Doula (/ˈduːlə/) means companion, supporter, advocate, assistant. A Death Doula is a companion, supporter, advocate, assistant to a dying person and her or his loved ones.
Whether at a hospital or at home, why do people not consider a Death Doula’s presence at the bedside of a dying person important or necessary?
Our culture has been conditioned to assume illness and death are a matter of hospitals, doctors, and medications. We think of death as a purely physical issue to be dealt with and disposed of before anyone has a chance to realize what has happened in all its dimensions.
Even when some people have a sense of wanting to have rights at the end of life, of wanting to be prepared for a good death, the most accessible reference is that of completing advance directives and doing what they can to ensure their right to death with dignity.
Have you ever considered that this is like “sending a postcard from a place you have never visited” (Bodhi Be, Personal Communication, April 2019)? We have not been there; we have no true notion of what we will think then, how we will feel, what we will need or what we will want, or whether we will even have the opportunity to consider these things.
We can plan all we want, and none of this is truly insurable, as we cannot predict how or when illness or dying will strike, and we cannot predict what encountering illness or dying will be like or what it will awaken in us.
People don’t consider emotional, psychological, spiritual guidance when they think about preparing for a good death. Most people are concerned with not feeling pain, with not wanting to be a burden to others, with not being kept alive if they lose cognitive capacities or become brain dead or cannot use the bathroom unassisted.
The current culture does not register this very important and neglected human need for emotional, psychological, spiritual accompaniment in the face of death. There is currently very little room for the very important work a Death Doula can do for an ill or dying person and their loved ones.
The current culture does not permit our acting on this very important and neglected human impulse to offer physical, emotional, and spiritual accompaniment to others in the face of death. There is currently very little room for the very important work family members, close friends, and the community can do for an ill or dying person and their loved ones.
Thanks to the work of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, we, over the last 50 years, have begun to reconsider our relationship to death, dying, and grief, and we have developed and built Hospice teams and centers as an adaptation to the lack of humanity in end of life care and the way the death industry and our health care systems deal with death and dying.
While establishing Hospice centers and service teams has resulted in some success and much needed quality and dignity at the end of life, this is a palliative solution to a more profound issue, which is that death has been removed from family and community, and our society has succumbed to collective death phobia.
In order to assure that future generations will have a healthy relationship with life and death, that they will move from death phobia to the more natural honoring of the life-death-life cycle, we must empower the people.
Let us empower the marginalized communities and give voice to their ancestral traditions around loss, grief, dying, and death, and complement their practices with education and training so that accompanying the ill and the dying returns as a natural and expected aspect of everyone’s life, so that our elders reclaim their rightful place as carriers of wisdom and experience for our communities.
Let us bring back humanity to end of life care and how we deal with death and dying, bringing dying and death back to the family and the community, empowering loved ones and our communities to retake the way we respect our grief-stricken and our dying, and the way we honor our dead.
Let us bring back nature to our dying and death, to give back to the earth with this most natural of processes that is the life-death-life cycle, in which death feeds and nurtures life.
Let us bring back into full view and full access the purpose of loss and death as it gives more life, exposing the initiation that is every loss into a life of purpose and service.
Let us empower those who have courageously suffered, endured and survived any trauma or loss, to guide them in discovering, owning, and applying the gifts our wounding honors us with, and educate and train them to support others who are going through, have gone through, or could go through similar trauma or loss.
Let us spread the word and the work via all people who become involved with this work, such that the network evolving our loss, grief, death, and end-of-life culture strengthens and grows to ensure a future where every household understands and appreciate accompanying and caring for our elders, our infirm, and our dying as a natural, expected, beautiful and blessed part of life.
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