A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End

Summary

Most people don’t know how to have a “good death”—but Jane Callahan does.

By day, Jane is a corporate marketer and mom, but by nights and weekends, she works with the almost-dead. As an end-of-life doula, she helps the terminally ill prepare for their imminent demise. And it has revealed invaluable truths about this temporary status called life.

Callahan peels back the curtain of one of our most taboo subjects and walks listeners through various journeys of the dying. In vignettes that weave together patients’ lives—and her own—this book will reveal to listeners all the things they didn’t know (or didn’t know they needed to know) about our last great adventure. Along the way, listeners will uncover knowledge on the raw realities of being mortal and how radical acceptance of the human condition can help us improve our deaths and lives.

Surprisingly funny and often cutting, A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End shies away from absolutist advice. These stories depict how we live our lives in shades of gray—and how some questions don’t always need answers. As an experienced death doula, Jane has spent years witnessing how our culture’s resistance to talking about death has led to preventable suffering in the last moments of life.

This account of her up-close-and-personal experiences with the emotional, physical, logistical (and dare we say spiritual) aspects of dying shows that when we talk about death, we’re actually talking about life.