Death isn't often a comfortable coffee table discussion, but it is as natural as life itself. In an honest and eye-opening conversation with Jill McClennen, a seasoned death Doula, we traverse the delicate terrain of end-of-life planning and the profound services provided by those who guide us through our final days. Jill enlightens us on the parallels between preparing for life's milestones and the equally significant act of preparing for its conclusion. With her guidance, we learn to navigate the necessary practicalities, like legal documentation, and understand the emotional and spiritual support that can transform this period into one of meaning, connection, and even unexpected joy.
As the discussion unfolds, we find solace in the stories shared, which reveal the sheer scope of emotions that accompany the end-of-life journey. Jill's personal anecdotes and the experiences of those she's assisted serve to dissolve the fears shrouding death, offering a lens of clarity and peace. Listening to her talk, it's evident that there is great value in being present for those nearing the end, and in fostering an environment where families can address their myriad questions and feelings. This dialogue is a gentle reminder that amidst the sorrow, there can be profound moments of gratitude and love.
As we listen, we're reminded that within each of us lies the potential for great change, and the capacity to make a significant impact on the lives of others, often in ways we least expect.
This is a show where ideas come together. The guest statements expressed on The Savvy Communicator Podcast are their own and not necessarily the views of The Savvy Communicator.
Thanks for joining us! Become part of the conversation at www.savvycommunicator.com, and follow me on social media: my handle is @savvycommunicator.
Death isn't often a comfortable coffee table discussion, but it is as natural as life itself. In an honest and eye-opening conversation with Jill McClennen, a seasoned death Doula, we traverse the delicate terrain of end-of-life planning and the profound services provided by those who guide us through our final days. Jill enlightens us on the parallels between preparing for life's milestones and the equally significant act of preparing for its conclusion. With her guidance, we learn to navigate the necessary practicalities, like legal documentation, and understand the emotional and spiritual support that can transform this period into one of meaning, connection, and even unexpected joy.
As the discussion unfolds, we find solace in the stories shared, which reveal the sheer scope of emotions that accompany the end-of-life journey. Jill's personal anecdotes and the experiences of those she's assisted serve to dissolve the fears shrouding death, offering a lens of clarity and peace. Listening to her talk, it's evident that there is great value in being present for those nearing the end, and in fostering an environment where families can address their myriad questions and feelings. This dialogue is a gentle reminder that amidst the sorrow, there can be profound moments of gratitude and love.
As we listen, we're reminded that within each of us lies the potential for great change, and the capacity to make a significant impact on the lives of others, often in ways we least expect.
This is a show where ideas come together. The guest statements expressed on The Savvy Communicator Podcast are their own and not necessarily the views of The Savvy Communicator.
Thanks for joining us! Become part of the conversation at www.savvycommunicator.com, and follow me on social media: my handle is @savvycommunicator.
Hello and welcome to the Savvy Communicator podcast. I'm your host, amy Flanagan. Today we are going to discuss a topic that most people truly don't know how to talk about dying and the end-of-life process. If that scares you a little bit, it scares me too, but not too much because I know our expert guest, jill, is going to get us through it all. Jill McLennan is a mother, she is a chef, she is a podcast host and she is a death doula. Jill, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, amy, for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation because it is one of my favorite conversations to have, and I know that sounds strange to some people, but talking about death and dying really does not have to be morbid, it doesn't have to be scary. It's something that we could all do with a little practice.
Speaker 1:I think that's absolutely. What we need is practice, because it's certainly been through my life that it's the one thing people don't want to talk about, unless it's kind of a joke saying, oh well, you kids are going to have to be the one to clean out the house or something similar, and everybody just sort of laughs and goes on. I have some experience, having dealt with the end-of-life process in my family, but truly not enough to talk about it on a comfortable level. That's why I'm so glad you're here, because I think a lot of us can benefit from it. If you don't mind just starting us off at the beginning, what is a death doula?
Speaker 2:A death doula is somebody that provides completely non-medical care. So we're not nurses, we're not doctors, even though sometimes nurses and doctors will become death doulas. That's not what we do. As a death doula, we provide emotional, spiritual and physical support for people around the end of life. You don't have to be dying to utilize a death doula.
Speaker 2:You can use us at any stage of life to help you prepare yourself for what you would want at the end of life, to ask some of the hard questions, to have the conversations with your family members, so that this way, whenever the end of life does happen, everybody feels a little bit more prepared, they're a little bit more relaxed, a little more comfortable, because you know what you want, you've communicated what you want and your family members don't have to be stressed and anxious, not knowing what it is that you want. So really, everybody can use a death doula, even though we will often sit with people at the end of life what they will sometimes say sitting vigil. So we will work with families and, as somebody's actively dying, we will go and sit with the family members. We will sit with the person that's dying to kind of help through that process, but there's so much more that goes into death doula work than actually just sitting with somebody that's dying.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating to hear about. That's really fascinating. So I was preparing for this interview. One of the things that I noticed was that I think in the media especially, death can be portrayed as something that is usually sudden and it's usually a terrible loss and possibly something that could have been prevented. And I wonder if those things are possibly some of the things that you have to deal with, because we really don't get a lot of information about preparing for this stage of life.
Speaker 1:You prepare for a wedding, you prepare for a baby, you prepare for knee replacements or anything like that, but this is supposed to be something that we just face head on.
Speaker 2:And I find it not just with the general population but even with medical staff there's not a lot of preparation for what the actual end of life looks like. That's really how I got into the work, because when I was taking care of my grandmother at the end of her life, they sent her home on hospice. I said, okay, I expected it to be like TV she closes her eyes, she maybe sleeps a lot, but that she was just going to peacefully die in her sleep. There was nobody that actually talked to me, nobody that prepared me for the realities of it. And we need to have these open, honest conversations. But they're not happening on any level.
Speaker 2:And, like you said, tv we're so fascinated in this culture by TV shows and movies and even podcasts like the real crime dramas and the people being shot and blown up and like that's not how most of us are going to die.
Speaker 2:Most of us are going to probably get a diagnosis that then, over a long period of time, we're going to try treatments, that then eventually we have to get to that point where the treatments are not working anymore and we need to have that conversation.
Speaker 2:We need to make that decision to allow ourselves to transition off of treatment into what they would consider comfort, care, keeping people comfortable until the moment of death. But we don't know that because that's not what you see in movies, that's not what you see on TV, and that is again a lot of what a death doula does is just helping to educate within our communities, educate the general public and also educate our families that if somebody calls me and says my mom just got a diagnosis, we don't know what to expect, we don't know what to do, we don't know what questions to ask. That's one of the things that we can do as death doulas is just kind of help people understand how to advocate for themselves and what they want and what they need, rather than going in blind and being like I'm so overwhelmed right now I don't even know where to start.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I can certainly see that. So if I was coming to you as a client today, and as I am, somebody that's relatively healthy, nothing on the horizon that would be of concern. Where would you start me off? What are some of the things that just anybody walking down the street might need to know and start to think about?
Speaker 2:The first place I always start with people is your paperwork, which is not fun and exciting, but it's important. There's legal paperwork that, again, as a death doula, I don't do the legal paperwork, but I want to make sure that people have their wills in place, that they have their person. Essentially, that will make the medical decisions If they've lost the ability to make them for themselves and if they say, no, I don't have anything, okay, great. So that's where we're going to start. We're going to start by having a conversation and I have a document that I created, but there's ones that you can just get online something like Five Wishes, where you read through.
Speaker 2:You have a conversation with somebody about what's important to you. Is it extending life as long as possible or is it being comfortable? Now your answer is going to be different depending on where you're at. Right now I'm 45. I have two young children. Absolutely, do anything possible. Whether it's a car accident, whether it's a diagnosis of some type of cancer, we're going to do everything possible so that I can be around as long as possible for my children.
Speaker 2:Yes, now, when I'm older, that's going to be a different answer. You know, if I'm 85 or I'm 90 and I get a cancer diagnosis, am I going to want to go through treatments that potentially are going to make me very ill, maybe extend my life a little bit, but my quality of life is going to be really low? I would rather have a year where I feel pretty good, I could still get around, I could still interact with my family and my friends, versus two years where I'm bed bound and I don't feel well and I don't have the energy to do anything because I'm going through these really extensive treatments. That's why it needs to be a conversation. There's no right or wrong answer. It just depends on the person. That's really where I like to start with. Again, everybody, no matter what age you are, we need to think about these things. Even before my husband and I got married, we were in our 20s At the time. That's when Terri Shiavo, kind of that, was all over in the news right.
Speaker 2:It was all over in the news that she had collapsed, she was being kept alive. Her husband was saying that's not what she wanted. Her parents were saying something else. And I said to my at that time, my boyfriend I said you know, if anything like that were to ever happen to me, please, please, do not keep me on life support, like if they're saying that there's nothing that can be done, that I'm gonna live like this, you know, basically in a vegetative state, for the rest of my life. Please don't let that happen.
Speaker 2:But because we weren't married, especially he would have no say unless we had it down on paper. And so we did our first versions of our advanced health directives when we were in our 20s, because you never know, wow, now again, 25 years later, here I am, 45, healthy, still in really good condition as far as I know. I am pretty healthy. But I still have similar wishes. But they have changed because now we do have children. Right, things had to change. So it's gonna be flexible, it's going to be fluid as you go through different stages of life, and so it's still, even if you work with a death rule. It's not like you just sit down and you do this paperwork and then we say, okay, you're good until you're 90.
Speaker 2:Like no, we need to revisit these things on what we would consider big life milestones. Right? If you get married, if you get divorced, if you have children, if you get a diagnosis, those are all times when you need to revisit what your wishes are. But you're not gonna know what decisions you want to make if you don't understand the different terminologies. Right, like I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nurse, but part of what I've done is taken the time to learn and at least know what questions you should ask your doctor if different things come up, so that you're making educated decisions.
Speaker 2:Again, there's no right or wrong answer, but if you're making it from a place where you feel confident, because you understand, then that's much better than being in crisis because something happens, maybe there is an accident, and you're like I don't know, I've never thought about this, I've never thought about what my spouse wanted. We never talked about it. That is not the time to have that conversation. You really need to have it earlier on. And a death tool. It can just help navigate that conversation and help it, because it can be difficult to talk to your loved one about it, and so that's part of what we can do is almost like mediate the conversation, so it's a little bit more comfortable for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I could see wanting that guidance even at this stage in life where, as far as I know, everything is okay. But to have somebody to look to when things get difficult or emotional. Because I love my husband, I love my family, I don't want to think about anything happening to them. I don't want to think about having to make these decisions and yet everybody's going to have to.
Speaker 2:None of us really want to think about it, right? Even me, as a death ruler, I get a little choked up. I get choked up still when I think about the fact that something could happen to my husband. I mean, it's the reality, it could. It happens to somebody every day. Not thinking about it isn't going to prevent that from happening to me, but thinking about it just makes sure that I am prepared, if it did happen, as far as what he wants. But it also gave me a side benefit that I didn't expect, which is I am so much more present and appreciative for every single moment that I have with my husband and with my children, in a way that I wasn't before and again, I loved them and I appreciated them before, but if I was in a rush I might run out the house and be like see y'all later and just run out the door.
Speaker 2:Now I try so hard not to do that. I try to say every single time I leave the house I love you guys so much, Like I'll see you when I get home. Y'all are my favorite people ever. I really make this conscious effort so that if something were to happen to me or something were to happen to one of them, there would never be this feeling of we didn't have that connection at the end. Because so often that happens, right? People leave the house, they're mad at each other, or even if they're not mad at each other, everybody's just so busy. We're rush around all the time and then something happens and they say oh, you know, I didn't really say goodbye, I didn't say I love you I didn't give them a hug or a kiss because I was in a rush.
Speaker 2:So it changed the way that I live. By being okay with the fact that I will die and we will all die at some point, it doesn't mean that if something were to happen, I would be okay with it. I mean I would still be if my husband were to die suddenly or even get a diagnosis right. I would still be heartbroken, I would still struggle, I would still go through the human emotions, but I wouldn't look back with regret thinking, wow, I wasted so much time because I've really spent the last few years being as fully present with all of my loved ones and I didn't used to do that before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see that. Like I said, I had some experience with death in my family. So I think that you have that knowledge after a certain point in time, that it is going to happen and you do hang on a little more closely to the people that are there. But there are still so many things that I don't know about it. I mean, you said paperwork and I was like, oh right, yeah, that's all I knew about it. If you asked me what forms do you need for something like this, I wouldn't be able to tell you. So it's really so fascinating to hear it from your perspective. And this may be a little out of order in terms of questions, but I just I have to ask because there's so much sadness around it Do you ever find that there's lightness and happiness and laughter around death?
Speaker 2:Oh, definitely. Again, it seems unusual, but there's some people that when they reach this stage where they know for sure that they're dying and they're working through some of these things, there actually is joy, there is happiness, there is this feeling of you know, okay, I'm ready for this. It's time I could actually relax, finally, I could stop fighting, I could stop trying to do all of these things. Family members I've seen people in rooms, you know, playing music together and singing and you know holding hands and connecting in ways that they hadn't connected. I've talked to people that they're like I was closer to my mother at the end of her life than I ever was, because I was showing up and we were together and we were having conversations that we were never able to have. Because our walls kind of come down right, Like there's this facade that we keep up this strength. You know all these things that we walk through life, that for a lot of people, as they near the end of life, they can let that down and so they actually connect with people so much more deeply than they did in their normal day-to-day life. So there really is a lot of beauty at the end of life. We just don't hear about it as much. We don't talk about it, but, again, we don't really talk about death that much. So it's not like you really hear people sharing their experiences.
Speaker 2:You know, even for me with my grandmother, you know, there was times when I was sitting up at night with her and she was talking about these like women that were in the room and they were singing to her and you know, and I'm not seeing these people, but I loved that. I was like really, and I'm like what do they look like? Like what are they singing to you? What is it Like? I was really curious and we were having these beautiful conversations and it was two o'clock in the morning while I was like sitting up with her and I wouldn't trade that experience really for anything.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, there was some difficult moments, but the difficult moments, honestly, were my fear and my confusion, because I didn't understand, because I had nobody to really say to me oh no, it's okay, this is normal, this is natural, this is what happens. If I would have known that, I could have relaxed so much more. So my hardest moments actually wouldn't have been as hard, because I would have understood what was going on rather than just being like here you go. Grandma's going home on hospice, good luck.
Speaker 2:And that was it, and I was like oh, all right, I will figure it out as I go, and I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were very fortunate that we had hospice too. We had inpatient hospice and everybody there was amazing. But it's still a lot of time on your own with your family member and I think that being able to have somebody there that you could ask questions of, whether it's as simple as what is this medicine that they're giving, or where do you go to get a Diet Coke, All that stuff that's just the human part of being around. I would have wonderfully benefited from something like that. I think what are some of the main questions you get from people or families that you're working through?
Speaker 1:If they are near the end of life, either with themselves or with a family member. What are some of the most common things that you hear?
Speaker 2:Oh man, there's honestly a wide range of things that I've heard A lot of. It is that people really do question what they believe is gonna come after this. Right, there's, there's. No matter how much somebody has faith when they're really facing the end of life, I do get a lot of questions about it and I try to do things in a way of I try to listen 90% of the time and talk only 10%. So a lot of times I'll ask questions back well, what do you think is gonna happen? What did your family think was gonna happen?
Speaker 2:You know, I'll ask the family members a lot of times as they're preparing for somebody's actual transition, the end of life transition. They will have questions too about you know, what's? What can I expect? What is it gonna sound like? What is it gonna look like? Are they gonna be in pain? You know, what can I expect the end of life to actually look like?
Speaker 2:And there is some common things that people have happened, but it doesn't happen to everybody. You know, everybody is a little bit different, just like with birthing, right Like birth tolls and death tolls. We have a lot of similarities and, just like when you have babies, there's some things that happen, but it doesn't happen with everybody and everybody's birth experience is different, and so we can prepare people as much as possible. But a lot of it for me really has just been listening to people talk about their life, about their experiences, about their fears, and then they will sometimes ask a question and a lot of it will be like is this weird? Is this weird that I'm talking about this? Is it weird that I feel this way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know like, and that's what I'm like. No, all of this is valid the anger, the sadness, the relief, the gratitude, right Things that people are like. Why am I feeling these emotions? All of it's normal, all of it's natural and that's really more. What I'm there to do is just kind of hold the space for people to process on their own what they're feeling and what they're going through.
Speaker 2:But I've had some really beautiful conversations with people that are dying and, again, in a lot of cases there's not the fears that I expected, there's not the sadness that I expected. In a lot of cases, especially if somebody's older, like I'm kind of ready, you know, like I'm ready for this, like let's, let's just keep me comfortable. You know, thanks for sitting with me, thanks for holding my hand, you know, thanks for being here with me. But they're not necessarily as afraid as you would think. But then some people of course are, and again, usually that's more, they're afraid of the unknown. They're afraid that they're being a burden on their family members. Right, they're, the fears that they're having aren't really about them, it's the unknowns and how it's affecting the other people in their life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I want to take a step back, actually, now that we plunged right into the middle of, you know, being with a family member or being the family member that might be going through this, and you know, you weren't always a death doula, you started off as a chef correct.
Speaker 2:That is correct. Yeah, that's my background. I've been in food service since I was 16 and I'm 45 now, so you can do the math on that one. It's been a really long time since I've been in food service and I loved it. I mean, I've worked in restaurants, hotels. I owned my own bakery cafe where we would do wedding cakes and breads and soups and salads and coffees and I taught.
Speaker 2:Most recently I taught a job training program where I would teach people culinary baking and a class called serve safe, which is how to not get you sick when they're making your food very important class yes right, and so that's where most of my career was spent, which did mean that then I had a little imposter syndrome when I was kind of coming into this new career right, where I was like, why I'm just a cook, why is anybody gonna want to know what I have to say or what I can do? But I think in some ways it actually was a positive thing that I came into this as an outsider, because I was able to see some of the places where I could really help fill the holes in what's already existing between hospice and doctors and nurses and even assisted livings, right, rehab centers, all these different things that were already there. I was like, oh, I see now where they need a little extra help. So it actually worked out well.
Speaker 1:You know that's so true, and again I'll go back and blame the media. For another thing is that we're also kind of led to believe that being a beginner isn't a good thing, that either. You're supposed to jump right in and be a flash and learn everything in the first five minutes and leap ahead. But if you're kind of going through things you know slowly but surely and learning things and having to learn them again, you are somehow not doing it right. And there's such a focus on achievement when actually, by learning, coming from you know, a different viewpoint, coming from a different level of experience that you actually have vantage might not be the first 10 second advantage, but it certainly will be the third week or the fourth week advantage because you have experience that you can just lay on top of everything that you're learning right now so.
Speaker 1:I know you mentioned that you got into end-of-life care because of your grandmother had. Had anything else been pulling you towards that particular type of career, or was it just because your own grandmother did care?
Speaker 2:I think, actually, that I've been meant to do this work my entire life, because even as a child, one of the things that my grandmother and I used to do together we would go to there was a local veteran home and then there was also a local Catholic kind of like rehab hospice center that my grandmother and I would go volunteer at, and I remember her telling me even, you know, when I was in high school, we, we would do this, since I was a child, all the way until I graduated high school.
Speaker 2:I would go with her around holidays and we would sing and give out rosaries and take people to mass, like, do whatever we needed to do, and she would say to me, you would go into the rooms that everybody else was afraid of and you would go up to the people and you would just talk to them and you'd hold their hand, like when you were really little and I was like really and I was like okay, and because I knew that I was doing it as an adult, but I didn't have that recollection that I was naturally doing this.
Speaker 2:It didn't scare me, I wasn't afraid of it. They look like the people that needed me the most, but I never considered actually it's not really true. I did consider becoming a doctor and then I was told at one point that I was too stupid to become a doctor. Right, could you imagine. But it's okay because my path worked out well. But I did actually want to be a doctor at one point and then put it off to the side, ended up working in a bakery, kind of went on that whole path and then when I took care of my grandmother, that's when again I kind of revisited it and I thought maybe I want to be a hospice nurse, like I think that's work I could really do.
Speaker 2:But I had a bakery, I had a six month old at the time. Life just kind of kept moving. But then this job training program that I teach I work with people that have oftentimes come from very traumatic situations. So there is a lot of death, there's drug overdoses, there's shootings, there's stabbings. I mean I've had students that have told me stories about the things that they've witnessed. I've had students die.
Speaker 2:I've found somebody who had drug overdosed, like I mean I really was coming across it so much in my work, but again it was pulling me towards it. It wasn't scaring me, it wasn't pushing me away. I was like this is a need. This is what people really need support with Telling the stories that they needed to tell, that they needed to get out, and not having somebody get uncomfortable and run away and try to stop the conversation or change it to a different topic. I just sat with it and I breathed and I just opened my heart so that they can feel that somebody was there to hear them and to support them.
Speaker 2:And so again I thought I was gonna teach baking, when really I kind of was doing something else, and so it was kind of pulling me again down that path. And so when I really was getting close to being about 40 years old and I thought I don't think I can be in a kitchen until I'm 65. Like I've done this a long time already, you know, the older I get, the harder it's gonna be on my body. I'm standing, I'm unloading trucks, like I'm getting things out of the oven, like that are above my head and way half as much as me. Like I just physically don't think I could do this.
Speaker 2:And then I heard the term death doula and I was like that's it. Like as soon as I heard it and the guy and there's actually not many men in it but the person I happened to hear on a podcast was a man. As he started explaining what he did, I was like that's it, that's it, that's what I'm supposed to do, that's what I'm here for. And so I think I actually started this work when I was a child. I just didn't know it until I was about 40. Then I actually really made the effort.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting because it's so amazing, I think, whatever path you take in life and career, how you look back after a little while. You're like no, I was always supposed to end up here, even though I planned to be a fantastic lawyer or an amazing politician, but somehow it turned around and I'm here and those skills I had them feed into the skills I have now, and I just think that's amazing and very cool when we have that realization. So what was it like for you when you began working as a doula?
Speaker 2:It's so I love the work that I do. It's hard to get the work and it's partially because it's new enough that people don't know what it is right. So even today, there's a local hospital by me that I'm gonna start volunteering with and again, this is a hospital. They have a palliative care team. It's actually a trauma hospital, so they have a lot of death and dying and the volunteer coordinator said I have never heard of a death doula until we got your email and I was like, well, here we go. So she looked it up, she researched it, we had a long conversation about it, and so people just don't know that we exist, they don't know what we do, they don't know how and when to utilize us. So, as much as I can say like I love doing the work, I haven't done as much of it as I would really like to, especially at you know I started in July of 2020. And this is now what? January of 2024. So it's been quite a few years now and I am slowly getting clients that I'm working with, but it's really just been a process of educating people about what it is that I do to try and bring on the clients. And it's okay, right, like, it's fine, I'm in it for the long haul. And I think in some ways it's actually been great, because if I would have just immediately gotten clients doing what I thought I was gonna do, which was sitting with people at the end of life, preparing them and their families, right Like having a client hire me on, I go through the whole process with them, I potentially would have never looked into hospitals. But now I've been volunteering already at another hospital that's further north, so it's over an hour away from me, and I actually found that I really like hospital settings. I like kind of working with people in shorter bursts, kind of going through supporting them when they really need support, because maybe the doctor just came in and said, hey, we can't continue treatment, this is it, and then the person's like, oh well, now, what do I do with this? And their family members are like, what do I do with this information? And so I actually have found that I really like working in hospitals. I don't necessarily want to work in like a hospice type setting. So it's been an interesting journey for me to kind of figure out where I fit, and I also am finding too that I do like educating, and so I am starting to become more of like a paid speaker where I will go into different businesses.
Speaker 2:I do some classes myself online. I do some classes myself in person around all different topics. It could be grief, it could be death and dying. I have caregiver courses that I kind of work with people to train caregivers so that they understand what's going on. It goes back to my teaching roots, right Of what I've just done for the last 10 years of my life, and so I'm really finding that I love doing that and that's when I started the podcast, because I love to talk to people and so there's definitely a lot of different things that I didn't think I was gonna do when I did my training. That I realized and it's not just me, I mean, it is other death dwellers we're just kind of not at a point yet culturally where we can make enough money to support ourselves. If we're just gonna do like the kind of death that all the work that most of us were trained to do, we have to kind of branch out.
Speaker 2:And that's okay, because I'm actually finding a lot of things that I didn't expect that now I'm really enjoying and I'm finding there's a need and people really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I love teaching too, and I've had a similar experience to yours, in that you start out by thinking, oh, can you actually teach a class about this? And then you discover that, yes, you can, and it is needed, and that's always the most fun, because you're going with information that nobody else knows about, and that's why you're so needed. So I do wanna ask you a question that might be some people might roll their eyes at it, but I would say for listeners, regardless of religion or spirituality or atheism or whatever, do you find that people find comfort as they're getting towards the end of their life, or they're with a family member that's getting towards the end of their life, or is that just something we like to think?
Speaker 2:I have really seen both where some people really turn to their spirituality at the end of life, and it does bring them comfort, it brings them a sense of peace. Some people will start off as atheists and will turn to a religion at the end of life which, you know I don't know if that's just a function of it's better to believe and be wrong than not believe and be wrong. Right, maybe there's some of that happening. Maybe it is just some of the natural human ability or human desire, I guess, to want to believe in something, and some people almost go the other way, where they're like I was. You know, I believe this thing my entire life and now I'm not so sure and I'm okay not being sure.
Speaker 2:And again, that's why I love this kind of stuff, because I love having these conversations with people about what it is they're. You know they're thinking and expecting and you know sometimes they're more willing to share some of their weirder thoughts and weirder beliefs because they're like I'm dying anyway, so what do I care if this lady thinks I'm weird and so I think we're going to go to another planet when we die and I'm like amazing. I think that sounds really cool and a lot of times people want to ask me what I believe and I'm like, honestly, I don't know. I really don't know what I believe and I'm okay with that. Not knowing what I believe happens to us after we die.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people probably closer to a majority, you know are not sure, because I know I have what I'd like to believe and I have what I'm pretty sure about and but then there is that not knowing and there is concern and even fear that can come out of that, because it is a time when you really, really like to be sure and know that whoever it is, is going forward into this predictable situation. But it is the most unpredictable of all situations and you cannot know everything as much as we'd like to.
Speaker 2:No, and nobody knows for sure. I don't care what they say, nobody knows for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was reading about you and one of the things that really caught my eye is that you not only sit and talk and answer questions and support family, but you will also do your best to do some spiritual healing as well for people that request. It Is that? Tell me a little bit about that, please, of course.
Speaker 2:So it really is more again asking people questions, not trying to push my spirituality onto them. That's usually where I kind of start, and one of the things that I like to do is kind of what people would call like energy healing, reiki. But it's my own way of doing it. But I think Reiki is something that a lot of people are kind of familiar with, where it's like a guided meditation almost, where I help people relax their bodies, I help them relax their minds, and then I talk them through this visualization, this experience, where it helps to bring them within right, to feel the sense of calm, to feel the sense of peace, and even some of the healing also is, you know, the regrets, the shame, the things that they maybe didn't tell anybody else but they're really struggling with it at the end of their life. I'm there to hear all of it because I want people to die feeling like there's not those unsaid, unfinished kind of things that they maybe can't finish with the person right, and maybe the person's not around anymore, maybe the person doesn't want to talk to them. I mean, there's not much that would ever make me flinch that somebody would say, and so I'm like it's okay, you can say anything to me If you need to get it out of you.
Speaker 2:I do believe again with this like energy healing thing that if we hold these things within us, they almost cause like pockets of you know.
Speaker 2:We visualize it as like smoke or like this, like dense kind of like darker pockets, right, that that's what we hold when we hold the grief and we hold the shame and we hold the trauma, right.
Speaker 2:And if we're holding all of that before we die, I feel like that is going to make it harder for the person to transition and so we need to get it out.
Speaker 2:And so I'll use movements, I'll use again like the guided meditations, like I'll use just different techniques with people and have them be able to express these things, to come to a sense of peace within themselves so that they're ready to die. And sometimes I almost give like homework, like I have a client that I work with that I give them almost like homework assignments where I'm like all right, let's talk about these things, but first I want you to write them out or draw out a picture of what you think this thing is right. I work with everybody individually for whatever works for them to help them process, to help them heal. So that my goal is is that by the time they die, they can feel okay about the fact that they're dying, because their soul is more at peace, and I feel that's really probably, to me, the most important part of the work that I do with people. But it is all interconnected.
Speaker 1:Yeah, are you there for people with grief? Does your work continue to help people that are grieving after a death, or do you tend to just stay within the process itself?
Speaker 2:I do work with grief. Not all death doulas will Death doulas. We kind of go across the spectrum. I like to say I'm before, during and after death. So again, the preparation before, the during process, but then also with the grief afterwards, because a lot of people that is when they feel you know, we have all again, we have the support around us a lot of times as somebody's dying and then they die and then the people that are left behind are just kind of okay, well, now, what? Now, what do I do? I've even talked to people one woman who was a widow and a fairly young widow and she said you know, they come in, they put all the equipment out, you know everything's in the house, and then he died. And then it was like, okay, my house is a mess, Everything's still all over the place.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:What do I do from here? You know, like a nail, I have nobody. My friends aren't really around anymore. I don't have any support. And so, as a death doula, that is where I still like to work with my clients, and I've actually had clients that I've only worked with around grief, where they've come to me after a death. One woman it was a baby had died and so I worked with her for a while. Another person that was a younger person, their parent had committed suicide. I worked with them for a while. Again, I don't shy away from the really hard stuff. That's when people need this support the most, and so again, I would kind of do techniques with them. I would do some relaxation, some movement.
Speaker 2:I think with grief especially, moving our bodies is so important. I try to incorporate all the senses with grief work because it's can we just believe. You want to hold it all in. We're a, we feel alone. We feel that sense of people don't understand, they don't want to hear about it anymore. You know our culture. They basically give you a timeline. If it's a child that dies, you have this much time. If it's a spouse that does this much time, you know like that it doesn't work that way. There's no timeline, and so we get this shame and we hold it in, and so again it's going to stick in our bodies, and so I like to really incorporate this like holistic kind of using all the different senses to work through the grief, to be able to express the grief so that we can maneuver through the world in a way that feels a little bit better for us, doesn't go away, but it can get better than what we typically do in our culture when it comes to grief.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I saw a lovely little cartoon once about grief and it was just described. As you do, grief is a bookcase that moves into your room and you don't necessarily want it there but it's not leaving. And then one day you put a book on the bookshelf. The bookshelf is now serving you in a little bit and then, maybe after a while, you put a little plant on there and then you know another book and then maybe you decide to paint it one day. So the bookshelf is not going away, but it can become part of you in a more positive way. Not to say that the sadness ever goes, but you know that it's just more, more part of you. I don't know what the word is, that I'm looking for more part of you in a comfortable way or an easier way or you know something, but that you know the bookcase that's moved in with you is something that can serve to help you to.
Speaker 2:I don't like that. I've never thought of it that way, but it's a. I'm a very visual person, right. So in my head I'm visualizing that and I'm like, oh, I really like that because, you're right, I never going to completely be gone, and I think one of the things that I've heard people say that I really have loved is when somebody dies and I've even heard people say this about children, which again, part of me is like I can't imagine.
Speaker 2:But after they go through some of the healing process, there's gratitude for no matter how much time they had that person, whether it was 12 years or 20 years or whatever. It was just this sense of gratitude that they were in my life, and it doesn't mean that there's this like spiritual bypassing of it, of like, no, it's wonderful, I'm fine. But we do tend to sometimes as humans, right, we get so stuck in the sadness and the loss and there's this feeling that if I quote, unquote move on, it means I'm okay that they're gone, it means that I don't miss them, it means that I forgot about them, and that doesn't have to be the case. We don't have to get stuck in our grief in order to feel like we're honoring the person. We can still be grateful for any time that we have with them. We can still celebrate anniversaries, we can still create rituals around. You know things that they enjoy doing and we enjoy doing with them. So now, once a year, we do it, still in a very ritualistic way.
Speaker 2:But, not be stuck in it so that day to day we just can't function. So we can work with grief better than we do.
Speaker 1:I think that's a wonderful place to kind of bring this to a close for now. But if you had to choose, like a piece of advice that you wanted to leave our listeners with, you know number one piece of advice from jail to death to love, is there something that leaps to your mind in particular?
Speaker 2:My biggest thing is. I tell people often to just start the conversations with your loved ones in small ways. It doesn't have to be a big. Let's sit down and talk about death and talk about all these things. Just start the conversation and just be like, hey, have you ever thought about the end of life? You know, have you ever thought about what you would want after you die? Do you want to be cremated or do you want to be buried? Like, just like little conversations. Just get the conversation started, because once you start it will get easier. It's just that fear of even starting it stops so many people. So you don't have to dive into the pool. Just dip your toes in a little bit and just start it a little, and then you can work from there. Okay.
Speaker 1:All right, that sounds good. I can hang on to that, I think, and I hope our listeners can too. Jill, tell us a little bit about how people can get in touch with you if they are interested, because you do some virtual sessions as well as in-person work. Is that correct? That is correct.
Speaker 2:I do work virtually and in-person, and I do, again work with people before, during and after death. I work with caregivers as well. So if you are caring for somebody, or even you know, we all have parents that are aging, if we have our parents still around, we're gonna have to navigate this at some point. So I'm happy to support people through any of that, and my business name is End of Life Clarity. That's my website, that's what I am on all social media, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, whatever it is. But even on Facebook, people are welcome to friend me. I'd like to have conversations with people you know right on Facebook. It's kind of a nice way to interact, but you could reach out to me on any of those platforms and I'm happy to talk to people.
Speaker 1:That's great. We'll make sure that we get those in the show notes as well. Thank you for everyone. No problem, jill. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for kind of carrying me through this conversation, and I know my experience. Inexperience is showing and yeah cannot thank you enough. Everybody is just Jill at endoflifeclaritycom. We'll have all of our information in the show notes, and thank you for taking on this topic with us. It's definitely a tough one, but I'm certainly leaving feeling more relaxed and a little more uplifted than I was when we started, so I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Wonderful Well, thank you so much, it was my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you to our listeners for today. I want to shout out Atlanta, georgia, manassas, virginia and BelmaPen Hope I got that right in Belize. Thank you so much. I see you. I appreciate you, looking forward to seeing you on our next show. But if you're enjoying these episodes, please leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform. Really helps the show out. Thanks so much for being here today. We'll see you next time.