02/27/2023
Notes on what I do:
• I provide basic care to people with serious illnesses. I serve people and families living with a life-limiting illness. I guide and support the dying and their families in the dying process. My goal is to empower, educate, and encourage people and their families to be involved in making decisions. I help people plan for the last days of life, supporting them emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I work in a non-medical role, supporting and enhancing palliative care. I also help families emotionally after the death.
Emphasis on:
1. Meaning
2. Legacy work
3. Planning
4. Attention to the sacred nature of dying.
5. Alternative interventions for symptom management
6. Intense involvement in the last days of life
7. Reprocessing the experience with loves ones after the death
8. Active involvement in early grief
Doula Approach:
1. Life Review
2. Planning
3. The vigil
4. The Ritual
5. Reprocessing
Three areas of Activity:
1. The dying person reflecting on their life and planning for how they envision the last days of life to unfold.
2. Holding space for the plan of those last days, when the body is finally breaking down.
3. After the person dies, as family and friends process their experiences of the dying time and begin their work on grief.
Other notes:
The goal of palliative care is to provide relief from the symptoms and pain of these illnesses along with stress relief and support for both patients and their families.
• I feel called to serve and to fulfill people’s last wishes in the final days of their lives.
• I try to help patients face the end days of their lives with dignity, humour, and their self-respect intact.
• I feel that it is an honor and a privilege to be allowed into such an intimate time of their lives.
• I try to ease the passage, which might be difficult and painful.
• In the medical profession people often treat the dying as if they are already dead. They speak to their patients in whispers and solemn tones, avoiding any talk not only of death
itself but of the lives their patients have lived up to this point.
• I try to get to know the person.
• My job is not to help people die.
No, I help them live the rest of their lives.
• I’m learning. I’m being. I’m evolving.
• I try to meet and support their physical, emotional, spiritual needs; to help them live life to the fullest.
• My role also requires emotional understanding, connection, and commitment.
• My relationship with each client is unique based on their individual needs. It is about sharing the human experience.
• You can’t say you know what they’re going through because you don’t. But you have to be conscious of it. It’s important not to judge.
• I see something beyond pain and suffering. I see hope, love, devotion, sacrifice, forgiveness, togetherness, friendship.
• My goal is for people to feel safe with me.
• The patient and I cross this intimacy barrier. We develop deep yet very quick relationships.
• My goal is to earn trust from the person, and that they believe we’re in it together; that they’re in safe hands.
• Most of my clients are elderly. My youngest client was 17.
• Love is an action; it’s not just a feeling.
• Personal Support Workers’ and Death Doula work is important. I’m proud of what I do. I have a sense of being summoned. It gives me strength.
