A death doula is a non-medical person trained to care for someone holistically (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually) at the end-of-life. They recognize death as a natural, accepted, and honoured part of life. Death doulas are also known as end-of-life coaches, transition guides, and end-of-life doulas. Although we’ve been dying for thousands of years, it is only in the last…
Written by Dr. Sarah Kerr, PhD, The Centre for Sacred Deathcare https://sacreddeathcare.com/ When someone dies, the first thing to do is nothing. Don’t run out and call the nurse. Don’t pick up the phone. Take a deep breath and be present to the magnitude of the moment. There’s a grace to being at the bedside of someone you love as…
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of…
Suzanne B. O’Brien RN, creator of Doulagivers, has been at the forefront of the End-of-Life Doula Movement in the United States since it began building momentum nearly a decade ago. She has years of experience working with over one thousand end-of-life patients as a hospice nurse and palliative care professional. Suzanne writes that Death is currently the number one fear…
Although most Canadians say they’d like to die at home, more than half of us die in a hospital. Subsequently, it is nurses, particularly those who work in hospice care, who are with the patient, or the patient and their family, when the death occurs. At our recent meeting, we invited Huguette, a retired hospice nurse, to share with us….
My first experience with the death of a loved one was unnerving. I did not know how to interpret the physical and mental changes I witnessed. I had no capacity to learn about death while it was unfolding before me; it was difficult enough just to be there. In bringing a baby into the world, there are opportunities to take…