I'm 26 years old and a death doula in training

I don't know much about dying, but the plants do, and the universe does.

Photo by DEAD GOOD LEGACIES on Unsplash

I’m 26 years old and a death doula in training. I haven’t shared this with most people for fear of being insensitive, making someone feel uncomfortable, or inciting thoughts of death someone didn’t want to have. It’s interesting, though, because I find the path of a death doula to be a beautiful one. I wouldn’t be embarking on this journey if I didn’t. I think death shrouds are beautiful. I think it’s even more beautiful to have the opportunity to create your own. I think home funerals are beautiful, and they allow air to move through the room and move through grief in a way that holds it for what it is. I think creating a playlist or being read your favorite words at the time of death is beautiful. There are a lot of things about death that aren’t beautiful. They’re ugly, painful, wrenching. But they’re also inevitable, which is why I think we owe it to ourselves to find something beautiful in there, for our own sake and for the sake of those we love who are going to leave a hole in our hearts when they pass, even if only temporarily.

If I’m being honest, I’m tired of skirting around the topic of death as if it isn’t something real and inevitable and unavoidable. I want to be sensitive, of course. I’d never force the conversation on someone who didn’t want to have it. But I want to hold it for what it is. And I do believe that diminishing or avoiding the conversations around death is, in its own way, insensitive to those who have done it and those who will. I don’t want it to feel frightening or scary, even though sometimes it still does. I won’t rub it in your face; you’re welcome to leave the conversation anytime. I’m still learning to talk about it, and I’m still learning how to feel about it.

Death takes our breath away time and time again, even while we’re still alive. It’s certainly okay to let it. Taking breath away is something death is made to do. But equally as important is how we go about breathing in again.

I’m not even sure if this essay is for you or if it is an exercise in my own unpacking of why I’m here in the first place, on Earth and within the path of a death doula. I’ll admit that I’ve re-read and edited this essay over and over again, certainly more than my others, because I want this conversation to make sense, to land in a place that doesn’t ruffle any feathers or send someone crawling to their bed. But it isn’t going to be perfect because my journey is still messy and colorful and scattered. I don’t have all of the questions yet, and I certainly don’t have all of the answers. All I have are my fragments of fears, wishes, curiosities, joys, and deep pains. At the very least, I hope I can present this conversation to you in a way that makes you feel safe and curious. My journey is still in germination, and I hope it lands as such, authentically and willingly.

I’m currently in the middle of a 3-day workshop called Advanced Care and After Death Care Directives with the Center for End of Life Transitions in Asheville. It’s a workshop to help you better understand how to prepare for death - the documents you’ll need, the conversations you’ll have, the questions you may need to ask yourself - either for yourself or to prepare you to assist a loved one. We’ll be completing a document called Five Wishes, which will outline how we want to be cared for if we can no longer express those wishes. Your five wishes are: “the person I want to make care decisions for me when I can’t,” “the kind of medical treatment I want or don’t want,” “how comfortable I want to be,” “how I want people to treat me,” and “what I want my loved ones to know.”

Perhaps even more important than exploring how you want to die is coming to terms with the fact that unexpected circumstances may mean your wishes don’t come true. Perhaps even more important than your wishes for your good life and good death are learning to let go of them because they are as uncertain as the promise of tomorrow.

I don’t have anyone pending to assist. I’m hopefully going to have a long, happy life ahead of me. But I think that before I am given the opportunity to hold this moment for someone, I have to do it for myself. Doing it for myself has gotten easier over time. I’m very open to talking about death now, but I haven’t always been. Death used to paralyze me to the point that I didn’t want to close my eyes and go to sleep because I might not wake up. And I wanted to wake up. I remember crying because I didn’t want Sydney to die. I didn’t want to lose her. I loved her. I do think learning to love myself and learning to love life was the first step in learning to accept my own death and the death of others I love.

I wouldn’t call death an obsession for me, but I find it something I think about often simply because it’s something that most people don’t want to talk about. I want to feel comfortable talking about it and thinking about it because it is such an integral part of life. I am going to die one day, people I love are going to die one day, there is no way around it. I find some solace in knowing that we can’t run away from it. I also find some solace in knowing that everyone and everything before me has died, too. I’m not going to be the first. Death is a process deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe alongside the beating of hearts and the rhythms of breath we hardly notice. Thomas Hübl, in a reflection on the Tao Te Ching, says we are a part of millions of years of living and dying that we can trust.

As someone who has thought about death quite a lot, there are still questions that I have never answered, and I’m not sure how I’m going to. There are some decisions I’ve made. I would like to be buried in a shroud. If I have the opportunity, I’d like to help make it. As of today, I want to be covered in flowers and fronds, like Marigold, Cedar, Violet, Chamomile, whoever is present and willing. I want to be buried in a green cemetery in Asheville or somewhere in the Appalachian mountains of the Carolinas. If I am able, I want to die at home, surrounded by people who know me and love me. I want to hear soft music and maybe someone reading to me all of the beautiful stories the plants have shared with me. I like the idea of my community dancing on my grave after I go under. But I also like the idea of those around me feeling free to do the things that make their own grief feel honored.

But who do I want to make decisions on my behalf when I no longer can? How do I make a first choice? A second choice? Will I want someone to hold my hand or rub my arms? How much will I care about feeling clean or smelling something beautiful? It’s hard for me to imagine sometimes what my wishes might be. While I want to afford myself as much autonomy as possible, I also trust that in death, my body and my mind will know how to adapt to the given circumstances, and whether or not I am listening to music or smelling incense will be inconsequential. At the end of the day, ritual is what you make it. Death is a ritual in itself, and it’s a ritual that the body knows how to perform regardless of the circumstances and the pleasantries.

Regardless, I don’t think obsessing over our impending deaths and the deaths of those around us is doing any favors in life. I think there’s a balance between knowing how to live and knowing how to die. I have a hunch that knowing how to do the first one makes the second one almost intuitive. I’m sure that my ideas about death will change over time, but I want to be as honest as possible with you and with myself about where I’m at and what I believe. For now, these are my thoughts and feelings, as musing and fleeting as they may be.

I have had three significant deaths in my life. I was far away from each one of them. I wasn’t there when they died. I wasn’t a part of planning the rituals and vigils. Grieving wasn’t a very public process in my home. But I want to know how to show up for my community when these times come. Shouldn’t that be the way it is? Wouldn’t life look different if we knew how to care for our loved ones in death and grief?

I haven’t had any near-death experiences that I’m aware of. Except for the first time a plant spoke to me, and I heard it. I was in the middle of falling in love with life, which made thinking about the inevitable fate of life persistent and uncomfortable. I was preparing to spend a few days in the Chihuahuan Desert and Big Bend in West Texas, listening to a recording of Stephen Buhner talking about knowing through feeling and experience and life. I was pacing around my little studio apartment in Austin, Texas when a thought popped into my head.

Do you want to experience death?

This thought had a different quality to it, like it came from somewhere else. I said yes, and I saw myself sitting with an Agave in the sand. We were meditating. And I was waiting for something to happen. For something to feel different. But it didn’t. Life felt the same. That hum was still there. That pulse was still there.

I asked the Agave, “What am I waiting for?” The Agave said, Death isn’t extraordinary; we do it all the time.

In my master’s dissertation titled For the Love of Plants: An Inquiry into Science, Subjectivity, and a Decoupling of Human and Being, I wrote,

Everything that I know about death has come from someone else. I have not died myself, although there are parts of me that know death. Pieces of myself die every day. Philosopher Andreas Weber reminds us that every time we breathe out, we breathe out carbon, bits of ourselves. And every time we breathe in, we breathe in bits of others that have been exhaled. Living is a practice of reciprocity. Every experience I have had with death is accompanied by life, and so it is. One does not exist without the other.

I’ve had people in my life die. Family, pets, relationships, dreams, moments. But they’ve all stayed with me. We impress ourselves upon that which is around us in such a way that makes us unerasable.

I’ve been told that dying should feel as effortless as walking into another room. I don’t know what that journey is going to be like. But I want it to be beautiful. I want death to be beautiful. And I have the opportunity to help make those moments beautiful, as painful as they may be. I want us to feel privileged and grateful for having the opportunity to stand by a loved one while they embarks on this new journey. I want us to feel comfortable holding their hand until we can only hold our own and those of the people who stayed behind in this place a little longer.

There are so many moments to cherish. Andreas Weber says, “Aliveness must be able to fail if it is to be truly alive.” I’m not as scared of death anymore. If I am of the Earth and the Soil, then returning to it should be a homecoming. A bittersweet one, no less. I’m not ready to go yet, but I’ve come to understand that dying is something I was born to do.

There are people in my life who are worried that being a death doula would change me for the worse. It would be too much to bear, too stressful, and too emotionally charged. They worry that people who are around death regularly, like EMTs and firefighters, become numb and different. I’m not a death doula yet, but I do believe that being unaffected is not what makes you the right person for the job. It is supposed to affect us, but it’s about how it affects us and how we carry it all.

The difference between death doulas and EMTs and firefighters is that we are working with death, not against it. When someone dies, it isn’t a failure. It’s what was always supposed to happen. When you’re there for someone's death, not fighting it, I can imagine the moment; when it finally comes, it hits you differently. I don’t want to speak for the people there who are losing a loved one. I can’t tell you how that will hit you or how it will feel; that’s not up to me to decide. But I imagine that death can hit you in different ways. Sometimes, it comes quickly and sharp and descends into slow shattering. Other times, it is softer and duller, and it wraps itself around you and holds you in a way that perhaps is easier to clutch onto. I would like to believe that death is compassionate to those it touches, even if it isn’t realized immediately or at all.

The first time I ever heard of death doulas was at an herbal conference in 2021. The first workshop was on the wise woman approach to living and dying. In a passing comment, she shared, “The love language of mushrooms is death.” I’ve learned that plants have this same language. It was the first thing they began teaching me, even though I wasn’t asking for it, and I didn’t feel ready. They said, If you want to understand death, you need to know how to live in this body of yours that spans well beyond your skin. They said, Learn who you are. You are ecosystems; you are multitudes. You are rocks and rivers and Aspens and Marigolds. You are rain and laughter and Owls and mountains.

If you know what life feels like, you’ll never lose your bearings. If you know what the universe feels like, you’ll never lose your bearings.