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- [00:07]
A
Recently, I got the chance to chat with my dear friend and world renowned death doula, Aylua Arthur. And I told her about something that happened when my dad first got sick. I was thinking back to when my dad was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and his partner Joanna, who'd heard you speak several times, she sat me down and she asked me if we should bring in a death doula.
- [00:33]
B
Wow.
- [00:33]
A
It was a sunny day right after he got diagnosed. And she said, you know, I've been to your End well conferences. End well is the nonprofit that I founded in 2017, focused on making the end of life a part of life. I've really been doing my own research. You know, is it time to call a death doula? Much like how birth doulas help people prepare for and then experience childbirth, death doulas help people and their families prepare for and experience the end of life. And I just chuckled because it was awkward. And I was also really, like, happy and proud that she, you know, had taken important information from endwell and thought about it. This is actually a moment I've thought about often because Joanna was right. We should have called a death doula. But when she suggested it so soon after my dad's diagnosis, I just thought it was way too early. It was one of those things where I just imagined it would go differently and that we'd have the opportunity down the road to do that. I think the experience would have been so much easier for all of us had we had someone who was there just to, you know, lend a hand when things were getting hectic in the home or give us the ability to sort of pause and say, let's just take a beat here on what's going on. It's stressful and emotional. I think that could have been so grounding for all of us. But in the end, we just ran out of time. I told Alua about all this. So when would have been the right time to make that call?
- [02:26]
B
Now.
- [02:27]
A
Yeah.
- [02:27]
B
For anybody who's starting to think about mortality. In any case, if you're absolutely healthy and you don't know what it is that you're going to be dying of one day, if you start to think about your death, now is a good time to call death doula. Get the conversation going. Start thinking about the things that you need to collect. Start thinking about your body and your mortality and your relationship with aging and your relationship with surrender and vulnerability and your doctors and your care team and who you rely on. Upon. Like, now is the right time for everyone. Yeah, Disease or not. Now is the right time.
- [02:59]
A
I should have just called you.
- [03:01]
B
Yes. I wouldn't be there.
- [03:06]
A
Aua and I met in person for the first time about 10 years ago. I was getting ready to give a keynote at a hospice event in Southern California. And before I went on stage, I saw a woman walking towards me in the hallway and I recognized her immediately. Even though we'd never met in person, it was like seeing this old friend that I was just so excited to get to be with immediately, like, ran and gave you a big hug and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm.
- [03:31]
B
So excited to meet you in the flesh finally. It was pretty great.
- [03:34]
A
Yes. Yes. Since that day, I've crossed paths with Alua many, many times. We've become friends and she's an incredible force working to train more death doulas so that everyone who wants help can find it. She's one of the most vocal and visible people out there talking about the end of life, and I've been lucky enough to welcome her to the endwell stage more than once.
- [04:02]
B
Ah, what a treat. Wow. We're here, y'. All. We're here.
- [04:07]
A
She made a splash on the interview circuit supporting the release of her New York Times best selling book, Briefly Perfectly Human.
- [04:14]
B
Briefly Perfectly Human. What does that mean to you? That means that our lives are really brief in their inception. It's kind of the standard contract of being born and perfect.
- [04:23]
A
Annie Lua is an amazing, inspiring speaker. Here she is at ted.
- [04:29]
B
I want to die at sunset. I want to watch the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple as day dies into night. I want to hear the wind fluttering through the leaves and smell very faintly. Nag champa amber incense, but very faintly because scent can be tough on a dying body. I want to die with socks on my feet.
- [04:51]
A
So in the midst of all of your writing, your speaking, you're traveling, you're teaching, doing all these incredible things. What's your favorite part of it? What do you like to do the most?
- [05:03]
B
I like to come home. I really like coming home. I love being out there and talking to the people and hearing back from people. Either because I got to sign a bunch of books afterward and I heard how death is impacting people in their lives, or I'm on stage and I get the feedback directly from the audience by what has impacted them. I love the energetic loop of being on stage, but all of that. I love it when I get to come back home and I'm sleeping in my bed and I'm pulling my underwear out. Of a drawer that I recognize and I get to be in my routines. I love to balance it because this work isn't all of it. Like, this work just points me back at, well, what is your life? And so being in my life is what's feeling really, really good right now.
- [05:59]
A
On the first season of Before We Go, we focused on my story, my father's cancer, the unexpected diagnosis that put my own health at risk and and the path it set me on to search for meaning, purpose and clarity in the face of it all. But this season we're doing something a little different. We're in conversation with people from all walks of life, exploring how we live alongside mortality. I wanted to start the season with Ailua so that she could share her journey to becoming a death doula, how she walks with dying people and their families, and how doing this work has changed her life for the better.
- [06:39]
B
I'm so grateful to get to be like in the thick of humaning with really rad humans. Like, I work with amazing people. I get to party with incredible deathy people. The community of death folks is like the most interesting, most fun. We're always up to some weird shit. It's just great. It's just, it's fun, it's big, it's huge. I think ultimately this is the way that I'm crafting a life that I will feel comfortable leaving when it's time.
- [07:07]
A
I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter and this is Before We Go today's episode A Lua Arthur Comes Home Fall is in full swing and it's the perfect time to refresh your kitchen with tools that make everyday cooking feel simple and satisfying. One of my favorites is the Quince ceramic nonstick fry pan. It's perfect for pancakes on a crisp morning or easy one pan dinners after a chilly day. And the cleanup. Truly a breeze. By partnering directly with ethical top tier factories and cutting out the middlemen, Quince delivers luxury quality cookware at half the price of similar brands. It's the kind of upgrade that feels smart, durable and effortless. Lately, I've been reaching for my ceramic nonstick fry pan almost every day. Making cozy fall breakfast and weeknight comfort meals has never felt easier. Keep it classic and cozy this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.combeforewego for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com beforewego to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com before we go, I want to rewind a little bit. I know that in 2012 you took a life changing trip to Cuba. Why were you there and how did that trip change your life?
- [08:37]
B
I was in Cuba. Well, it's hard to answer why I was in Cuba, to be honest with you. I just followed an instinct. I'd followed a series of bread crumbs and serendipity that got me there.
- [08:46]
A
A Lua was in her early 30s. She was a lawyer working at the Legal Aid foundation of Los Angeles when she became what she describes as severely clinically depressed.
- [08:57]
B
And during that depression, I took a leave of absence and the breadcrumbs popped up. And I kept following my intuition because I had nothing else to go on at that point in time. I was looking for answers about why I felt so sad and lost and hopeless and couldn't figure out my way in life. And I ended up in Cuba. And, you know, only in retrospect can I see how serendipitous it all was. And that my life took a solid left turn after getting to Cuba. But at the time, I would have told you I was just going to listen to some music and drink some rum, roam around.
- [09:32]
A
So what happened? What happened in Cuba?
- [09:36]
B
Well, I wandered around a lot and I drank some rum, went on long runs. And I met a fellow traveler on the bus, a woman named Jessica who, who was traveling to see the top six places in the world she wanted to see before she died because she had uterine cancer. We rode the bus together for 14 hours. And during those 14 hours, it just kind of opened my eyes to somebody about my age who was grappling with mortality and also how isolated she felt because anytime she'd talk about her ideas about death, people would tell her to focus on hope and healing instead and not to think about her potential death from this disease. And it unsettled me, made me really sad that something that she would eventually face for certain, maybe not as a result of her disease, but just at one point in her life that people didn't make space for. And I realized how little space I'd made for it in my own life.
- [10:28]
A
So Alua returned from Cuba and had the idea that she wanted to make more space for the end of life, both for herself and for others. But finding her path wasn't easy, not at all.
- [10:41]
B
Finding my path was her cure. Sometimes I think I'm still finding it, honestly. After Cuba, I applied to death and spirituality psychology programs. I applied for PhDs.
- [10:54]
A
Alua knew that her new path had something to do with taking care of people in and around the end of life.
- [11:00]
B
I talked to everybody I knew who was involved in end of life care in some capacity. I talked to funeral directors and nurses and EMTs and just anyone to see what they were doing in death care. And nothing really seemed to fit. So during that time, while I was reading everything I could get my hands on and talking to anybody who would talk to me about death, my brother in law, Peter St. John, became ill.
- [11:27]
A
So Alua moved to New York to support Peter, her sister and their daughter. But she never thought that Peter would die. He was too young and he was healthy except for the cancer.
- [11:40]
B
He was sick for about four months before the doctors said that there was nothing more they could do to treat him. They didn't say he was dying, they just said they couldn't treat him anymore.
- [11:49]
A
What does that even mean, we can't treat you anymore? There's always more we can do to care for patients.
- [11:57]
B
It was so clinical. Yeah, it was a bit robotic. It was like, well, here's a body and here's medicine. And we applied medicines to the body and, and the medicine isn't working. And logically, you know that that means that the body will not recover from this illness, which means that he will die. But for somebody who so desperately wanted her brother in law to live, like I couldn't even conceive of him not living much longer. It was just hard to understand. It took a while until it was like, we are at the end of his life. Like it's, it's time. Yeah, it's.
- [12:33]
A
At one point, I think you've said it was clear to you that your brother in law was dying, but no one was talking about it. How did you decide to be the first to say it out loud?
- [12:42]
B
Well, Shoshana, I mean, I think you know me well enough at this point to know that sometimes I have a hard time not saying the thing that's most in my throat or it's sitting on my mind. And you know, a lot of times I wish I did have more of a filter when it comes to things like that, but in this case I didn't. And it seemed to me it was pressing, it was necessary. Peter and I would talk about it, but when anybody else had come in the room, he'd kind of shut up about it. And so I followed his lead. It was confusing, it felt kind of disingenuous, but also understanding that it was such a big conversation, you know, I also didn't want to be the one to say, hey, all, Peter's dying. Can you see that? Because that also seemed like a really terrible position to be in.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah. Why do you think his doctors, his care team, weren't forthcoming about that?
- [13:36]
B
Big sigh and exhale. I wish that the medical care professionals, in Peter's case and I going to speak very generally and broadly across the board, had a lot more education on how to talk to people about death, that they spent more time thinking about their immortality, that folks were taught to sit with the hard questions. I think when a human, let alone a doctor, is constantly faced with death themselves, it makes it easier to then to start talking about it. But we have to first be willing to look at our own. I think in some cases, medical care folks are also tasked with the idea of saving a life. And I'm using air quotes around the idea of saving because I don't even know what that means. Like, we cannot save a life. One will die. We can apply medicine to bodies the best that we can, but at some point it just won't work anymore. And I think it makes some folks feel really powerless when they can't save the life.
- [14:39]
A
In medicine, we're taught to fight, to do everything we can to prolong life. But that often comes with an unspoken message that death is a failure, that if someone dies, we didn't do enough. So it's no surprise that many clinicians struggle to name what's happening, even when it's clear. We avoid the conversation, hoping to protect people from pain. But in doing so, we often rob them and their families of the chance to prepare, to be present, and to say what matters most. And so was Peter ever on hospice that he received? No.
- [15:18]
B
No. He got a referral for hospice on Friday afternoon. And, you know, you call a business on Friday afternoon and it's like, well, call us back on Monday. And that's kind of what we got. He had his death rally on Sunday night. He fell asleep on Sunday and he didn't wake up again.
- [15:36]
A
Hearing stories like this makes me so sad. And there's a million of them. In most cases, we refer to hospice way too late. In the US the median length of stay on hospice is only 18 days. That means most people receive this kind of support for less than three weeks before they die, which is barely enough time to settle in, let alone have meaningful support for what's ahead. And it happens all the time. But when it happened to a Lewa's family, she found herself even more determined to do something about it.
- [16:12]
B
I was at Peter's feet through his dying. And I really wanted somebody to be there, Somebody else who we could ask questions to, somebody who would tell us that we were doing as best as we could. Somebody who could acknowledge that it really sucked. Somebody who had knowledge and resources and who was compassionate. Just somebody who was present. And I didn't find anybody. I couldn't find anybody. Or I'd call one place and they'd say, well, did you try hospice yet? Or maybe you should try the funeral home or. I just kept getting bounced around like I just needed a point person to answer the questions. I was in the midst of grief, you know, even as he was dying and certainly after he died, and grief brain is so foggy, it was hard for me to think through what we needed to do. I just kind of took a moment and I let grief wash over me and do what it will. And what happened was that I got really purposeful and kind of angry that the one thing that I wanted, I couldn't find, you know, I just wanted somebody desperately to be there with us. And so I decided to make it for myself. I started researching again, anything I could, trying to find out what kind of role that was. And when I talked to a therapist of mine about this idea that I had, she'd known somebody who'd been to an intro program for death midwifery.
- [17:31]
A
The course was taught by an organization called Sacred Crossings in Los Angeles. It was three intensive weekends over three months. Ailua attended and she learned a lot about how to offer support to a dying person and their family. But for Alua, it wasn't enough. So she kept researching.
- [17:49]
B
I started looking at all the other areas that still needed some attention, like all the preplanning stuff, all the things that would have been helpful to have when Peter was still alive to try to gather those now. So I built a practice that looks like caring for people right at the end of life, but also supporting people and preparing for it long before they get there, when they're still healthy and willing to do so.
- [18:10]
A
Elua didn't just take the three month course. She did a lot of what you might call extra credit. She took a job volunteering at an estate planning office to learn about wills and trusts. She took another job working at an alternative funeral home. She volunteered at a hospice where she learned about the bureaucracy and regulations of the hospice industry.
- [18:30]
B
It was probably almost about a year and a half before I finally hung out a shingle and said, I'm a death doula. Because up until then I thought, well, I don't know anything about this. There's still so much to learn. But I recognize that some of that also is. Well, first my desire to want to know everything I can, which I never will. I blame my Gemini brain. But some of that also just being a bit of an imposter syndrome. You know, death is so big. It's. It's, aside from a person's birth, the second biggest moment in their lives. And it's impossible not to feel small in its face. And some of that, was that just me feeling small in the face of death and somebody's dying?
- [19:15]
A
A Lua had experienced what it was like to need this kind of support when her brother in law was dying. But when she finally did open her business, she found that finding clients wasn't as easy as she thought it would be.
- [19:27]
B
I made meetings with a bunch of hospices and I made a pretty little deck and I brought a bunch of brochures and I wanted to tell them all about what we did. And I expected them all to say, yes. Amazing. Now how can we work with you? All of them, all 77 of them said, no, thank you, we don't need it, we've got this. And I was crushed. Crushed. But it didn't stop me, obviously. I kept going and made it to a couple that eventually said, yes and opened the door and let me in.
- [19:54]
A
What do you remember about the first time that you met with a dying person as a death doula? Were you nervous? Were you excited? Like, what was it like?
- [20:03]
B
I was very nervous and very excited and I still am nervous and excited anytime somebody invites me and I'm like, woo, wow, this is such a big deal and I'm here. I think it's helpful also to treat each death like the first. I don't ever want to get to a place where I just feel like I know what's going on, because I won't. Not only is this person doing it for the first time in that body, I am also brand new to their dying and I'm a guest. And so I always want to show up in awe and in surrender and in nervous excitement for what it is that I may find.
- [20:41]
A
Some in the medical world see death doulas as outsiders, unregulated, unlicensed and unfamiliar. There's also a deeper tension when you've been trained to treat and to fix. The presence of someone focused on comfort and letting go can feel like giving up. It challenges the very culture of medicine where death is too often seen as the enemy rather than a natural part of life. There's some in the medical system that don't exactly like having death doulas around. How do you advocate for your clients and also for your profession?
- [21:20]
B
I think it's starting to change. I think there's a lot of misconception about what it is that we actually do, which leads to some of the challenges with it. And also I will say that there are folks out there that call themselves death doulas without doing any of the inner work or the, the personal work necessary to prepare them for the role. And that's where we end up getting into trouble. I think advocating for the work feels easy when folks hear about what it is, like actually what it is, and say, I wish that you were there when my father died. I wish that you were there when my brother was ill. I wish that you were there at some point. It's hard to deny the impact and the necessity of it when you're thinking about the humans involved and not just the bottom line. And by that I mean the dollars. You know, when we're thinking about people and supporting people and making sure people have as holistic care through a really difficult, painful, thick time in their lives, why wouldn't we invite everybody into it?
- [22:21]
A
In 2015, Alua founded Going With Grace, a death doula training and end of life planning organization. It seems like the field of death doula work is really growing. I'm seeing more and more people drawn to it. People bring it up all the time to me. Of course, I live in a bubble around this stuff. But from your perspective, is that growth real? Are you noticing a broader awareness or a shift in how people understand or what death doulas do significantly?
- [22:51]
B
And also, I may live in a bubble, but I'll just tell you, in our little bubble at going with graves, we've trained almost 3,000 doulas in 58 countries.
- [23:00]
A
Oh my gosh.
- [23:01]
B
So that's one training organization and there are several. So if we can multiply that and then expand it to all the people that don't seek formal training, or the people that have learned sitting at the feet of grandmothers for decades, or the folks that have served in this capacity for somebody in their life and didn't know what to call it, but have gone on to assume the role time and again, it's definitely growing. In our training courses, we have, we have a lot of medicine folks. There are doctors and their surgeons and their nurses and their EMTs and their folks that are coming through our course.
- [23:34]
A
Really?
- [23:34]
B
Oh yeah, yeah. So many of them. I'm so Happy. So many of them.
- [23:37]
A
Oh, my God. I haven't. I had no idea.
- [23:39]
B
Orthopedic surgeons and like, yeah, like, there are people coming. There are people coming, people coming. And so it's starting to shift. It's slow.
- [23:45]
A
The fact that an orthopedic surgeon came to your course, like, that is mind blowing. Because those guys, they're kind of like, I'm a bone technician. I fix bones. You know what I mean? Like, they very rarely I have found, like, super in touch with anything beyond. Let's just take you to the OR and fix that hip, you know.
- [24:04]
B
Can I tell you a funny story, though?
- [24:06]
A
Yes.
- [24:07]
B
So we have a death meditation in the course, and we journey into, you know, the body eventually coming apart and flesh withering and bones withering, et cetera. And I used to say that the tendons have come apart and the bones of the feet have gone this way of the hands. And so the death meditation's over. And this person walks up to me afterward and said, that was really beautiful. Thank you so much for that experience. But those are ligaments, not tendons. I said, oh, okay, thanks. I took the note.
- [24:43]
A
Since I started end well and met Alua and we became friends and really started thinking about the ways we can best support dying people and their loved ones, I've really found myself fascinated with death doulas and the work that they do. And recently I decided to learn more. So I don't know if I told you this. I recently had the chance to do a death doula training course. Did I tell you this? More about that after the break. You're listening to before we go. We'll be right back. Earlier this year, I got a chance to learn more about death doulas and the work that they do. I got an email publicizing a course that the Iliff School of Theology was putting on to create, like, a certification for death doulas. And there was a practicum portion of it where you obviously have to do work in the community, but the coursework itself was offered online. And so I decided to enroll in it, which I don't know. I sort of didn't know exactly what to expect. And I saw this as like a cool educational experience. I was surprised at how much I learned. I sort of thought I could fall back on my medical knowledge and my experience of taking care of patients in a clinical framework. But that's not what. What death doulas are about. That's not what the training is. So much of it was knowing yourself and, you know, finding the right Self care practices. You have to be okay yourself in those situations. So so much of it was reflecting on your own mortality, being really comfortable with that, recognizing what your emotional or psychological triggers are because you will walk into any number of situations of family members who have challenging dynamics or different values and beliefs than you do or you know, are just outright fighting with each other. And how do you walk beside that and still do your job and show up for the person in the bed and do your best to manage again, not being a therapist, not being a, you know, a medical provider. And how do you offer support when things are tricky? I was surprised by how much of the course was about knowing, getting to know myself and self care, which we talk a lot about, but in really different ways. It made me think differently about what it means to show up for other people and to like be in my own body. Does that surprise you at all?
- [27:54]
B
No. And I'm also so happy to hear that this was your experience.
- [27:58]
A
Yeah.
- [27:58]
B
At Going with Grace, we also teach the work through the lens of the self first. In order to be effective, you have to have spent time on your own because in the absence of that awareness, you'll just bleed into the space between the two and not recognize that it's your stuff that's in the space and not be able to show up for somebody else. And because your stuff is all over the place. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so for like every module of the course, even when we're talking about advanced planning and advanced directives. Well, how does this apply to you? Have you done your own. You know that saying, people can only meet you as deeply as they met themselves?
- [28:34]
A
Yeah.
- [28:35]
B
I actually believe people can only meet you as deeply as you've met yourself. And when we're doing death care, how can I ask anybody to go places that I'm not willing to go? You know, like we must open that portal. I must be willing to go there, otherwise I can't meet you there. And my job is to meet people where they are. So I gotta do my work in tandem with the practical and the knowledge, like, must also deal with my inner work.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah. So there was this moment in the training where we, we were watching a cat video. And not like the funny cat memes, but actually watching a video of a rowdy kitten who's jumping around and scratching. I wanted to share this video because it's a beautiful representation of co regulation. The assignment was to watch how the older cat behaved around the kitten. And by moving slowly and calmly and purring, it allowed the kitten to calm down and mellow out as it continues.
- [29:45]
B
To persist even though the kitten is.
- [29:47]
A
Clearly batting it away now. I don't know anything about cats. I don't, you know, I don't even like cats, honestly. But it was fascinating to see that the just presence and energy of the adult cat was really soothing and calming to the kitten. So the whole idea being that the way that we show up our body language, the way we use our voice, you know, how we're moving in space, connecting with other humans makes a difference. And I first was like, I cannot believe we're watching cat videos right now during this death doula training. But it really stuck with me as this beautiful metaphor for presence. And I wonder, what does presence mean to you in the spaces that you enter? I. I imagine it's a big, A big thing.
- [30:40]
B
It's everything. It's everything. First of all, I love that that's what you all are doing with cats. But it's also so accurate when I'm thinking about showing up into a space for dying. Like, I must enter myself first. Since my job is to meet people where they are. I have to be flexible enough in order to go there. But the only way I can be flexible enough is if I'm grounded in my own body. When I'm in my head, when I'm worried about what they'll think or what I'm going to meet in there, I'm not in my body, you know, I have to, I have to stay grounded. I have to hold my own center. Also, since we find so much emotional. Chaos isn't the right word, but a lot of emotional depth in the spaces in which we walk into. I have to find ways to touch my own center consistently. And the only way I can do that is by staying present, you know, and by staying like, with this moment. I also find presence to be like the core of how we approach our mortality. Anyway. There's no way I can tell what my fears are. Where am I feeling my grief? Where am I feeling my fear? How's it showing up in my body as opposed to the things, things that I think about it or expect it to be, but rather, how does it feel? How does it feel?
- [31:52]
A
Yeah, I've known this about myself, but this class really brought it home for me that I spend so much time up here, up here in my brain, right. Even though I do a lot of movement, I love, like, physical activity. I know a lot about the body and what happens and all those things. But to really like it got me, like Feeling my feelings. Yeah. Which it seems like such a weird thing to say because I'm 45 years old, but, like, it was just this really profound experience and totally not what I was expecting.
- [32:28]
B
Yeah. Yay. Yay.
- [32:31]
A
And, like, most people would hear this and say, like, yeah, duh. But, like, doctors aren't trained in those things. We don't necessarily. Even though this is intuitive to a regular human, like, we don't think about these things in terms of how we interact with patients and families. And I think maybe we should. There's so much of the work that's just learning how to connect with people, especially in a time when you might be meeting them on the worst day of their life. So I just. I found it just totally invaluable. And I want to figure out, how can we bring this type of. Of training not necessarily to become a death doula, but the elements of it that are applicable to clinicians? How do we do more of that? It would make us better doctors, certainly. I think it would improve the patient experience and hopefully allow us to tap back into why we first decided to go to medical school.
- [33:35]
B
I would love it. I would love it because I think the part of the role of the doctor, there's space for it. Like, if people could just even sit with their mortality for a little bit, it would help a lot. Would help a lot. Yeah. It would make space for people to have these really strong reactions when you tell them that the medicine isn't working anymore, to understand how anger shows up in grief, to see how challenging it is to take in that big amount of information at one time and try to process it, try to, like, filter it through emotional body also before it even gets back up to the head. Like, all those things would help doctors a lot. I would love it. Yeah.
- [34:16]
A
Yeah. And just this idea of sitting with suffering and we don't have to talk, we don't have to fix, and it's okay to just sit in the present moment and say, I'm here. And the reality is, you know, your cancer is no longer curable, but we can still take care of you.
- [34:30]
B
That's a beautiful way to put it.
- [34:32]
A
Yeah.
- [34:32]
B
I mean, there is no fixing death. You know, there's no fixing grief. When I'm with dying a lot, it just reminds me of that. Sometimes in order to show up for my fellow human, I just need to show up because I can't actually make it better. I think I might, but my presence is what makes it better. Showing up is what makes it better.
- [35:05]
A
Before we go is a production of Podcast Nation and Me. Our production team includes Karen Given, James Brown, and Madison Britt. Original music by Edward Ayton I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter and if you like what you've heard, I would be so grateful if you tell a friend about us. And please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps other people who need us find us a little easier. And if you'd like to see photos and videos of these conversations and connect with other Before We Go listeners, visit us on Instagram at beforewegopodcast. Next time on the show. In April of 2016, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt walked into his bedroom and discovered that his wife had died in her sleep. But he says this wasn't the worst day of his life. The worst day was the next day when he had to tell their seven year old daughter that her mother had died. My mind just went right to Alice.
- [36:01]
B
I'm like, how do I protect her? What do I do now? How do I make sure that she's okay?
- [36:05]
A
So that's right where my brain went. But experts want us to know most children who experience grief and loss will go on to lead happy, healthy lives. And there are things that we can do to help. And really what we tell parents or caregivers, especially of those who are grieving, is that the most important thing they can do is literally to bear witness to their child's pain. That's next week on Before We Go.