Moving Through Transition
When a death doula becomes involved in the transition process, their job is to step back and look at the whole picture. The medical workers will do their work and the funeral workers will do theirs—the doula’s job is to see what isn’t being handled, and to figure out the best way to fill in the gaps.
Peering Beyond the Veil
Here’s something you might not know: Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who created the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, was a big fan of going to seances. He was not only a follower but a spokesperson for a movement that began in the 1890s called Spiritualism, which reached its height in the late 1910s and […]
The Importance of Showing Up
A couple of weeks ago I was woken up by a call at around 6:30 in the morning. A friend of mine needed to get to the airport and the person that had agreed to take them had canceled at the very last minute. It wasn’t a huge emergency, as emergencies go; everybody got where […]
Funerals Are For the Living AND the Dead
These days, many people are abandoning the word “funeral” and instead use the term “celebration of life.” This could not be more appropriate, because the ultimate purpose of these ceremonies is to gather one last time with others to celebrate someone we all cared about.
The Gift of Trust
A commonly held view among those who work in hospice, or with end of life patients in general, is that most people who need to go on hospice wait too long to do it. Instead of opting for hospice care when they receive their terminal diagnosis, they decide to do one more round of chemo, […]
Death Book Roundup 3
It’s time for another book round up! Who doesn’t love a little summer reading? Previous book recommendations on this blog have focused on non-fiction books and memoirs by death care professionals. This time we want to tell you about some books that really get inside the grief experience in a more personal way. Most of […]
A Time For Anger
People who are hearing about end of life doula work for the first time often ask what a doula actually does, or what sets a doula’s work apart from standard hospice care. It’s a reasonable question. As we know, the answer to that question can be long and complicated. But I think we can all […]
Doulas and Grief Work
Those of us who work in end of life care need to be considerate of the fact that while death is certainly the end for the person who dies, for the people who grieve it is only the beginning. But working in death care does not always mean being an expert in grief, and that’s totally okay.
