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A doula offers non-medical, holistic support in body, mind, emotion, and spirit. A Life Doula performs a specialized service as it involves offering guided assistance to those at the end of their physical journey to manage their deepest needs. Marggie Hatala is a Certified Elder Care and End of Life Doula offering support to clients facing the challenges of chronic illness, aging, and decline and through their final days. In this article, she addresses the value a Doula can bring as funeral homes seek referral partnerships to provide enriched support for their clients. Working as a team, families benefit from receiving funeral service expertise with truly holistic support.

For most of human history … dying—like being born—was generally a family, communal, and religious event, not a medical one. Because many deaths occurred at home, people were likely to care for dying relatives and, thus, to have a fairly personal and direct experience with dying and death. In the United States, death at home in the care of family has been widely superseded by an institutional, professional, and technological process of dying. That process—its positive aspects notwithstanding—has distanced the final stage of life from the rest of living. In other words, we’re in new territory. The first generation of Americans is now living without any knowledge of how to “rebuild the shrine” of death. Americans are isolated from the process of dying. People are planning funerals and navigating close personal losses later in life and without any earlier exposure or “practice” with death. Funeral service is facing a perfect storm of factors that have obliterated our cultural literacy on death.

Stress will never go away, but if you listen to the lesson it is sharing, heed its warning and address whatever it is that the stress is bringing to your attention, you may just find yourself feeling lighter and more energized. Your thoughts may turn from pessimistic to seeing hope within the situation. Perhaps you will make time to play with your dog, take a walk and truly listen to the crunch of the autumn leaves beneath your feet or stop from time to time to just breathe. Knowing what to do when life throws you an unwanted surprise can turn a stressful situation into a moment to practice accessing your inner calm.

One of the biggest problems facing funeral service today is the fact that nobody knows exactly what a funeral director is. Are they akin to waiters, with a responsibility to deliver exactly what a family asks but never dare suggest something healthier? Or are they leaders, duty-bound to guide a family toward the decisions that will serve them best? Do they exist only for the deceased, to quietly handle the body and its disposition? Or is the surviving family’s health and well-being something with which they should concern themselves? Are they counselors with a role of providing compassionate guidance? Or salespeople with numbers to hit? Should they be empathetic to reflect the family’s state of mind? Or stoic, true to the fact that they have done this a thousand times?

The paradigm is changing isn’t it? The shift from old guard to new guard is upon us. It has proved to be uncomfortable on all fronts. Our beloved industry is one of the most stagnant industries in the world and tradition plays a major role. But what does tradition really mean? According to www.urbandictionary.com the definition of Tradition is “Peer pressure from dead people.” How can we bridge the gap between our past and our future? How can we help to see that our traditional beloved dark trade of embalming does not become extinct?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been reflecting on the last six months and wondering “What in the world just happened?”  In what has been a whirlwind like none we’ve ever known, our world has been turned upside down, masks have become the new way to make a fashion statement, and we in deathcare have been thrust (in large part unwillingly) into a world of change that we could have never imagined.  In a profession that has historically been steeped in tradition and oftentimes a “this is the way we’ve always done it” mentality, many of our comfort levels have been pushed to the brink, and quickly.  But, as we in the funeral business have always done, we’ve adapted (whether we like it or not) and ended up better for it.

This pandemic will end, but our work in serving the bereaved will continue. The ways in which we respond to the grief of those who lose a loved one during this time will determine how we are trusted and valued in the future. Learn more from Dr. Sara Murphy, author of “Grieving Alone & Together: Responding to the Loss of Your Loved One during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” a booklet available for free to all funeral professionals.

Funeral Directors, We Need You! I’ve been privileged to work with funeral directors for more than forty years. I know and respect many of you as colleagues, and I count some of you among my closest friends.  Funeral directors are good people. You’re “people people.” You’re good at helping others, and your empathy skills tend to be well above average. As is typical for caregivers, many of you aren’t so good at taking care of yourselves, however. This puts you at risk of burnout and mental and physical health issues during normal times. Now, more than ever, it’s essential for you to prioritize good basic self-care.

As you know, meaningful funerals are “rites of initiation.” They help survivors start the process of taking their grief, the “internal response to loss,” and allowing it to become mourning, the “shared response to loss.” When people cannot participate in ceremony they often feel as if their mourning is “on hold.”