Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About the End: A Conversation With a Death Doula

Think death – reimagined. Preparing for your death or that of a loved one can help us lead a more meaningful, authentic life. That – from today’s podcast guest. Alua Arthur is a  Death Doula who guides a person who is transitioning to death and their loved ones, through the emotional process. End-of-life planning.

 Alua’s book, a New York Times Best Seller, is “BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.”  Alua has been described as a guiding light. She often forms close relationships with her clients, who reveal to her their innermost thoughts – regrets, what-ifs, secret joys, hidden affairs, and more. She also helps to organize business and legal affairs.

As a toddler, Alua’s family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She still remembers it vividly. This and more helped birth her book and path in life. This book is for those close to death and their loved ones, and everyone else who desires to embrace life and live a more authentic life.

******************* BIO: Alua Arthur -  In BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.  America’s most visible death doula, Alua Arthur, shows us how imagining our ideal ending can help us get clear about how we need to live and who we need to become to achieve that ideal ending. It’s a captivating narrative, bursting with Alua’s escapades of wander and wonder, which lead her on the death doula path.  As the most visible death doula working in America today, ALUA ARTHUR is a seeker, a“recovering” attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. She has spent thousands of hours with folks as they contemplate their mortality when regrets, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally revealed aloud. Her TED Talk titled, “Why thinking about death helps you live a better life” went online in July 2023, and has already received over 1.5 million views. A frequent guest on TV and radio, Alua has been featured on CBS’s The Doctors and in Disney’s “Limitless” docu-series with Chris Hemsworth, as well as in national print media outlets, such as Vogue, InStyle, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. She travels the country and world as a keynote speaker, addressing audiences at conferences, end-of-life organizations, Fortune 500 companies, universities, seminaries, senior citizens’ communities, and more. Along the way, she shares the surprising and often moving relationships she forms with dying clients. By interlacing her personal life experience around some of the remarkable deaths she’s observed, Alua can get at the heart of the most raw and tender moments of our humanity.

https://www.aluaarthur.com/
https://www.instagram.com/alualov