Changing the Experience of Death and Dying in our Community
Speaker: Christiane Zeithammel
Disease to death is often shrouded in fear. Fear of death is like a plague that devours the life force and steals living from our lives. Death anxiety exists in various degrees and cultivates suffering in our Western culture.
Some people are afraid of all things associated with death. Others may fear their own mortality, or the pain of illness and dying.
We have become a death-fearing society that spends vital energy seeking out ways to stay young to avoid death even though the reality is that death is a part of life.
As a Death Doula, I am part of a death awareness movement. A movement that is needed to change the culture of fear and silence around death. Death needs to stand amongst us; visible and heard amongst the living. Death is happening in every moment; it is as natural as our next exhale.
Open and honest advocacy around death can make a difference. A difference that is essential of which I was made aware of working as a young nurse. People were not dying the way that I knew they should be. They were abandoned, left dying alone, in bathrooms. The doors closed on death so no one would bear witness to it. I knew this was NOT the way it should be! Those experiences made it very clear to me that changes were essential. Changes such as bringing dying and death up into people’s awareness to engage with while in the fullness of their life.
In this death awareness approach, we can provide a different experience. One that can be supported in the comfort of their homes, in person or virtually, with their families, wherever their life is and with loved ones nearby. An experience that is lived up to and through death and beyond. A Death Doula can support and encourage the dying person and their loved ones to face death, to move beyond the denial of death and to engage in an open and authentic exploration of dying.
Death Doulas have found that their clients’ experience their end of life and death as a part of living; with curiosity, varied emotions including fears, love, and hope. Paradoxically, feeling very alive, while dying. They feel supported in a matter-of-fact way, as if death was a natural part of their life.
The death awareness movement and the role of a Death Doula is a panacea for death phobia and a potent catalyst for change, to bring end of life back to the living in a holistic and fully honoring way.
- Date: February 26th
- Time: 6:30 PM
- Location: Beechwood Cemetery
