Today, I was asked what a death doula, more specifically, the meaning of the word doula itself is. I did not have an answer, which is interesting, given that I currently train to become a death doula (yes, I have decided to take another step after first writing about grief work in my professional world a few months ago.)
I surely had a decent idea of the word’s meaning, given that I had first heard about birth doulas a long time ago. Yet, being prompted in this way, I decided to actually look it up and learned—courtesy to Google’s chatbot—of its original meaning: It goes back to the ancient Greek expression for “a woman who serves.”
Being the feminist I am, it made me cringe for a moment, especially since we do have a few men in our program, but I also quickly realized that gender was not the point here, anyway. Key was the word ‘serve.’ It reminded me of Robert Greenleaf who was critical in coining the term servant leadership. Embracing this style, leaders are expected to be servants first: Prioritize meeting the needs of others in an organization, enabling their growth, and helping them perform as well as possible. By that definition, leadership flows from serving, not from exercising power. When I first learned about Greenleaf and this idea during my Ph.D. program in Organizational Psychology at CSPP in San Francisco, I was kind of baffled that the concept could really fly in the corporate world and, truth be told, I barely came across it in my well over 15 years in the field since.

Yet, to me, serving others in their journey of growth and development was more or less present since early on in life. Furthering that by learning how to facilitate peoples’ coming to terms with death and dying is only a continuation of what I have been feeling strongly about for so long. Don’t get me wrong, I was never someone ready to join a monastery or who believes that selflessness is the true goal in life. On the contrary, as human beings, my sense has already been early on that it is the greatest joy—and therefore selfish—to be there for others and to see them grow and flourish. That is, when it is done in the right spirit and with a healthy set of boundaries in place. Not in a co-dependent way, although I did exhibit a fair share of that in the past as well.As a little aside, and coming back to the selfishness of serving, I actually believe that if it were any different, I do not think we would have been able to procreate in the ways we have. There is no harder job in life and a no more rewarding one than being a parent. That comes from someone who was sadly not given the gift of physically birthing her own children. I have the utmost respect for everyone raising children and have luckily been an avid co-parent and diligent observer of family dynamics for my entire life. It is a gift I brought with me into this world, I think, and I have always been fascinated by what it takes to heal old wounds and to integrate the parts of us that are harder to accept, whether it gets tackled in childhood or in adulthood. In a more private context or in a professional one. At the end of the day, it is all about the willingness to heal and integrate and finding the people who can help facilitate it, in whatever form or fashion.

Therefore, extending what I might bring to the table—my personal story, my love for people, my educational background in psychology, my professional experience in leadership development, mediation, teaching and other areas—into the realm of death and dying is very logical to me, but bewildering to some. To me, it is all connected. Only the orientation, focus, or intensity of the individual reactions and responses tend to vary. Most people can relate to countless smaller losses or “deaths” throughout a lifetime. And then, there is the one big “final” death. I do not feel compelled to decide over the support-worthiness of whatever grief topic is put in front of me. It can be a demotion at work, losing a team that has given a client meaning in their professional life, a difficult corporate merger with lots of changes and losses, a divorce that upends all stability one might have felt for years or even decades, getting married or becoming a parent and seemingly losing one’s independence, the death of a loved one or ultimately facing one’s own death. It is always about coming to terms with one state ending and facing the unknown.

When I looked further into the AI definition of a doula in general, what I just wrote is supported: “Today, a doula is a trained professional who provides continuous practical, emotional, and informational support to a person before, during, and after childbirth, or during another major life transition.”
How often have you found yourself in a major life transition? And who typically helps you? Who is there to witness your pain, your anxiety, your struggles with making peace, letting go and embracing the new?
In the best of cases, we have family members, friends, or bosses who can hold some of that space. All too often, though, it appears that people still find value and identity in soldiering through such phases themselves, holding it together and either pretending it doesn’t challenge them or rationalizing that it is a change for the better and that grief or sadness has no place here (particularly, when it affects life-changing events that tend to be positively connotated such as promotions, weddings, or child births.) Still, the change is significant, and it deserves being honored in all its complexity and all its emotional nuances.

Taking all of it into consideration, I see this additional educational endeavor first and foremost as an extension to my work and not a replacement of my current professional life. Already today, I find that a lot of my work has to do with witnessing, validating, and facilitating my clients’ coming to terms and making peace with what is, what needs to be let go off, what wants to be grieved, wants to be celebrated and what waits to be embraced. And to go from there into conscious and healthy acting. Whatever that entails.