INELDA facilitates end-of-life doula training for hundreds of people each month who are dedicated to supporting others confronting dying and death. We seek to sustain spaces in our community to evolve our approach for supporting those facing their own mortality. As human beings, we experience loss, go through seasons of grieving, and face our mortality in subtle and monumental ways throughout life, not just at “the end.” Our new three-hour workshop, Living With Our Dying, invites us to recognize and engage with the undeniable fact that our time on this earth is finite. Pointing to the preciousness of life, to the unique opportunity we have being alive, living with our dying nudges us to consider how we may choose to live more intentionally, honoring what matters most to us while we are still here.

As deathcare educators we lean into holding space for grief and end of life. We welcome explorations about mortality and loss, and have seen that talking about death does not actually kill us. In fact, we consistently observe that when we explore what dying may mean for each of us today, and throughout our life—both literally and symbolically—it reflexively reminds us that we are alive now and invites us to consider how we may live more fully while our hearts are still beating and we are still breathing.

We have learned from experience that being mortal invites exploration and that we can expand our awareness of what is possible when we share this exploration in community. Talking about death connects us, both with ourselves and with others; it helps to codify our individual and collective purposes in our living and dying.

Death is often considered a taboo subject, and yet the avoidance of its contemplation and further exploration leaves many people facing loss, grief, and end of life feeling unprepared, disoriented, and unsupported. Considering our mortality allows life’s most essential existential questions to emerge. When we “let the news of our death transform us,” as Stephen Jenkinson invites, we make room for feeling deeply, recognizing attachments, identifying and addressing hopes, wishes, regrets, and so on. Making the time to contemplate the questions and find our answers also clarifies how we respond and choose to engage with the inescapable reality of our impermanence. Intertwined with our relationship to death and dying is sociocultural conditioning and learned experiences that living with our dying exposes. 

Curiously, we have the opportunity to parse out who we have been conditioned to be when we think about and are faced with death. As we take advantage of the opportunity, we can move forward with a more self-determined approach to our dying and grieving. Preparing for and having conversations about loss and death also foment otherwise unexplored knowledge within ourselves. This allows us to meet life’s moments of transition and change with a prior understanding that supports us. 

As we become more intentional in our relationship with our mortality, we are able to make choices that align with our values and preferences and lead us to live more fully, connect more deeply, and feel more ready to meet our losses and our death with greater ease and grace when the time comes. 

Living with our dying implies allowing death to inform our living, recognizing the many invitations it offers us to collaborate with change, learn through our losses, transform through our grieving, and grow and evolve through the phases of our lives. It seats death as the role of teacher, so that we may be guided by our finitude—holding space for reflection and discovery. To welcome our living with our dying grants many benefits.