Finally! A Show About Death Care Provider

woman in Bellingham. In Massage, I had a friend Zoe from Alaska, who is about twenty years younger than me, and was just this ball of like fun and it was just silly and full of life. And one day we were at lunch with one of our teachers and Zoey said, we're going to go to birth doula school. And I looked at Zoe and our teacher and I was like, okay, I mean, if it means I get

to hang out with you, I'll go do it. And my teacher looked at me and was like, no offense, but I probably would not hire you for a birth doul And I was like me either, me either. I have no desire to take care of pregnant people, no desire at all. I remember I was like, the please tick on my hair and give me ice chips? Is that a round ice chip? Because I really wanted square and I know I could not even take care of me. And my tea said, there's death du lists and I said,

what what do you mean? And she told me about the teacher in Bellingham, and so I looked her up and all of that and started to volunteer for Providence Hospice, which was really awkward because they're a religious institution and I was really conflicted. They limit folks access to end of life choice on their hospice, so it was a struggle for me to even share my time with them. End of life choice is legal in eleven states in the Continent, and it allows you life ending medications when

you have a terminal illness. Each date has like different parameters around it, like a different waiting period and how many doctors you have to see and stuff like that. And in Washington, our law was just updated, so our waiting period is now seven days and you still need two physicians, but it's the feen days. Too Many people were missing it because they don't find out until too late that they can actually have that choice, and then

fourteen days was too long. So Providence and other religiously affiliated hospices don't allow people to They don't support folks in that process. They won't their doctors won't be a consulting doc or a prescribing doc, and those people have to look out outside of there, and also some of their policies around how you end your relationship with the people that you're volunteering with. It felt wrong to me, like when someone died. That was the end of your relationship.

You didn't get to go say goodbye. Like the role that I was in was like when they died, I just didn't go over anymore. I filed out a report and I got a new person. I just want to come say goodbye. I would like to give you a hug and say thank you for sharing your time with me. And you know, you just lost someone. You have a caring relationship with the people that you are spending time with, and so that just felt very out of line with

my integrity. And even more so when I showed up at a funeral and saw four other people from the hospice at the funeral, I was like, Yeah, what are we doing. We all care and we're all breaking the rules, Like this is not okay, and so I stopped. I stopped that and did more training with Ashley up in Bellingham, and over time, the type of care that I provided to elders, death care and massage sort of started to mix and mingle. It's very much when I first got

started in death care. It is community care. It's not really like a client relationships. It was more we would experience like a traumatic or a sudden death and people would be like, I don't know what to do. And in small communities, when you have a person, you know, I have a person who knows what they do, so

folks would be like call of Shauna. Today we are holding our first Sunday morning m oh you are an I ng which is a space for us to just gather and be in our grief, not with a particular focus, but having a space where there's a fire and something warm to drink was were the two things that we knew we could do repeatedly and be able to show up and be present. And so that's really what my death care looked like for years was community situations. And

then that's where we are. We are in our community care home in South Seattle.

was here for you, you know. Two thy and eighteen, I was given the nonprofit a sacred passing by Ashley Benham from who was in Bellingham at the time, the school that I had studied in. The founder she said, I'm going to go to a nursing school and here's this wily teenager of a nonprofit for you, and like any any good scorpio, I said, thank you, and we changed it. There was a good solid base for death care.

But what I had learned over years of caring for other people was that it was a very prescriptive method that I had learned from, like it was a recipe, and that recipe is not for everybody at all. It was a very clear set of procedures from the founder's perspective of this is how we present ourselves. This is how we look, This is how our hair is, this is our jewelry is, this is our clothing, This is how we greet people. You know, don't wear more than two pairs of earrings at once. My hair was a

few different colors and that was inappropriate. So it was this whole. It was like a medicalized and professionalized method of caring for folks dressed in community care. A small group of us started to look at the curriculum and just add to it, and we were adding to it and adding to it, and pretty soon it just it

looked different. And over the last few years we have developed what feels like a really wonderful open way to practice death care for folks, to sort of give them a pool to move in and figure out what is your what does your care look like? In that time, a sacred passing started our program A Place to Die. So A Place to Die is three years old. It is a program exactly that if someone knows that they are very near the end of their life and they want to die at home or out of a facility,

I mean, for any reason. We don't ask why. We just welcome people. Sometimes folks they don't want their family to have the memory of them dying at home, and so they would like to die in a home, but not their home. Other times, people don't have a home, or they are on a hospice and want to use medical aid and dying and can't do it, or they're in a private care home and the private care home will not let them ingest on site. So many people have been moved on their last day of life to

our homes because their facility won't let them. It's painful, it's not what they want to be doing. It's new, and also everybody has been wildly thankful. And what a place that I started as is people sharing a room in their home. There's so many people living in these houses that are too big for them, and our houses are absolutely unaffordable, and there's so many people living without shelter that we were like, we have to share. There has to be people who are willing to share, and

we wound up gathering eight people. And what that means is this person just has to share the room in their home. They don't have to do any of the care work. We will clean it up, we will do all of the things. Your room just needs to be available to us. And during the pandemic we were allowed to. We received people in who wanted to be with their family where they couldn't be if they were in a nursing home. Could they be transferred to our places? Yes,

and then their family could come in. And so that like we did that. That was when a place that I started. And so then Sally was like, oh, I want to do a death plan. So she did a death plan and she wanted this then to be a place to die. She's like, how does my house do that? I was like, you just do that. You want to share a room? She's like, I got all these rooms and so I was like okay. She's like, well, actually I want you to have the house when I die.

And I was like okay. You know, like people say things all the time, and I just kept coming for massage and one day she called and asked me to come over. And I was out with my neighbor at the time, and so we came over and she opened up the door with flowers like a housewarming plant, and the quick claim deed, that's like what what I was like, I need to like record this for my own memory. I feel like I'm not going to remember any of it.

And so we sat down and we talked about it, and so there's a video of Sally talking about why she did this.

My daughter will not take care of me. She's already said, I will help Dante pay for it. We will put you in a wonderful home. And my son is like mom, I'll take care of you. I do a lot of medical aid and dying care work. It's either medical aid and dying or it's a traumatic death. That are like the predominant sides of my death care work. I am a volunteer with End of Life Washington and they are a nonprofit that was started and successfully achieved medical aid

and dying in Washington State. They started with volunteers to like just help people through the process and in the state of Washington now medical facilities depend on End of Life Washington to do that, and especially the ones that are religious, and so they have about one hundred volunteers and so people will be referred to them and they

send out a request can someone help this person? And so what we do w in that situation is we will learn about someone's condition and then work to get them set up with medical providers and depending on what that person wants and the volunteer's ability, like the type of care they get shifts. Mine is like a full care if they would like it. I do a lot of things that most of the other volunteers are like,

what why are you doing that. I will sit there and talk with someone about a death plan, do you want to do this, what are we going to do with your body afterwards? Where that's not a typical thing that folks will talk about, but I know from being in those situations a lot of times when someone then dies on their medical aid and dying medicine, folks will then look at me and say, Okay, what do we do now. I don't want those situations. It's not fun for anybody, and so I try to do all of

that with the people I help in advance. I predominantly see folks with cancer using medical aid and dying. In Washington State, medical aid and dying is not accessible to you if you have Alzheimer's or dementia immediately upon a diagnosis.

So you could be diagnosed today and be perfectly fine and just understand that this is going to be a progressive disease, and you still do not have your choice from that point on what Folks who have those like Alzheimer's or dimension they often choose voluntary stopping of eating and drinking, which is called VSAID, and we support that here too, and VSAID is a longer process, but with medical support, with a hospice who's willing to prescribe a

certain regiment of medications that hospices prescribe for everybody, the thirst and the hunger is really easily mitigated. It sounds preposterous and wild because we are so intrinsically linked to water and food, and food means so many things to so many people, Like not eating sounds hard and uncomfortable. And V said, with medical support have been some of

the like Calmus deaths that I've seen. They're longer than medical aid and dying and require much more care, but it's still someone being able to make their choice and the people who love them are there caring for them.

I have seen, like the healing for the people around after that is so much different folks who are using medical aid and dying And V said, like they say the things they wanted to say, They see the people they wanted to see, they do the things they wanted to do, And while it's sad and devastating, there is an amount of pressure that's like released from the emotional valve that folks experience in those processes because they know it's not a surprise, and just that understanding allows you

to like be present in that situation so differently.

the world or nothing is ever going to get better to like take that energy to a loved line to be like, hey, like this is sad and you need to be here.

and a anti nausea pill. Well you take those and you wait an hour, let your belly get sort of settled. And everybody says that anti anxiety medicine is bullshit, doesn't work. They're like, this is what they give me. I'm like, hey, I know, you can take whatever you would like as long as you don't fall asleep. So if you have other tools that you would like to do, go ahead

whatever you want. Just know that if you fall asleep, you're gonna wake up and be like what I cared for a gentleman once who wanted to ingest his medicine at four o'clock and I said, okay, I'll come over. Well, at three forty five, his regular care person gave him his meds, which one of them was a xanax, and then combined with our next meds fifteen minutes later, it put him to sleep. None of us understood, like I didn't know he had those medicines from his normal care provider.

So he was like, I'm going to use the restroom. And you went to use the restroom and fell asleep there, so we had to move him to his bed. He woke up and was like what it didn't work and we were like, no, you didn't take it yet. You didn't take it yet, you fell asleep, and he was like, what do you mean I fell asleep?

and that was it. After the medicine, someone will be awake for roughly five to ten minutes, and I always tell people like that time period will go so much faster than you ever think it will. It will feel like one minute. And so it's very important when I work with folks who are taking medal Klein and dying. We talk a lot about that five minutes. What do you want of that five minutes? Who do you want in here? Is there something you want to listen to?

Is there something you want to hear? Is there a scripture you want? Prayer like? What is important to you? Those are your last exchanges with people? And everybody around is always shocked. Even though I say it goes quick and I try really hard to prepare folks, they are always not ready for the speed in which that happens.

Also then ridiculously surprised that people don't die immediately because they go into a coma, and then each body takes in that medicine differently, so someone could die within fifteen minutes. The longest person I've cared for was thirty nine hours. That was before they changed the medicine. They changed the way that it was mixed, and now we have not had a death that took that long. But yeah, I think it's my ability to just hold heavy things that

allows me to do this. Like it doesn't. It doesn't make me uncomfortable to hold heavy things. It doesn't make me uncomfortable to talk about heavy things. I couldn't tell you how I came to be this way. I just know that I can when people say to me frequently, like I'll be caring for someone and they're like, you have a tough job, and I will say thank you for thank you know, thank you for acknowledging that. And

let's remember that people teach kindergarten. There's kindergarten teachers out there. I could never nope, nope. So I feel very strongly that we are all made for something. And if you ask a kindergarten teacher, how can you, like, how can they do that? I don't I like doing it? Like you know, like I bet you, they couldn't really pinpoint what makes them, what caused them to have the ability

to do that. I just really firmly believe that we are all we all have something that we're good at, and it's when we're able to step outside of those lines of capitalism, the shoulds, the paths that society has set up for us, that we get to discover that. I think people are often surprised at the fact that their body can stay home if they die at home or if they die in a hospital, Like your body can go back home, you don't have to go to a funeral home. And I think people are shocked by that.

Why would you go home? Well, A, it's free, it's free. You can go home. You can have a wake at home. People can come just like they would anywhere else. They can come and they can see you, and your body is cared for in a loving way, and it's preserved and it's not any of the things that people might want to scare you with. You know, like it doesn't move, it doesn't stink like it's about And people are often like, well,

I go home and then I leave that same day. No, you can stay, like, we can cool your body for however long you need it to be. There's a lot of cultures that, you know, they bring folks home for much longer than you would think. Some folks bring people home for ninety days and there's a lot of care and that is perfectly legal, and I don't think that people know that and knowing that it does so much

having a person come home if they can. When they come home, you're able to metabolize that grief and that death so much differently because you're doing things so like not staying not staying busy, but like doing things for this person. You're caring for them. You get to like you get to see that they're dead. You touch and you feel that they're dead, you hear that they're dead.

All of your senses are understanding this and they have Like there's just this time that your body gets to process this instead of the two hours that you can dip into the funeral home with a whole bunch of people around, Like you get to be at home. You get to wake up in the morning and go downstairs and wail on the floor if you want, and then get up and make yourself a cup of coffee and go sit like you get to do what you need.

And also when people come home, it reintegrates dying into our living because depending on your household and who lives there, Like you get younger people who now understand we die and it's not scary. It's sad someone we love has gone. We don't get to talk to them anymore. Like, yes,

it's all of those things and it's normal. I love the after death because because we don't know, I feel like it's the one thing I get to make wonderful in my life, and like a very nebulous, wonderful like I know there's something there has to be, Like, this is not it. This is just not it. It's so ridiculously arrogant to think that this is it. I think that there are souls everywhere, like I think they're implants.

I think there is a source energy that we all share anything that is living, And to think of the galaxies that exist out there, like I might die and this energy might go to like four thousand years ago, or maybe it just lives in a plant or you know, like I'm not connecting my consciousness with it, but just the energy. Yeah. I have a friend Patricia who I went to massage school with, and she wound up getting cancer and was in Ohio when she died, and I

knew she was nearing the end of her life. That actually the day before she had called and to say goodbye. She was like, I know, I'm going and so we talked for a wonderfully long time. But I was in my kitchen and I was looking at a bunch of fabric and Patricia was an amazing seamstress. Every time I would make something, she would look at it and say, that's garbage. And I feel like, Patricia, that's so mean

and she's like, I'm just honest, like she was. And I was looking at a piece of fabric, and all of a sudden I heard wee and I was like, oh, Patricia died. Like I heard her spirit do something and she was so delighted. She was so delighted by whatever it was, and she and she had died. From that moment on, I was I was like, there's something good, even if it's like until my conscious until I'm unaware of my consciousness, it's gonna be something that I've never expected.