Most people don’t want to talk about death, or listen to others talk about it. Yet it was precisely such a discussion, hot on the heels of a near-death experience, that gave a then-depressed and disillusioned Alua Arthur a new grasp on life. It also placed her on a new professional path, one more akin to a calling than a traditional career.
Whatever mental image you have of a death doula, Alua Arthur, a 45-year-old Ghanaian-American with long locs and an infectious, megawatt smile is not that. Her very presence—commanding, confident, ebullient—feels like a celebration of being.
In her engaging new book “Briefly Perfectly Human,” which hits bookstores on April 14, Arthur, who lives in Los Angeles, explains why ignoring death ultimately deprives us of an essential understanding of life. “…[T]he idea of death is a seed. When that seed is carefully tended, life grows like wildflowers in its place. The only thing that is in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it.”
What is a death doula, and why would somebody need one?
A death doula is someone who provides holistic non-medical care and support of the dying person and the circle of support through the process. The time of dying is such a complex and painful time where one has to manage not only their emotions around the death, but also a lot of practicalities beyond the physical needs of the dying person. Having someone who is kind, compassionate, and knowledgeable to journey with you can be tremendously supportive.
Was there a particular event or series of events in your life that inspired you to become a death doula?
I practiced law for almost a decade at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. During that time, I became clinically depressed and took a leave of absence from work. During that leave, I traveled to Cuba, where I met a young woman on the bus with uterine cancer. She was a fellow traveler who wanted to see her top six places in the world before she died — Cuba was one of them. we spent a good portion of our 14-hour journey together talking about death — mine and hers. She had not been able to express a lot of her concerns around her dying before because when she would mention it, the people in her life would ask her to focus on hope instead. They made no space for her concerns about her death as though it wasn’t going to happen one day, even if not from this disease. It seemed like a form of existential gaslighting. Sitting in our shared mortality on the bus, the world opened up for me. I thought about my death and began to reconcile that the life that I had was not the one I wanted by virtue of considering my death.
Six months after I came back from Cuba, my brother-in-law became ill. Four months later, the doctors could not treat for his illness anymore. I got to support him through the last two months of his life and it changed me. I witnessed firsthand what I had glimpsed on the bus with my friend in Cuba. I saw how lonely it was to be dying and also felt how lonely it was to be somebody in the circle of support. I understood instinctively that this was happening to thousands of people across the globe, but it felt like we were the only ones. I would have given anything to have someone there to answer questions, to bear witness, to let us know when we were doing it right, and to offer suggestions for when we weren’t. Someone to support us thru the practicalities so I could focus on my grief. And since I didn’t have the support when I wanted it, I decided to offer it to other people.
How can we, collectively as a culture, change our relationship with death?
Acknowledging that it happens helps! Creating space for us to talk about it, and to talk about our fears of death without shunning these big conversations is a great way for us to begin moving the needle toward societal death acceptance. We also need to not hide things that we fear or the conversations that make us uncomfortable. Most of the people I know have a fear of death. By virtue of the work I do, it creates space for people to discuss it. But if not for this work, it generally isn’t a space ripe enough for people to share what’s on their hearts. I know I never did. Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. It just means that we will be ill prepared when the time comes. We need to get away from this idea of emotions as good or bad and right and wrong, but rather give ourselves the freedom to experience the breadth of the human experience — which, for some includes a fear of death. And that’s OK! It’s not something to have to get over or to fix, but rather to acknowledge, and to find ways to learn from our fear of death, to see what it has to teach us about our lives.
We also need to change our relationship to and adoration of youth. This means societally, we tend to shun getting older which makes aging, and thus death as the enemy. It is not the enemy. Aging is a gift.
How do you process the loss and grief at the end of each journey you take with a client?
I notice that I eat a lot of Kettle potato chips! Something about the fat, salt, and crunch soothes me. It also reminds me to stay in my body— that’s where grief lives. And that’s where it begins. From there I can allow whatever is coming up to come up and not push any of the big feelings away. I do my best to give myself grace for the process because grief looks like a whole lot of things, not just sadness and tears. Sometimes it is anger or irritability, and sometimes it’s experiencing gratitude for being alive and instant guilt that I’m not sad at that moment. I grieve with my clients, but I also grieve for them. Often, by the time they are dying, I have gotten to know them quite well, and it hurts when they die. I also feel grateful to have sat and honor at the end of their lives.
Is there a final wish or regret that you’ve heard often in the course of your experiences as a death doula?
Without a doubt, the biggest regret people seem to have at the end of their lives is about how they spent the time that they had. So many people spend their lives bowing to societal expectations and ideas other people have of who they are and what they should do with their lives. And then they reach the end wishing that they had done something else or had stayed more true to themselves. We can do ourselves a favor now, spending our time in ways that satisfy us. You must live your own life because you will die your own death.
What lessons, if any, about life have you learned from your work with people who are approaching death?
That we are still here!
