How death doulas are like birth doulas

By the time I was six months pregnant, enough people had asked me if I was working with a birth doula. My response was an indignant "Of course not!" I had a lot of opinions that went like this: Doctors know what they're doing. Hundreds of thousands of people give birth every day. I just show up and do the thing. I had read all the books. The nursery is ready. I knew this was coming.

I thought birth doulas were for more spiritual folk, those who felt a sacredness in becoming a mother that I just couldn't identify with (yet). Birth, to me, seemed like a purely medical event. I was 31 and fresh out of graduate school, and I wasn't even sure if I was ready for it all. I was excited to build a family with someone I loved but also very cranky about stroller prices. Which is to say, I did not want to pay more for anything--especially a doula.

But, I didn't know what I didn't know.

And of course, my labor went south, even after an uneventful pregnancy. There were complications that generated panic and disorder. Doctors started doing whatever they were doing, without telling me what was going on. Teams didn't talk to each other. Nobody asked me what I wanted, but even if they had, I likely had never thought about how I'd answer in the first place. I couldn't understand what they were attempting to explain, in the haze of it all. I want to say my son's birth was not what I had pictured, except I hadn't pictured anything.

When baby and I went home, there were more complications I was not ready for because so many people told me "the body knows what to do." My body didn't know, I guess. And I had no idea what was going on, how to help myself, what to look for, and what to ask for. But I had read all the books! (This chain of events eventually leads me into the basement of an Orthodox Jewish breast pump store in the bowels of Brooklyn, but I will spare you all that.)

If I could go back and do it differently, my first order of business would be to hire a doula. After all that stress, I found solace in knowing that if I had another child, I could do it differently.

But with death, you just get the one chance at it. Which means how we die matters--to the dying person and to the people who love them.

I think nothing else so perfectly explains why we need death doulas than this story. But people who have never faced a death before struggle to grasp that concept, the same way I struggled with it while pregnant. Doula work has value you don't realize until you are in the moment of crisis, or until it is simply too late.

It is almost routine for us to go into these experiences thinking we know more than we do, either because we've been told the system works or because we've simply thought about it. I wish both of those things were enough.

Like birth, death has become highly medicalized, but it is a very human and communal event. We know death is coming, yet we are never quite ready. We have wills, maybe we've even long conversations about it, but realize later on we didn't think about that one (very important) thing. We feel like the doctors are in charge, but don't understand that most doctors meet us with little to no training on conversations about death and dying. And their jobs must start and end somewhere.

Deaths get complicated the same way births do. Family dynamics get messy in tense times. We want to prepare but don't always know what that looks like. So, doesn't it make sense to bring on a knowledgeable guide who has been around the block many times? One who can educate you, facilitate solutions, who can help bring calm, who can be your advocate, who act as an extra support so you can focus on being in the moment?

That's what a death doula does.

Check out our reviews on Google, and consider working with us! For more information on what a death doula offers, read What is a death doula--and how can one help in Durham, NC?