Resources
From blogs, videos, podcasts, and interviews--find resources that answer your questions about being an end-of-life doula.
PODCAST EPISODES HERE
PODCAST EPISODES HERE
In photo from left to right: Suzanne O'Brien, Deanna Cochran, Edo Banach, Patty Burgess. This has truly been an eventful year! End of Life Doulas have taken a national and international stage with the initiative to unite doulas and standardize practice and goals of care. We are the new kids on the block for end of life support to families and established organizations who serve those with advanced illness and the dying.
We are like a birth doula, but not really; we are doulas for the dying. We accompany others at the end of life, not the beginning.
Let us begin with a little comparison and understanding of the role in relation to birthing. In 2017, in the US, birth doulas have created a special niche for themselves as providers of practical and emotional care for a woman and her family. I work in the field of death and dying every day and help people move through so much pain and grief, and I am still no expert in grief - yours or my own. Grief is love's expression of loss and since love is so hard to describe and share and experience, so grief must be. As an end-of-life doula, we expect a lot of ourselves sometimes. How often do you get to ‘practice’ the art of being with others as they are dying? How often do you get to ‘practice’ the skills that will make you good at this? Do you expect yourself to just be great at going between the two states of 'being' without practice? That is a lot to ask of anyone. A recent article by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, "Transforming End of Life Care through Communication," states something vitally important:
We, end-of-life doulas, have a 'job' to do which is to listen and hear what a person's goals are for themselves now that they are seriously ill.
This is our 3rd article in our 3-part series about the grassroots movement of the end of life doula. We reviewed our numbers from the 30-Day Death Doula Training Primer to see what interested you the most and here's what we saw.
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Are you interested in serving at the end of life in your own unique way?
"It's 100% possible!"
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