Lineage, grief, and the quiet ways care was modeled for me from an early age shaped my path to end of life doula work.
I was born of strong matrilineage, among women who dress their compassion a la tending to: tending to each other, to their herb garden, to their legendary recipes, to their proclivity for fiery discourse. The song of my ancestors planted the seed of my call. When I began the rite of passage into motherhood in 2021, I began to hear soft whispers of this hymn.
After my great grandfather was killed, my grandmother and great grandmother lie in bed gripping each other’s grief.
The funeral had just ended, in their home, just feet from where they mourned. Together, they heard two mysterious knocks on a door and the loud sigh of a man. My great grandmother gently assured my grandmother that there was no cause to worry, that my great grandfather’s spirit was simply leaving their home.
Together, we blessed my grandmother’s body moments after she died peacefully in her bed, in our home. I watched my aunt forcibly cast her entire body on my grandmother’s coffin as the pallbearers carried my grandmother out of the church. My aunt keened with raw instinct, and I, along with the entire mass, beheld the embodiment of a broken heart. I had not seen anything like this at a funeral, and I have not since. The quiet and not so quiet acts of love witnessed in my childhood had me taking notes long before the word “doula” entered my vocabulary.
As a child, I watched my mother “doula” my grandmother in her dying months, weeks, days…bathing, feeding, medicating, and bickering here and there.
End of life work brings me to the most peaceful, loving parts of myself.
It calms that insatiable desire for answers. It connects me back to the wholeness of my being and my lineage. It sits me smack in the center of liminality, and asks me to stay grounded. It reorients my relationship with the earth. End of life work constantly whispers in my ear, “Love is the only way.”
