Death doulas

[wtg]

Not exactly light reading, but well worth a look.

ANGIE WANTED TO DIE in a cabin at the base of a snow-covered mountain, with warm drinks to go around. Stacey wanted to die in a cool room with a down comforter, battery-operated candles, chapstick on her lips, and absolutely no cellphones. Sarah wanted to die at her fifty-acre ranch in southern Indiana, lying on her patio, as the grandkids caught lightning bugs. Once dead, she wanted her body to be washed, rubbed with frankincense oil, and wrapped in white gauze. I lived in a small house with roommates. An awkward place to die. I opted instead for a destination vigil at my parents’ home in California.

Mine was, like the others’, a hypothetical death story: We’d each been asked to imagine the final days of our own terminal diagnosis. In real life, I was healthy and young. If I were to die, it would likely be sudden. I’d be killed in a car crash, or fall down a staircase, and I’d have no time to make arrangements. But to complete my beginner training with the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), to be qualified to guide another person through the process of dying, I first had to plan for my own death.

Angie, Stacey, Sarah, and I were sitting on the floor of a wood-paneled, yoga mat–lined conference room as part of a three-day retreat at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, in Rhinebeck, New York. The Omega Institute hosts workshops themed broadly around wellness, and ours, despite its somber content, set an easy, comfy-confessional mood. We were cross-legged, our knees almost touching. The instructors had asked us to use our “deathbed voices,” but Angie was excited and spoke breathlessly. She told us she wanted her loved ones to touch her face after she died, to run their hands through her hair.

There were eighty-four of us would-be death doulas in total—a sold-out course. All of us has paid an $800 fee and received a 119-page manual and twelve hours of pre-training homework. But we’d all come to INELDA for different reasons. Sarah was a retired emergency room nurse whose husband died of stomach cancer shortly after her own ovarian cancer diagnosis, and she was now on a “spiritual quest” to learn about healing. Stacey was a former health care data analyst and long Covid patient from Michigan who was inspired by seeing Alua Arthur, a prominent end-of-life doula, help the actor Chris Hemsworth map out his future death in the documentary TV show Limitless. Angie was a secretary at a Boston hospital who’d witnessed how young suicides haunted ICU nurses. She wanted to avoid the same burden by learning to face death head-on. I came to INELDA because I think about death all the time.

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