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A death doula’s advice on thinking about mortality

A death doula explains her work, the death-positive movement, and more.

Death doulas, also called end-of-life doulas, wear many hats. In helping patients and their families prepare for a peaceful end of life, they can offer solace and companionship, handle logistics, mediate with medical staff, and more.

As my colleague Anna North reported recently, public interest in the job is growing. Celebrities like actor Nicole Kidman and director Chloé Zhao have spoken about training to become death doulas, and the hospital drama The Pitt recently featured a death doula character.

Why famous people want to be death doulas

“The interest from celebrities mirrors interest that we’re seeing from the population as a whole,” North told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “There’s been a rising interest in death doulas in recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic began, when so many people were forced to encounter death at the same time.”

Noel spoke with North and a death doula, Jane K. Callahan, for a recent episode of Today, Explained.

Callahan, who works in Durham, North Carolina, and wrote A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End, shared the experiences that made her want to be a death doula, what the job entails, and how the “death-positive” movement encourages us to acknowledge our inevitable demise and prepare for the best death we can imagine for ourselves.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why do you do this work?

In 2009, I got a call that my mother was in the hospital. She would end up dying two weeks later. I was 27 years old. And that was my first exposure to anything involving death and dying. And during those two weeks, I realized how broken this healthcare system is when it comes to helping people die versus fixing them.

I didn’t understand what was happening to my mother’s body, because I had no knowledge of how the body dies. It was hard to get a direct answer from a doctor. In fact, no one told me until toward the end that she was dying. I was waiting for her to be discharged.

I sat with that for a couple of years, and, eventually, I got pregnant, and I had my son. And when I gave birth to my son, I did not have a birth doula. I didn’t really understand what that was. A lot of things went wrong. So, I started researching birth doulas and realized that would’ve really helped. That’s how I found out that there are death doulas, which are based on the birth doula model. I realized those were all the things that were missing in the last two weeks of my mother’s life. So, I attended a training, and I started volunteering with hospice, and I’ve been doing that for eight years.

Do you think that you are more comfortable with death than most people?

I think I’ve gotten comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is really the main skill of being a doula. We’re not untouched by the work we do. I have moments where losing someone I’ve worked with is very hard, and watching them suffer and die is very hard. But you start to accept the reality of it through learning how to sit with discomfort.

Do you think that being in close proximity to death changes the way you think about being alive?

Absolutely. In Bhutanese culture, they’re encouraged to think about death five times a day. Do I think it’s mentally healthy to just spend your........

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