Death doulas: helping people face up to dying

Rebecca Green operates with households and aids them to accept the thought of death. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The woman sitting opposite me in an Edinburgh cafe is referred to as Rebecca Green. She is in her early 40s, with a soft Birmingham accent and a gentle, smiling encounter. She is a nurse. But she also does one thing else – one thing that has prompted both fascination and animosity in people she has told about it. She is a death doula.

Birth doulas assistance girls and their households by means of the approach of a child currently being born. And death doulas support folks in the course of that other large occasion – the one particular we don’t like to speak about. The idea is hardly new, but in the western planet, death has become a health-related matter, says Hermione Elliott, director of the charity Residing Properly Dying Well. The organisation is pioneering the use of death doulas in the Uk. “In other cultures about the globe, and for thousands of many years, folks have stayed in their homes to die, looked right after by their household and neighborhood local community. We want to see a return to this.”

So how did Green become a death doula? “Men and women sense that I am open,” she says. “When I was 19, a crotchety outdated aunt who was dying asked for me. I could tell she knew she was dying. And she knew that I knew. She just desired to see it in someone else’s eyes – the truth of it. Then she relaxed. She was in a nursing house and no one particular would be open about it. She didn’t like the lying and the pretending – it irritated her.”

“Then, in my 20s, not extended following I qualified as a nurse, I was lodging with a girl. She grew to become ill, and asked me to go to the physician with her. I feel we each knew that some thing was occurring. I was with her when she was given her diagnosis, and lived with her till she passed away. Her two sons, the two buddies of mine, had youthful babies and complete-time jobs, so they could not grow to be dwell-in carers. There was no query that I would not do what I did. Which is how I grew to become a death doula.”

Green went on to function in hospices, but identified it wasn’t for her. “They do a wonderful work, never get me wrong. I just found it all a bit holy: I would drive residence listening to thrash metal as an antidote. Some people want that, to be patted and stroked as they pass away. But other individuals want to stroll into it, to die alive – not die dying, carrying out as they are told.

“I’ve in no way advertised,” Green says. “It’s all just word of mouth. I don’t usually consider payment, both. Men and women want distinct items from me: it could be anything at all from becoming a companion at a bedside, to supplying practical support for the family members. Or aiding conversations with the person’s doctor, which will then aid with making decisions about therapy. Or navigating their way by means of the construction of the NHS. I have even met up with a guy who simply had a dread of death. We talked for a couple of hrs, and that was it, I never saw him once more.”

Even though some death doulas have a spiritual strategy, Green doesn’t. “Some individuals will detest me for this, but so be it. If a individual has not located ‘spirituality’ to be helpful to them just before they became ill, why introduce it when a individual is facing death? I truly feel it’s a way of avoiding the residing man or woman in front of you – and steering clear of yourself. Delivering a ‘solution’ to this ‘problem’ of death, with a story. It’s massive company, this spirituality. It preys on the vulnerable and it’s a crutch which is going to break when you lean on it. You have your existence, your residing moments, and by yourself – appropriate up to the really finish. You are ample – you never want to be spiritual.”

Curiosity in – and demand for – death doulas is on the rise. “It is because most of us would choose to die at property, cared for gently,” says Barbara Chalmers of Ultimate Fling, the UK’s initial “one-end shop for end-of-life preparing”. “The NHS is not the place for that,” Chalmers says. “We’ve lost our local community doula capabilities: the ladies in the past who looked following birthing and dying. So a lot more and far more people – largely girls – are education once more in these capabilities and offering end-of-existence companionship as a service. It would be interesting to work out the cost of this for the NHS, alternatively of them paying to preserve dying men and women in a ward and continuing the notion that death is a healthcare failure rather than the normal conclusion to life.”

I wonder how an individual who operates so closely with death feels about her very own mortality. “Death doesn’t scare me due to the fact I do not know what it is,” Green says. “I suppose I am saying that the unknown does not scare me. I uncover the notion that a single day I won’t be here any a lot more strange and unattainable to envision.

“But it’s also a reality that I haven’t often been here – I only got right here in 1969. Exactly where was I in 1968, or 1945? I have no concept. It can make me smile to believe of this.” So does that imply that she isn’t going to be concerned about death? “No, I do not fear about death. I fear about items like paying out my bills. I want I did not, but I do.”

So what does she say to people who are frightened of death? “I never offer any views or guidance. I never attempt to demonstrate that death isn’t scary. I can’t – I do not know what death is. And I will not soothe or placate folks when they are afraid, but rather stroll immediately into the state of fear with them, as a companion, and without going into a state of dread myself. This can be done as a conversation, as a stroll outdoors collectively, and usually – in fact in most circumstances – what we talk about is not death, but something else.”

Death doulas: helping people face up to dying