This Death Doula helps people prepare for the end of life news

People spend a big amount of time attempting to create their ideal life, but they do not put as much energy into planning for death. This is comprehensible – someone’s death is a terrifying reality, especially when you have got something to live for.

Alua Arthur, creator and death doula, has made it her life to assist people prepare for death. Through his enterprise, Arthur also passes the baton to aspiring death doulas, I’m going with Graceend-of-life training and planning organization.

Who exactly is a death doula?

“A death doula is a person who provides all non-medical and holistic care for a dying person and provides them with support throughout the process,” Arthur explains to ESSENCE. Also generally known as end-of-life doulas, death midwives, and death coaches, they often provide the compassion and empathy needed to get through this emotionally difficult time. This support might also include members of the family after the death of their family members.

However, death doulas are usually not limited to terminally unwell people. Individuals can even help healthy people create a death plan.

In practice, the day-to-day ins and outs of this job include helping people select a health care proxy – the one who makes health care decisions in your behalf when you find yourself unable to work – and electing a health care power of attorney. Other tasks that death doulas undertake include determining your wishes for life support, helping you make decisions about what you need to do along with your body and where sentimental items will go.

“Think about all the things that will make your life work after you die; all this information will die with you,” says Arthur.

Anyone who has drafted a will or estate plan may even see some similarities between the work of a death doula and the work of an estate planner. However, many nuances distinguish the two. First, a death doula brings human compassion to end-of-life planning, whereas estate planning may lack this.

“I actually think estate planning could do a much better job because a lot of times people have these conversations in a lawyer’s office and you just check the box,” Arthur explains. “I actually think we need doulas in estate planning offices and law firms to help people make value-based decisions about how they want to end their lives, because otherwise it would be cold, bland and unsupported.”

Apart from the preparations, there’s also quite a bit of reflection. Having worked with many people planning the end of their lives, Arthur says some of the commonest regrets include not living authentically, not having difficult conversations with people they love first, not spending time the way they desired to, and never taking enough risks.

At many points in his life, Arthur also had to come back to terms along with his own mortality. To help highlight her experience with death through each her work and life experiences, she recently wrote a memoir titled .

The doula’s family not only fled a murderous coup in Ghana in the Nineteen Eighties when she was a toddler, but additionally survived the death of her brother-in-law, who died after a battle with lymphoma.

The memoir helps readers see how desirous about death can improve their approach to life and its quality. Since we’re destined to die, that is the perfect read for anyone able to face this reality.

“I think it’s important that we identify the commonalities because it’s also a very divisive time,” Arthur says of what he hopes people will learn from the memoir. “Yet we are all human and struggle with vulnerability, surrender, grace and acceptance, and living in our truth as well as societal expectations and authenticity. All these things are human.”

If you are afraid to start out the end-of-life planning process, Arthur says you need to consider yourself lucky to even have the opportunity.

“It is a whole privilege to have the option to think about our mortality. Many people die in alternative ways, it’s true [messed] up, straight away. And to have the option to simply think, “Well, what if I died and what would it be like?” “It’s an absolute, absolute, absolute privilege and I want us to hold on to that very much,” he says.

Ignoring your personal mortality won’t make it any less real. Deciding how you need to live your final days and what legacy you need to leave behind can offer you strength. With death doulas like Arthur, it isn’t a process you have got to undergo alone.

“Recognize that this beautiful piece of tissue, muscle and blood, this vessel wherein we live, will come to an end. We can notice this when our hair turns gray and our eyesight isn’t any longer pretty much as good. Because we, too, live in a transitional phase. So stick with the body, catalog your accounts, take into consideration your death, [and] Talking about it.”