When and why did you decide to become an end-of-life doula?  

The date is specific: March 30, 2018. That afternoon, I spent a few hours visiting my friend and colleague Gerhard, who was within months of dying at age 39 from an aggressive and rare hereditary gastric cancer that had been caught too late, at stage 4. Fourteen months earlier, I had lost my only sibling—my younger brother, Michael—to a motor vehicle accident, and returned to Phoenix to grieve with my family after nearly two decades in Southern California. A road trip back to the West Coast to celebrate my 40th birthday offered me a blessed opportunity to spend time with G. He and I weren’t particularly close, and at that time he was no longer up to receiving many visitors, yet for reasons he couldn’t quite put a finger on, he didn’t hesitate to accept my offer to drop by. 

The moment I walked into his backyard, something snapped into place for us both. There was a strange ease neither of us could have anticipated, and I stayed three hours—long past the usual limit to his endurance, and much longer than I had planned. Witnessing without judgment or surprise the paradox of his condition—everything still so perfectly him, save for his failing physical body—falling into the familiar pleasure of our friendship rather than fretting over tubes and bags and pumps and medications, finding quick mutual entry into frank conversations about what it would mean for him to die, for my brother to have died…something profound occurred then that was so unusual for us both that we made a point of acknowledging it to one another in the days after. 

I like to think that I found my piece of spiritual land that day, and that the heartbreaking events of the next two years—during which time two immeasurably precious friends also met their peace—tilled and fertilized the soil so that the seed of this work could finally be planted during a session with my therapist in November 2019. I owe my best friend Melissa, who died in May 2020 of liver cancer, the debt of having offered me the intimate access to her inner and outer being in the final months of her life that awoke within me not only my calling, but also the gifts and tools that I have evolved into skills I use every day in this work.

How long have you been doing this type of work?

I completed my first formal end-of-life training with INELDA in February 2020 and began offering my services shortly thereafter both as a hospice volunteer and in private practice. I have since taken several other death doula and death midwifery trainings, seminars, and workshops; presented at the state and community levels about deathwork; been employed by Dignity Memorial as a funeral attendant; become a certified funeral celebrant; and found a genuine home in cofacilitating peer support groups for parents who have lost children. 

What type of environment do you work in?

I shine brightest and feel most myself at bedside, so I prefer in-person visits whenever possible. I serve my community wherever they ask me to meet them, whether that’s their family home, an independent- or assisted-living campus, a hospital, a hospice home/respite care, or a skilled-nursing facility—sometimes following them as they move from one location to another. I also will conduct sessions with a dying person or their loved ones via phone or video chat, email, and text if they are outside of my area or simply prefer it. As a celebrant, I officiate services wherever the decedent’s family or friends wish to hold them: indoors or outdoors, at private facilities, in public spaces, at places of worship, virtually, or in collaboration with a funeral home.

What do you do before you meet with a new client?

From a practical standpoint, I make sure I have all of the documents and tools I’ll need to conduct an initial session, from an intake form to copies of Barbara Karnes’ terrific booklets and a few of my business cards, as well as any personal protective equipment required or requested by the client or the facility. I’ll review any notes from the consultation and relevant research I may have done about a client’s particular condition or circumstances, print a hard copy of the signed contract and other paperwork to leave with the client, confirm the address and the appointment time and date, and make sure I know not only where I’m driving to, but what I’ll encounter in terms of traffic, parking, and access, as well as making sure I can easily locate a unit or building inside a confusing apartment or hospital complex. Promptness is important to me, as a matter of respect for the client, myself, and the work.

From a spiritual and physical standpoint, I have a number of cleansing or refreshing practices I choose from depending on how much time I have, how I’m feeling that day, what’s going on in my life at the time, and what I think I might be encountering in the client’s space. This includes everything from making sure I’m rested, hydrated, well fed, and limber—my daily basics—to performing rituals that allow me to work with the energetic and emotional aspects of myself. Before I step over the threshold of the client’s space, I take a moment to close my eyes, place my hands on my belly and my heart, and breathe deeply. I ask my guides for wisdom, grace, and intuition, and I offer gratitude for the power and potential of the experience that is about to unfold.

Can you share a short anecdote or insight that changed you?

I worked with a dying woman and her family who had asked me to participate not only in vigil as needed, but also in the immediate hours that stretched between her last breath and the arrival of the removal team. I got the call that she had died at about 9:30 p.m. and headed over to take part in the post-demise plan we all had worked on together just a week or so before. This meant that I contacted hospice to report the death, confirmed the details of the transport plan with the clinician when she arrived, and liaised with the direct-cremation staff when the knock finally came after several hours’ wait, shielding the woman’s beloveds (at their request) from the sight of a stranger disconnecting her medical devices, changing her clothing, and placing her beneath a sheet on a stretcher to be wheeled out of the home for disposition. My final service to them was to reset the bedroom: change the sheets, bag up the medications, organize the medical supplies, break down the durable medical equipment and put it into a closet, wipe everything down, light candles and incense on her altar, and take out the trash. Her partner intended to sleep in their bed that night to both honor and mourn her, and this gesture, offered on the spur of the moment, made it possible for him to do that without being surrounded by concrete reminders of her prolonged and relentless illness.

After so many long, grueling days of constant bedside support, everyone was beyond exhaustion, and my presence right after her death allowed the family to simply sit in their loss and their love, with little interruption, at a time when their heartache was most acute and precious. I realized in that moment how many elements of deathwork are not so much taught in a class as they are learned through experience or invented out of necessity, and how monumental a doula’s support can feel to the bereaved when they are deep in the throes of grief, which in many ways mimics or can itself be trauma.

Who has been one of your teachers or mentors?

Those who have allowed me to companion them through death are my foremost and perpetual teachers. I also count among my ongoing mentors the land itself as well as the people who have built their communities here and invited me to be part of them from time to time—fellow practitioners of traditional healing who represent lineages of all kinds, right here in my greater neighborhood. I am also grateful to learn all the time from my deathwork peers near and far, and to tune into my own ancestors and relatives who have shown up for the sick, the injured, and the dying. 

My eternal professional touchstone is INELDA’s own Kris Kington-Barker. She and Henry Fersko-Weiss were my instructors during my initial in-person training, and I have been indebted to Kris since day one for selflessly and continually sharing the ways she moves in this work. She is frank not only about her own successes, but also her uncertainties, failures, and repairs. She is rooted in her values while remaining flexible aboveground to adapt and change as called or needed. She is accessible, committed, dependable, warm, bursting with wisdom, and genuinely concerned about this community from margin to margin—the dying as well as those who companion them. She goes far beyond merely teaching the rote aspects of deathcare, modeling the qualities I find essential in ethical practice delivered with the highest integrity. 

True mentors don’t just advise you when you’re in a pinch; they help hold your candle awhile when the way is dark and your flame is flickering. And they never let you forget your worth—especially when you’re struggling. She is on speed dial for crisis and triumph both. 

What do you wish you had known when you started as a doula?

I wish I had understood—not simply “known,” in the intellectual sense—that not only do I not have to take up with every person who asks for my companionship or collaboration, but that it is in fact unethical for me to do so. Saying yes to all both dilutes our ability to give to each and diminishes by overextension the grounding and strong sense of self that is essential to deathwork. Boundaries begin with developing our powers of discernment, which are rooted in our efforts to tune into our unique selves, and they apply not only to selecting with whom we will work, but how, and how differently, we will work with each individual client or coconspirator. 

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow doulas?

Do not isolate yourself, but instead feel welcomed by this ever-growing and ever-evolving community as you feel out your unique gifts, tools, vision, purpose, and place in the world. Your work need not look like anyone else’s, but expanding your cultural competence about how others approach, frame, and deliver their services positions you to serve your chosen population while helping those outside of it to find the practitioners who can hold them well. Plus, a diverse network is a strong web of support for every thread. Noncompetitiveness is a major tenet of my practice. I trust that those who are meant to work with me will find me, and those who are meant to work with you will find you, which helps me stay energized and grateful.  

What is your dream for your practice or doulas in general?

It is my biggest, boldest, and most fervent dream to open a center for the dying where I can provide holistic care that spans a full complement of culturally resourced, trauma-attuned, environmentally sustainable, ethically driven, respectfully compassionate, community-centered modalities. It would be a truly equitable model in which those with the fewest resources and least access are not denied care or given stripped-down versions of it while those with more privilege receive higher levels of service simply because they can afford it. “How?” is a formidable question, and “When?” a close second, but the more I speak this vision aloud, perhaps the clearer “Who?” will become, thus getting us closer to answering the others.

In nearer terms, it’s to work in the intersection of the two biggest circles of my personal Venn diagram: deathwork and psychedelics. In 2022, after a good year of letting the idea kick around in my system, I applied for SoundMind Institute’s Psychedelic Facilitator Training Program in hopes of expanding the ways I serve the dying and bereaved. In 2023, I graduated both the academic and experiential curriculums, and I now work as one of SoundMind’s teaching assistants. In May 2024 I will complete a core competencies course with End-of-Life Psychedelic Care and then attend Psychedelic Research and Training Institute’s ketamine practicum with a focus on the dying. I hope to soon add psychedelic modalities to my services via the legal pathways that are available now as well as those that are on deck to roll out in the coming months. Natural and synthetic psychedelic molecules have growing clinical and anecdotal evidence of impressive success with lessening end-of-life existential distress and prolonged grief through self-exploration, tapping into one’s inner healer, communing with the mystical and divine, and making meaning of one’s life and place in the universal consciousness and community. I suspect that their effects may mirror what one might confront during the very last moments of life in this body—an idea that fascinates me endlessly. I see many years of tough but gratifying apprenticeship ahead.