Night Rose Deathcare Arizona Desert Agave
Night Rose Deathcare Arizona Saguaro

PHILOSOPHY

Preparing for one’s final days can be overwhelming, alienating, and frightening, especially when the body and mind begin to shift away from the fuller capabilities on which we’ve long relied. Uncertainties and unknowns can loom everywhere, from changes in our health to what happens to our physical and spiritual selves when we die. There are dozens of decisions to be made that can range from the practical (estate planning, where we elect to receive care, maintaining our household) to the personal (how we’d like to be remembered, which people we’d like to be with us at our final breath, tending to spiritual traditions). And this is all happening at a time when you are likely observing a mix of new and familiar emotions competing in your heart: fear, relief, humor, confusion, gratitude, guilt, anger, love, anxiety, and more.  

Still, facing the end of life also can be an experience that is deeply intimate, joyful, insightful, connecting, and uniquely restorative. As a death midwife and funeral celebrant, I have boundless respect for the divine affair of dying, drawing from my hands-on experience as a caregiver, companion, mortuary employee, and hospice volunteer. My role is to meet you where you are in your death journey, hold space with empathy and deeply engaged listening, and help you to discover, restore, and maintain agency during this profound time.

Untangling the Idea of a Good Death

Some people think that a death doula’s role is to help you have a “good death,” but that sentiment has never sat well with me. Having witnessed up close the metamorphosis that death delivers, I understand that there’s always a level of unpredictability involved. That’s part of what makes it extraordinary.

“Good” is subjective and linked to my perceptions, my values, my experiences. It comes with expectation—and expectation mixes often with failure. What any individual considers good for themselves may not be considered so by others; why should we burden ourselves with another mortal achievement, fret over whether, of all things, we are doing death correctly? Part of my function in your ecosystem is to lessen your burden, not add things to an already heavy basket. Besides, aiming for a “good death” is rather a vague goal; it generalizes an experience that is so layered and individual. What, exactly, ought to be “good” about it? The medical care? The social support? One’s spiritual health? A certain quickness or slowness?

I can’t guarantee that your death will be peaceful, painless, and swift. For all of our modern technologies and millennia of experience, dying remains at its core as mysterious as the ocean: a place we revere and that feels in some ways familiar, but whose depths exceed our capacity to fully explore or understand. But I can assure you that when the time comes, your body will know what to do, and that I’ll be there answering your questions, providing support, and helping you flow into death with resolve and agency.   

I’ve learned that there is no hard stop. Once the body starts to shut down, a transition begins, but it isn’t an abrupt halt, pivot, and exit. It is not a clean rupture or detachment. Life and death are mirrored in the tide; there is a rushing in with the first breath we take and a slipping out with the last exhalation. We leave behind evidence of our existence that persists long after our passing—the watermarks of our lives—and change the shape of everything we have touched. I’m here to honor and sync with your individual rhythm, meeting your needs to the very best of my abilities.

Your sacred autonomy is my north star. I center and respect your unique heritage, history, circumstances, preferences, intersections, traditions, relationships, values, identities, customs, faith, privacy, and definitions of safety in each moment of our work together.