E's Last Mile

Until now, most of my time as a doula has been spent in the eleventh hour, tending to people who are mostly sleeping. Often offering bedside vigil, typically as respite or as support to a very tired caregiver. I love this work. Creating whatever space they might find most beautiful, reading their favorite stories, playing music, offering loving touch, and helping the family understand the process of dying.

But recently, I had the opportunity to walk alongside someone much earlier in her journey. We'll call her E, and she was an incredible woman who still had weeks of living and a whole lot of love left to give.

We talked about the dying process. We chatted about her disposition choices. She chose alkaline hydrolysis. She called it her water bath. I just loved that. 

We talked about how she wanted to be remembered, and the parts of herself she was most ready to put down. She wasn’t afraid, but so deeply sad to leave her family behind. I cried with her as I held her words and made room for her to speak of the big sorrows, knowing there were no answers or platitudes. Just witnessing.

I wasn’t able to be with her when she reached her own eleventh hour. Shifting schedules meant David and I had to head to California to pick up the last of our belongings and make the long drive back here to our new home in North Carolina.

I danced, and sang, and wept to her favorite song in a hotel room in Flagstaff, Arizona, on the night she died. 

And after five years on the road and searching for a place to settle down, we’re finally rooting completely into the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And I’m fully rooting into this way of service to my friends, neighbors, and greater community.

Although I didn’t get to tend to E in the end, she taught me so much about what being a death doula truly means to me. And that DeeBees pops are a perfectly acceptable addiction. (Like Otter Pops but real fruit.) And that really, really hard lives can also be filled with beauty and meaning, and an endless generosity of spirit.

She lived her life with grace and grit, and it was an honor to walk with her, even if only as far as the last mile.

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I didn’t only learn about being a doula. I was lucky enough to see what community deathcare at its very best can look like. I experienced, in real time, this shared vision where friends, neighbors, and families come together to care for each other at the end of life. We aren’t experts. We don’t have years of special training. We’re just people brave enough to show up for each other.

My time in service at the Center for Conscious Living and Dying has really solidified the idea that we should all be tending to this deathcare ecosystem, this web of people we can lean on when it comes our time to support a family member and, more importantly, when it’s our own time to die.

Because of community deathcare, E's family was able to find some semblance of rest in what otherwise felt chaotic and overwhelming. Rather than being completely run down by the labor of caretaking, they could truly soak up their beloved’s fleeting moments of lucidity, instead of being too exhausted to fully experience them. Because of community deathcare, there was room for joy and awe.

Because of community deathcare, we could follow her lead and rhythm. A single family member didn’t have to walk and walk and walk with her while she did the work of wriggling out of her physical body. We, her extended community, took that tiring and necessary work off their plates so that they could focus on just loving her, and the heart-work of experiencing their grief.

Because of community deathcare, people came and sang her favorite songs, danced to her most beloved music, and truly felt the power of her life. We made space for her to live it until the very end.

This can happen in any community. And when I say community, I don’t mean some abstract idea of like-minded people that you hope to connect with someday. I mean your neighbor. The people you interact with at the grocery store. Your birth siblings and your chosen ones. Each person in the web of your life is a part of your deathcare ecosystem.

If there's someone we trust to sit with us, let’s ask.

If there's music we hope to hear, let's share it now.

Our people can take turns. Our community can carry us.

And so it goes, each of us doing our part to carry one another home.