It took David Rumph Jr. more than five decades to learn that his calling in life is to help people die.
Rumph is the chaplain at Hospice Services for Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. He’s a former photo lab worker, military policeman and pet supply retail worker who was led to hospice work by both his own experience with the death of family members and his sense of community service.
At any given time Rumph and other hospice staff members help as many as 45 people who are dying from terminal illnesses. Hospice is based on a philosophy of treating patients rather than diseases, helping patients die with dignity and free of pain. What Rumph does to help varies greatly among families. Sometimes he performs bedside religious services. Once a month, he meets with a group of male surviving family meetings at Denny’s. Much of the time he just listens actively, a method he calls “companioning.”
“Patients elect for this service,” he said. “We are invited guests into what I consider to be a sacred time and space. Many times there are hospital beds set up in the living room in front of the big window so that grandpa can look out.”
Rumph, 61, is from Kentucky. He was interested in ministerial work more than 20 years ago but life got in the way. As a young man, Rumph worked in photo laboratories, served in the Army and attended and dropped out of college several times. When he was 35, he decided he wanted to be a Methodist minister. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Northern Kentucky. His 18-year-old daughter killed herself when he was partway through a Master of Divinity degree.
Rumph’s marriage fell apart and for three years he experienced complicated grief, a disorder he sometimes encounters among family members he helps today.
Rumph credits Alaska with helping him recover from the grief. In 2001, he visited Alaska with his brother, who worked as a dog handler for Susan Butcher. Rumph planned to visit for two weeks but he ended up staying for two months and later moving to Fairbanks. Rumph worked as a clerk at Cold Spot Feeds and as an educator at First United Methodist Church. He went back to school and completed his master’s in divinity in 2005.
In 2004, he began volunteering for Hospice of the Tanana Valley, the organization that later was folded into Fairbanks Memorial Hospital’s hospice services. Working in hospice was a natural fit for Rumph.
“I’ve known death,” he said. “There was nothing scary or taboo about death itself. It felt like a unique and significant way to love my neighbor.”
Fairbanks hospice has transformed since it became part of the hospital program. As a volunteer, Rumph’s duties included driving patients to pharmacies and transporting medical equipment. The program was run out of a small office on Fourth Avenue. Today the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital hospice program has a building on Gillam Way near the hospital. A team of about 20 medical workers, social workers and Rumph care for patients. Rumph was hired to be the program chaplain in January 2014.
When new patients enter hospice, they usually have less than six months to live, but death is unpredictable. Sometimes patients get better and “graduate” from hospice care. The program recently readmitted a patient who’s bedbound again after improving enough under hospice care to walk with a cane.
After a death, Rumph is available for grieving friends and family members for as long as they need him.
There are only two rules when it comes to being dead: get someone to register your death and keep your body covered when moving it around. The rest is totally up to you – from getting your ashes tattooed into your loved one’s arm to punk funeral services
The UK’s only tandem hearse is one such alternative idea being adopted to mark the life of a loved one Good Funeral Guide
Halloween is one of the few times of the year when you are allowed to be morbid, so why not take the opportunity to think a little about your own funeral? If fear of death is fear of the unknown then we should definitely be more afraid of funerals. For a start, most of us don’t know that there are only two laws to keep in mind when planning a funeral: you have to register the death of a person within five days, and secondly, you can’t travel with an uncovered body on a public highway. Seriously, that’s it – the rest is totally up to you.
Why have some black-suited blokes coming to haul your body away in a Transit van to have your eyelids glued together, only to be subsequently burned to cinders in a glib 20-minute service at a crematorium, when your shroud covered body could be crowdsurfed into your mate’s Volvo or turned into a firework? I spoke to five women making funerals that work for the dead and their families about what makes a ‘good funeral’.
Not all dead people are ‘loved ones’
Let’s start with terminology. Hopefully you’re living your life being the best person you can be, but if you happen to fall short and die being widely regarded as a complete and utter a***hole, then your relatives should be able to say so at your funeral. Some people cause pain and funerals are a good place to finally put those feelings to rest (alongside your body).
“I remember the first time any anger was expressed at one of our funerals, and I hadn’t seen that it was missing. This young man was in his late twenties and he had been a heroin addict for 15 years and his brothers were angry, as they had tried to help him for so long, and they just stood up and shouted and it was so brilliant and it was a relief to hear that,” says Claire Callender from the Green Funeral Company.
Tell your family to relax around your corpse
Before you pop off, try to remind your relatives that just because you have breathed your last breath it does not mean that your body stops being you. As a death doula – someone who provides care to the dying and their families – Anna Lyons describes “families who are happy to sit and hold somebody’s hand while they are in the dying process, and the second their heart stops beating and they stop breathing they shy away and their body becomes untouchable and something disgusting, because we have medicalised everything and we have stripped everyone of the normality of it.”
Ditch the funeral parlour
Louise Winter, a funeral celebrant, says: “Funeral directors have come to see it as their duty to protect the living from the dead.” Perhaps instead, we should be protecting our dead selves from funeral directors. Tora Colwill, from Modern Funerals cautions: “You shouldn’t just pass over your body to be manhandled. The mortuary hub is often in an industrial estate, where they stack up the bodies and one by one wash that, cut that hair, embalm there… if we actually asked questions about how our bodies are being treated, some of the answers we would be unhappy with.”
There has been a move over the past 20 years to return funeral care, planning, and burial logistics back to the home, the traditional place where families dealt with death before the rise of the funeral industrial complex following the Second World War. Claire Turnham, a funeral planner, says: “It is not about doing things differently, this is the way things were always done, this is the norm. This is the traditional.”
Funeral directors are probably going to rip you off
For anyone who has yet to organise a funeral, the receipts would cause you to die of shock if you could afford it. Reflecting on her time working at a funeral directors, Anna Lyons says: “(A) lot of funeral directors push people toward spending more money. You are working with people at their most vulnerable and people have been taken advantage of for too long.”
Embalming is gross and unnecessary
Many funeral directors recommend that a body should be embalmed if it is to be displayed in an open casket during a wake or service. However, according to Cara Mair, co-founder of ARKA Original Funerals, “Embalming fluid is lethal, it is formaldehyde, and it is carcinogenic. The embalming process is so invasive and it is not needed.” Instead, proponents of the natural death movement like Tora Colwill use natural methods, often alongside the family, to prepare the body for an open casket. “When you die, you can use rigor mortis to your advantage. For example, instead of having your gums stitched through to keep the mouth shut, you can simply roll up a towel and place it under the chin keeping the jaw locked as your corpse begins to stiffen.”
You don’t even need to have a coffin
Undertakers offer luxury metal and wood coffins costing several thousands of pounds; instead coffins can be made from biodegradable cardboard that your family can decorate as part of the wake, or bodies can be buried in traditional shrouds which cost just under £100. Also if there is life after death, I would much rather wake up in a cool shroud to haunt people in.
Your funeral service can include anything
Since there are really only two rules you can literally incorporate anything into your funeral service. Claire Callender and her husband Rupert use the ethos of punk and rave when helping families plan funerals: “I just throw out the rules, there is no set way of doing it, just make it up as you go along. And that is the punk, DIY, let’s just set up a record label in your bedroom, let’s just do it … with the rave aspect it is that thing about rave where you just found yourself dancing with a thousand people and you were all connected and you had this communal thing and you had a church without a religion.” Giving your family something to do allows them to process their grief, so don’t outsource it all to a funeral director.
Throw the eulogy out of the window
By having one person who is allowed to give their version of your life you lose out on the rest of it. You are more than a mother or husband – maybe your ex-partner has a salacious story to tell about that one time in Vegas, because what happens in Vegas should not stay in Vegas, it should be told at your funeral to all of your assembled relatives. The advice given by pretty much everyone I spoke to was to get everyone in a room, preferably with your body and let conversations happen.
Crematoriums are the worst
The most important thing is to not have the service in a crematorium, or as Louise Winter, from Poetic Endings calls them, “hospices where flowers go to die”. For Callender they can be one of the most challenges places to work: “The crematoriums hate us because they just want to bring a dog in, light the candle and rearrange the chairs – it is because we are trying to bring ritual to a really spiritually barren place.”
You don’t have to choose between burial and cremation
You can do so much more with your corpse. You can be buried in a pod that later grows into a tree; blasted into the sky in a firework; or inked onto your loved one’s skin forever in the form of a tattoo until they too die and then it’s up to them where you end up.
If you do decide to get buried, you don’t have to go to a church or local authority cemetery – you can be buried in a natural burial ground or on private land. It is recommended that you check in with the landowner, police and local environmental health authority – nobody wants to become drinking water.
Finally, whatever you do at your own funeral, make sure it is honest
We don’t get to say the things we really feel because we are too anxious, or tied up in the tedium of the everyday. Funerals are the one time that people are listening and really want to talk about life, death, love and all of the things inbetween. Like really talk about it – not just pretend they are talking while they’re swiping away their phones. So make some space for that.
Traditionally, the “Day of the Dead” is a time when family and friends gather to remember friends and family members who have died. But it’s also a perfect time to think about your own death – if you dare.
Care to face your own mortality? Here are 10 Mind-Blowing questions to ponder about your own death.
Most people won’t go there because it’s either too scary, too painful, or we just pretend it will never happen to us. But ready or not, there’s a 100% certainty death will eventually get up close and personal with every one of us. Here, from MORTALLS – The Death-Positive Conversation Game, are 10 mind-blowing but worthwhile questions to ponder about your own death… if you are willing to do so:
What scares you the most about dying?
What are some not-so-scary things about dying that don’t really bother you?
When you die, would you rather be awake and aware, or sedated and oblivious? Why?
What would be the best thing about a quick death? The worst thing?
What do you think you will regret the most when you are dying?
What is something you want to be remembered for?
What is something you do not want to be remembered for?
Who will carry out your final wishes when you die? How will they know what those wishes are?
Does the certainty that you are going to die affect the way you live your life right now? If so, how? And if not, why not?
What three words would you use to describe your own attitude about death and dying?
A new decree forbids Catholics to scatter ashes, and insists on the sanctity of the cemetery. But in terms of burial options, the Vatican are way behind the times
‘Burial space in UK graveyards is at a premium, so people are moving towards alternative trends in the disposal of bodies.’
[J]ust in time for the prayers for the dead on All Souls’ Day next Wednesday, the Vatican has restated its position on what can be done with the ashes of the faithful. In short, no longer can Auntie be kept in a mantelpiece urn or grandad’s ashes scattered on his local team’s football pitch.
Concerned about the adoption of “new ideas contrary to the church’s faith” suggestive of “pantheism, naturalism or nihilism”, the Vatican document conflates ashes-scattering with a dangerously new age spirituality, stipulating instead that remains should be kept tangibly in a sacred place. The Catholic belief in bodily resurrection at the end of days makes this position unsurprising, and the church clearly has a vested interest in discouraging casual rituals outside their control, but it’s a proscription that doesn’t sit well with current trends in the UK. The Vatican may face a harder battle against creeping modernism in the matter of burial and funeral practices than they bargained for.
Burial space in the UK is at a premium. The Labour government’s 2007 plan to allow the reuse of graves was given the green light in London, but the toxicity of the topic has seen it languish “under review” ever since for the rest of England and Wales. A Scottish bill to permit such recycling was passed in March. But such measures won’t make a significant dent in the 75% cremation rate, and the scattering of ashes is still a huge trend – the Mountaineering Council of Scotland warns that the sheer volume of ashes on the most popular summits is such that it is causing dangerous chemical changes in the soil.
The Vatican rejects the idea of death as “the moment of fusion with Mother Nature or the universe, or as a stage in the cycle of regeneration” that scattering in such natural environments represents; it also bans the use of ashes in memorial trinkets. In recent years, ashes have been used to make everything from records to tattoo ink, and such gung-ho going-ons have become associated with rock’n’roll abandon, from Keith Richards snorting his father’s remains, to the metal fan whose ashes were scattered in the mosh pit earlier this year. US experimental act Negativland went so far as to issue their new album this month with a small bag of the ashes of band member Don Joyce. Irreverent stuff, but the modern history of cremation in the UK started in no less paganistic style, with the failed prosecution of druid William Price for burning the body of his baby son on a pyre in 1884, setting a legal precedent that saw the practice legalised in 1902.
But cremation may not be where the individualism and valorisation of the natural world the church so fears is really thriving. Alternative trends in the disposal of bodies are moving towards burial. The Association of Natural Burial Grounds (ANBG) represents more than 270 woodlands and meadows run as natural cemeteries in the UK; 20 years ago there was only one such facility. It is in natural burial that the idea of an unmediated return to the earth that the church has denounced is writ large, with bodies often buried without a coffin and the landscape managed sustainably to preserve its natural beauty.
Rosie Inman-Cook, head of the ANBG and of the Natural Death Centre (NDC), a charity that puts choice, family and respect for the environment at the centre of their funeral advice service, has written inspiringly about the wide range of funeral and burial options available in the UK today. In the words of Leedam Natural Heritage, which operates eight natural burial grounds, these alternatives “offer something gentler”. Indeed, this is all in a context of the rejection of the staid funerals of old, which belonged to a more emotionally buttoned-up past, with British Humanist Association-trained celebrants now conducting more than 7,000 funerals a year.
But more and more people are doing away with formal ceremony and professional celebrant altogether, instead taking the “direct-it-yourself” approach championed by Inman-Cook, or going for direct cremation, which involves no funeral at all. The fact that David Bowie chose this option cemented his image as the ultimate individualist, and the NDC has reported a rise in interest in this possibility.
With adherence to a faith’s doctrines always being on a sliding scale, and the Catholic faithful hardly being immune to changing fashions, the church perceives these new approaches to marking the end of our lives as a threat. But if they are worried about greater freedom and a more individualistic approach to death and burial, scattering of ashes is old news.
[M]ore than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death.
It was a ritual the indigenous people had been practicing at least 3,000 years. A ritual the Spaniards would try unsuccessfully to eradicate.
A ritual known today as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.
The ritual is celebrated in Mexico and certain parts of the United States. Although the ritual has since been merged with Catholic theology, it still maintains the basic principles of the Aztec ritual, such as the use of skulls.
Today, people don wooden skull masks called calacas and dance in honor of their deceased relatives. The wooden skulls are also placed on altars that are dedicated to the dead. Sugar skulls, made with the names of the dead person on the forehead, are eaten by a relative or friend, according to Mary J. Adrade, who has written three books on the ritual.
The Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during the ritual. The skulls were used to symbolize death and rebirth.
The skulls were used to honor the dead, whom the Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations believed came back to visit during the monthlong ritual.
Unlike the Spaniards, who viewed death as the end of life, the natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake.
“The pre-Hispanic people honored duality as being dynamic,” said Christina Gonzalez, senior lecturer on Hispanic issues at Arizona State University. “They didn’t separate death from pain, wealth from poverty like they did in Western cultures.”
However, the Spaniards considered the ritual to be sacrilegious. They perceived the indigenous people to be barbaric and pagan.
In their attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Spaniards tried to kill the ritual.
But like the old Aztec spirits, the ritual refused to die.
To make the ritual more Christian, the Spaniards moved it so it coincided with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 1 and 2), which is when it is celebrated today.
Previously it fell on the ninth month of the Aztec Solar Calendar, approximately the beginning of August, and was celebrated for the entire month. Festivities were presided over by the goddess Mictecacihuatl. The goddess, known as “Lady of the Dead,” was believed to have died at birth, Andrade said.
Today, Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico and in certain parts of the United States and Central America.
“It’s celebrated different depending on where you go,” Gonzalez said.
In rural Mexico, people visit the cemetery where their loved ones are buried. They decorate gravesites with marigold flowers and candles. They bring toys for dead children and bottles of tequila to adults. They sit on picnic blankets next to gravesites and eat the favorite food of their loved ones.
In Guadalupe, the ritual is celebrated much like it is in rural Mexico.
“Here the people spend the day in the cemetery,” said Esther Cota, the parish secretary at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “The graves are decorated real pretty by the people.”
I was in my dorm lobby when I returned my mom’s call. While the news I received wasn’t incredibly unexpected, I felt tears well up in my eyes before she had even finished her sentence.
“Gramp is dying, honey. They don’t expect him to make it through the night. I’m so sorry, baby.”
It was nearly 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, and home was an hour away. To make my mom leave her father-in-law’s bedside to pick me up didn’t seem like the right thing, even though she was more than willing. I asked if I could say something to Gramp. When my dad got him onto the phone, though he was barely conscious, he managed to utter the words “I love you, Kelsey,” clear as a bell.
When I hung up the phone, puffy-eyed and alone with my sadness, I caught the elevator to get to my room. To my dismay, two other girls entered the lobby and walked toward the elevator. Instinctively, I began to compose myself, wiping running makeup, blotting away tears, and avoiding their gazes once they got onto the elevator. Though I thought little of my actions at the time, my mind having been elsewhere, I now see how the need to hide grief is such a constant and conditioned phenomenon of the culture I live in.
Cheryl Strayed writes, “We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of,’ to ‘move on from,’ and we are told specifically how this should be done.”
We have learned to welcome other sights that would once have been considered socially unusual on a college campus, or anywhere for that matter: belly shirts and low necklines, cursing, clear physical signs of alcohol and drug use, yelling and loud laughter—the list goes on and on. For some reason, though, when it comes to sadness, this must be a private affair, or done only with those with whom we are most comfortable.
Even more interesting is the realization that I had not hidden my tears on that elevator for myself—I wasn’t keeping my emotion hidden for me, but rather I composed myself and held back tears to avoid making these strangers feel uncomfortable.
Whether our reasons for concealing sadness and grief are selflessness or self-preservation, it is odd that this kind of emotion makes us so uncomfortable in public settings. My tears were fine, even expected when my family said a prayer together at the funeral home. It is as if we are expected to allow ourselves to mourn for those two days of rituals, but to leave our tears in the church and emerge back into the world of the living seamlessly.
When kind friends, acquaintances, and even professors did check up on me and acknowledge my loss in person, it always amounted to a “How are you doing?” with a look that lingered a little longer than usual. But actually addressing the loss in public is almost never done. This, we feel, could make a sad person upset in public. Unthinkably, my cover would be blown and lots of people would be made uncomfortable because of me.
All around us, every day, people are grieving something. It is often something much bigger and more heart-wrenching than what I’ve experienced, like the loss of a parent, sibling, or even a child. It may have happened last week or it may have happened five years ago, but pain has no time constraint. There are moments when a loss of years ago can feel as fresh as if it had occurred yesterday. When we avoid emotional expressions of grief, struggling people are left in solitude when what they may actually want is support.
We need to stop being made so uncomfortable by public displays of emotion. Often, even in the presence of close friends, we hide pain and try to appear OK, putting on a composed face to protect our own vulnerability and others’ comfort. But we cannot always be OK, and we need to stop convincing others and ourselves that this is the case. It is OK to not be OK. We need to allow each other sadness, wherever and whenever we need to express it.
[E]vi Numen, 33, of Philadelphia, could be considered a little death-obsessed. She’s the curator and founder of Thanatography.com, a site that showcases the work of visual artists exploring the themes of death, grief, and loss. Previously, she worked at the Mütter Museum, known for its collection of medical oddities and pathological specimens, such as presidential tumours, murderers’ brains, and books bound in human flesh. She has also recently added a line to her résumé — she’s a “death doula” in training — one of the first in the United States.
Evi Numen
Numen can be excused for being a little morbid. When she was 20, she survived a car accident that killed her partner on impact. Earlier that night, he had told her he was going to propose. While in the hospital recovering from her injuries and raw with grief, she kept asking if she could see his body in the morgue. “I needed to confront his death to truly believe it,” Numen says. “My doctors thought I couldn’t take the sight of him, dead and broken, but to this day I believe it would have helped. Seeing him in his coffin during the funeral a week later felt staged and artificial.”
Last April, when her late partner’s father was in rapid decline with cancer, Numen rushed to his side. “I held his hand, listened, and talked to him when he could, and also allowed his loved ones to take a break from the bedside. What I couldn’t do for my partner, I tried to do for his father.”
A large part of the assistance Numen provided was for his family. “I had to remind them it was okay to take care of their own needs. I couldn’t “fix” anything, but I could bring food so it was there when people needed it, or stay by the bedside and encourage family members to go for a brief walk to get some fresh air.”
Caregivers [of the dying] often need to be ‘given permission’ to care for themselves properly.
After her partner’s father died, Numen knew she had found her new calling. She did some research and found the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA). “Immediately, I knew this was the right next step,” says Numen. Cofounded by former hospital social worker Henry Fersko-Weiss in February 2015, INELDA trains people to provide emotional support for the dying — and their family members. Ferko-Weiss was inspired by the concept of doulas who support a mother and her partner during pregnancy and childbirth. “I kept seeing people die in ways that I thought were unfortunate or even tragic. I was trying to figure out how to change that. To me, the principles and spirit and techniques of birth doulas could be interpreted and adapted for the end of life,” says Ferko-Weiss.
A certified death doula can help not only the dying person, but will assist their loved ones throughout the entire death process, from coming to terms with mortality weeks or even months before the death to remembering and memorialising their loved one after passing.
Numen took a 22-hour training with INELDA and has logged more than 20 hours of volunteer training at two different area hospices. She’s been coached to become familiar with the physical changes the body goes through directly preceding death — and in helping comfort and counsel the dying person and their family from the point of a terminal-illness diagnosis all the way through even a year after a death. “I think many of us have the tendency to be problem-solvers and try to offer solutions to someone who is hurting, but there is no solution to dying,” Numen says. “It is easy to develop the habit of offering platitudes to such a situation, such as, ‘This too shall pass.” But that’s not actually comforting to a grief-stricken person. I know this from my own experience. Instead, I serve as an active listener, letting the other person really talk about all their conflicting emotions.”
Numen says that one of the most fascinating parts of her training was learning how to recognise when the person is “actively dying.” “Most of us know what the birthing process is like — foetal development, labor, contractions, water breaking, and such are fairly common knowledge in the Western world. Yet very few of us know anything about what it looks like to die: Your appetite decreases, your skin changes colour, breathing sounds different. There is a huge discrepancy in how we view the two ends of human life. It is easy to see how such ignorance about death can lead to avoidance and fear.”
Numan had asked the nurses at a hospice where she was volunteering to call her if they needed someone to keep vigil for an imminently dying patient, especially if their family couldn’t be there. “My objective was to be with the person who needed me the most,” she says. She was called to the bedside of an elderly man in end-stage pulmonary disease. He had no family present and was unable to communicate. She was his sole companion in his final moments. She knew from her training that he only had a few hours of life remaining.
Over the course of seven hours, Numen played Clint Mansell, Erik Satie, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin on her iPad as she sat by the man’s bedside and watched him breathe. “His breath cycles grew further and further apart, but only by seconds, which to me felt like minutes as I found myself holding my breath with him,” says Numeb. “I knew he was very near. Within an hour, his breath got steady but oddly mechanical, more like a reflex than an action, and then the next inhale never came. I called the nurse and she confirmed the death. It was easier and more peaceful than I thought it would be, and yet it affected me more than I expected. I had, after all, trained for this, read about it, and kept vigil to other dying patients, but his passing was the first I had witnessed.”
Despite all her preparation, Numen was so deeply affected by the experience that she had to skip her next scheduled shift. “Being there for that man, when no one from his family was able to, affected me more than I thought it would,” she says. “I didn’t cry — I felt it wasn’t my place to, like I was just a stand-in for his family. There is a weird sense of intruding, especially when keeping vigil for complete strangers, that I have not been able to reconcile yet.” It also had a personal resonance for her. “Witnessing a death brought up the other losses in my life, and I had to honour these emotions before I could return to keeping vigil for someone else,” Numen explains.
Witnessing a death brought up the other losses in my life, and I had to honor these emotions before I could return to keeping vigil for someone else.
Despite her unanticipated reaction, she is even more committed to her calling of caring for the dying than she was before. “It wasn’t gross or scary, but it was certainly difficult. Every death will be different, and maybe it will get easier or less nerve-wracking, but it will not get any less worthwhile. Even if I never get to talk with the patients I attend to, knowing that I brought some small amount of comfort is enough.”
She’d also like to see more people become comfortable with ageing and the dying process. In a culture where ageism is rampant, Numen has found that learning about the end of life has actually made her less apprehensive of getting older — and the inevitable end. “Most of the patients I’ve seen close to death were peaceful and tranquil. They seemed comfortable and had this beautiful glow about them, this serenity that I didn’t expect to see. I’m still fearful of sudden death and the suffering of prolonged illness, but not of the dying itself.”
Numen also hopes that more family members will recognise that a death doula can be an option that can bring enormous comfort in someone’s final moments. “It’s about regaining control over an uncontrollable process,” she says.
