HBM135: Dying Well

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Amanda is a death doula, someone who provides practical, emotional, and spiritual support to people who are about to die. Sometimes this means that Amanda helps dying people and their families sort out their end-of-life paperwork and advanced care directives; Sometimes she helps dying people plan their own memorials. And sometimes she sits with people as they die. She says the tasks she performs are different for every person, but that her goal is always the same: to advocate for the wishes of the dying.

Amanda says that, in her experience, death is often harder for the loved ones to accept than it is for the person who is dying. “It’s almost like, in Western culture, it’s not OK to die… Like we guilt the dying person into trying to keep them here longer, with medicine and medical procedures because we, the survivors, are not capable of letting go of that person.” Because of this, Amanda recommends that people grieve by holding and touching the bodies of their loved ones after they die. She believes that talking about death openly will help people be less afraid.

Producer: Bethany Denton

Editor: Jeff Emtman

Music: The Black Spot

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:07.0	This is Here be monsters.
0:21.0	I'm outside right now walking my dog, which is something that I tried to do actually multiple times a day, not only
0:29.2	for him, but for me too, working with death and grief often can be fairly heavy work and when I first started training to become a death dula. My teacher said to be careful of being sucked into the
0:58.3	underworld. And so I asked for clarification because I really didn't understand spiritually where she was coming from.
1:20.7	And what she was talking about is, you know, which I think a lot of health workers,
1:25.0	especially people in hospice, understand, as if you're around death and you are human,
1:29.2	where you still treat the people with humanity and kindness. It can be very difficult to not
1:37.6	let all the people around you who are dying or experiencing intense grief to really impact your
1:47.4	emotional well-being. A lot of what death work is about is honoring the people who have died by living a happy and complete life because you never
2:09.2	know when they're going to be gone and grief comes from the unsaid feelings and the unsaid love and the
2:16.2	things that you can no longer say to them. So it has helped me put things in
2:22.2	perspective, help my put put things in perspective,
2:23.0	helped put my life in perspective to be honest,
2:26.0	and has given my life a lot more meaning. Here be monsters, the
2:45.0	monsters, the podcast about.
2:48.3	Putting the body in the parlor.
2:50.6	The podcast about the unknown.
2:55.0	I'm often.
2:57.0	I'm often asked what does the death dula do. A death dula is essentially a non-medical support for someone going through their end of life
3:17.4	transition.
3:19.0	So that would include anything from paperwork, so practical and spiritual support that is given by
	...

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