebrant on Twenty Years of Stories, Service, and Showing Up

The best compliment I get isn't about the words I chose. It's when someone walks up to me after a service, eyes still wet, and says, “That was exactly her.” Or, “You never even met him, and somehow you got him right.” Once a man shook my hand at the door and said, “Now that's what a funeral should be like.” I've thought about that one ever since.

That's the whole job, really. Getting a person right, out loud, in front of the people who loved them most.

I'm Michelle Sponseller, a Certified Master Celebrant and Certified Funeral Celebrant in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, serving families across Michigan. If you've found this page, you might be trying to figure out who I am before you trust me with something that matters. That's fair. So let me tell you how I got here, and what you can count on if we work together.

Twenty Plus Years of Showing Up

Before I ever stood at the front of a chapel, I spent more than 20 years in local government. It was, and remains, serious work for serious people. Events that had to go off without a hitch, infrastructure projects that touched thousands of lives, economic development decisions that shaped a community for years. The details mattered, and getting them right was the entire job.

People trusted me with confidential information, and I learned to hold it carefully. I learned to listen for what someone actually means, to keep my word, and to stay steady when the room isn't, because someone there needs at least one calm person to look at.

None of it felt like preparation at the time. Looking back, all of it was. I retired from that work in 2024.

The Funeral Home, and the Goodbyes That Could Have Been for Anyone

After I retired, I went to work at a local funeral home, and that's where everything shifted. It was a great experience, and I'm grateful for every bit of it. I heard a lot of services over time. Some were beautiful. But too many felt like they could have been read aloud at any funeral, for any person, with only the name swapped out.

I lost count of how many times I heard an officiant open with some version of “I didn't know Mary, but...” and then read a few facts off a page. The dates were right. The person was missing.

I noticed something else, too. More and more of the families I met didn't belong to a church. They weren't anti-faith. They just didn't have a congregation, or a pastor who'd known their loved one. The religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called the “nones,” are one of the fastest-growing groups in the country, and around here they were being handed a service built for someone else's beliefs.

And there was one more gap I couldn't stop thinking about, and this one's about money. More families are choosing direct cremation because it's what they can afford, and there's no shame in that at all. But then the urn sits on a shelf in the closet, a year slips by, and they realize they never gathered to say goodbye. So what happens when Uncle Bob is on the shelf and you still want to hold a service?

These gaps are what pulled me in. That and a stubborn sense that people deserve a goodbye that's actually about them, whatever they believe and whatever they can spend.

What a Celebrant Actually Does, and Why I Trained for It

Caring wasn't enough on its own, so I trained for this. I earned my certifications as a Certified Master Celebrant with the Celebrant Academy and a Certified Funeral Celebrant with Insight Institute, because families deserve someone who's studied the craft, not someone winging it with good intentions. For the full picture of the role, I wrote a plain-language guide to what an end-of-life celebrant is.

The short version is this. A celebrant builds a ceremony around the person who died, not around a template. The service can be deeply spiritual, fully secular, or an honest blend of the two. Maybe it includes cultural or family traditions. It can hold scripture, or a favorite song, a back-road drive, a recipe, a running joke, the things that actually made up a life.

And here's something a lot of families don't realize. A celebration of life doesn't have to happen right away, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. If your loved one was cremated months ago, we can still gather. A backyard, a community room, a favorite park by the water. So if Uncle Bob is still on that shelf, it's not too late. Direct cremation doesn't mean you've lost your chance to honor someone well.

I meet with the family, listen for the specifics, and write a service that sounds like the person we're honoring. You'll see a draft beforehand, and we'll shape it together until it feels right. I wrote more about why this matters in Bad Goodbyes, if you want to know what first lit the fire under all of this.

What Guides Every Ceremony I Lead

After many services, a few principles have settled in and stayed.

• Every life is worth honoring fully. The quiet ones, the complicated ones, the ones the world rushed past. Especially those.

• The specific beats the general, every time. “She loved her family” tells you nothing. The way she answered the phone, the chair nobody else was allowed to sit in, the dish she always brought, that's where a person actually lives.

• No upselling, no surprises, no sermon your loved one would have hated. My job is to serve your family, full stop.

• The story I'm handed is sacred. When a family trusts me with their memories, I treat that trust as the most serious part of the work, because it is.

A good celebrant mostly disappears into the service. If you leave thinking about how well you knew the person we honored, and barely remember me, I've done my job.

Teaching the Next Generation of Celebrants

These days I also teach. As the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy, I train people who feel the same pull I once felt. It's some of the most hopeful work I do, because every celebrant I help train means more families, down the road, getting the goodbye they deserve.

If reading this stirred something in you, if you've quietly wondered whether this might be your work too, I wrote a whole post about that feeling in The Quiet Pull Toward Ceremony Work. It's worth paying attention to a pull like that.

If You're a Family, or a Funeral Director

If you've lost someone, or you're planning ahead, I'd be honored to hear about the person you want to honor. There's no pressure and no cost to a first conversation. If you'd like to understand the process first, here's how to hire a funeral celebrant in Michigan.

And if you're a funeral director in Central Michigan looking for a celebrant to add to your referral list, I'd welcome that conversation too. I work with funeral homes regularly, I understand your timelines, and I make your families' experience better without making your day harder.

Let's Talk

Whatever brought you here, a loss, a plan, or plain curiosity, I'm glad you came. When you're ready, I'm easy to reach, and I answer every message personally, usually within a day.

Schedule a conversation: celebrantmichelle.com/contact →

Michelle Sponseller is a Certified Master Celebrant and Certified Funeral Celebrant based in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, serving families and funeral homes across Central Michigan. She specializes in personalized end-of-life ceremonies, religious, secular, and everything in between, and also officiates weddings and other life-milestone services. She serves as the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy.