A little window into my world lately

Every now and again I become aware that my life has developed this rather extraordinary rhythm where, in the space of a few days, I can be talking about dying, grief and funerals, sitting in a room watching people discover something quite profound about themselves, planning a community event, talking about carers and systems and education, preparing to honour the life of someone I care about, and then finding myself lying on a massage table being reminded that I have a body too.

That has been my world lately. It is busy, certainly, and there are moments when I look at the diary and wonder exactly who thought all of this was a good idea, although I have a fairly strong suspicion that person was me! Underneath all the movement, though, there has been something quieter happening that I have found myself noticing more and more. So much of what I am doing at the moment seems to keep bringing me back to the same question: how do we live fully while remembering that life is finite?

It sounds like a very end of life doula question, and of course it is, but increasingly I think it is simply a human question.

A few weeks ago I spent four beautiful, intense days in Melbourne facilitating our face to face End of Life Doula Intensive Course with six people who arrived with completely different lives, histories, experiences and reasons for being there. One of the great privileges of this work is watching what begins to happen when people feel safe enough to put down some of the armour they have carried, including those inner voices telling them they are not knowledgeable enough, confident enough, experienced enough or somehow “the right sort of person” to do this work.

Over those four days they leaned right in. They brought stories of people who had died, experiences they were still making sense of, questions they did not necessarily have answers for, tears, humour, curiosity and a willingness to be changed by what they were learning. As a facilitator, that changes me too. There are groups who draw something from you that you did not even know was waiting to come forward, and this was one of them. By the end I felt that lovely mixture of exhaustion and gratitude that comes when everyone in a room has genuinely shown up.

Perhaps this is one reason I remain so passionate about education in this space. We can teach information about advance care planning, dying processes, grief, after death care, services and systems, but underneath all of that we are helping people become a little more comfortable sitting beside what our culture so often asks us to avoid.

Language has been occupying a lot of my thinking for the same reason. I have been writing and talking about the language we use around death, dying and grief, and I keep returning to how powerfully words shape our experience. We say someone “passed away”, that we “lost” them, or that they “lost their battle”, sometimes because the words died, dying and death simply feel too confronting. We routinely say “loved one”, even though the person being cared for may not have been loved at all, or the relationship may have been complicated, painful or difficult.

These may seem like small linguistic choices, but they matter. When we become comfortable enough to use honest language gently, without making it harsh or clinical, we give other people permission to do the same. We also begin to loosen the idea that death somehow represents failure.

One of the reframes I love, which my dear friend Bruce taught me many years ago, is the difference between saying someone is dying from an illness and acknowledging that they are living with it. A person is living right up until that final breath leaves their body. There can still be choices, relationships, conversations, pleasure, humour, meaning and moments of enormous beauty. Even when the world has become very small, there can still be capacity, choice and control, the three Cs we talk about so often in our work.

Grief, unsurprisingly, has also been very close. This week I am heading to Brisbane to be the celebrant for the memorial of a friend, and to be with his family. There is something very different about this kind of journey when death and grief are also your work. All the knowledge, all the conversations and all the years of sitting beside families do not somehow place you outside grief when it belongs to you as well, nor would I want them to.

Sometimes we are the person supporting and sometimes we are one of the people feeling the absence. We can know a great deal about grief and still discover that there are moments when no particular words are required. What matters is turning up, being present, telling the stories, laughing where there is laughter, crying where there are tears, and creating room for all the different ways people loved and knew the person who has died.

I am reminded again that ceremony and memorial are not really about producing a perfect event. They are about making somewhere for love, complexity, memory, sadness and all the things that cannot easily be put into words to have a place to land.

At the same time, my work around grief has been broadening through my involvement with NALAG Grief Support and my instructor training in Grief First Aid. I love the growing recognition that grief literacy belongs in communities, not solely in consulting rooms. We will all encounter grief, whether through death, illness, ageing, relationships, identity, work, displacement or one of the countless other changes that ask us to let go of a life we thought we were going to have.

That same philosophy sits underneath so much of the community work we have been doing through Preparing the Way. Our Dying to Know community events, the work with Western NSW PHN, Carer Gateway training and the conversations we are now having about how these models might travel into communities right across Australia are all, at heart, about bringing knowledge back to ordinary people.

When a family suddenly needs to understand what palliative care does, how to have a conversation about wishes, what happens as someone is dying, what happens after somebody dies, where they can get help, or whether they are actually allowed to care for someone at home, that information needs to be accessible before the crisis arrives.

Death literacy is not about becoming an expert in death. It is about having enough knowledge, confidence, language and connection to community resources that death does not leave us feeling entirely powerless.

And sometimes the community part of this work looks much less formal. I recently spent a gorgeous afternoon back at one of our local Orange wineries where we held events last year. Sitting there again, looking out over this beautiful part of the world I now call home, there was something lovely about remembering all the conversations that have already happened there and knowing there are more to come this year.

I love that this work can happen in places like that. Not only in hospitals, classrooms or conference centres, but around tables, over cups of tea or glasses of something lovely, at wineries, halls, clubs, pubs and community spaces where people already gather. There is something powerful about taking conversations about dying, caring and grief out into the places where life itself is actually being lived.

Perhaps that is part of what moving to Orange has given me too. I am very conscious these days of the feeling of coming home to my little house and closing the door behind me. There is a feeling of deep safety in it that I value enormously. It is my place to exhale, to make a cup of tea, pour a glass of wine, potter about, sit quietly, cuddle into my own life and have some space where nobody particularly needs anything from me.

For someone who spends such a large amount of time in conversation with people, teaching, organising, travelling, supporting, thinking and creating, that quiet has become precious. I need the spaces in between things more than I once realised. Time to breathe is no longer something I think of as what happens if I manage to get everything else finished; I am beginning to understand that it is part of what allows everything else to happen.

I am also very aware that while my work connects me with beautiful people all around Australia and beyond, having people close by matters. Sarina Chapman has become my main support person here in Orange, as a bestie and as a colleague. There is something incredibly grounding about knowing there is someone nearby who knows me, knows this work, knows some of its demands and is simply there. We speak so often in our doula world about community and the importance of not doing caring alone, and I am reminded that those principles apply to us too.

There is another part of my world at the moment that deserves a place here because it brings me a ridiculous amount of joy, and that is the animals. I have always had a very deep connection with animals and with the natural world. When I think back to earlier parts of my life, living very remotely in the Riverina, 100 kilometres from “town”, trees, dogs, horses and cows were very much my friends. They were often the beings I felt safest with, the ones I could sit beside without needing to explain anything, perform anything or be anything other than exactly who I was. There is something about that kind of relationship that has never really left me.

These days I have what I affectionately think of as my “love pups”, two gorgeous chocolate Labs I get to spend time with, and then there is little Snowy, Sarina’s dog, who has become part of the fabric of life here too.

I recently met two beautiful greyhounds and had one of those lovely days where animals seemed to keep finding their way into it. I had proper cuddle moments with two dogs and, rather gloriously, a cow as well. There was something about standing there with this beautiful big animal, having that quiet physical connection, that took me straight back to something very old and familiar in myself.

Animals have a way of bringing me completely into the moment. They offer me a relationship where very few words are required and remind me of something I know but can easily forget: presence does not always need language.

Perhaps those friendships I had with trees, horses, cows and dogs all those years ago were teaching me something about accompaniment long before I had ever heard the words end of life doula. They taught me about staying close, noticing, not needing to fix, being comfortable with silence and allowing connection to be enough. It makes me smile to realise that, after everything life has brought in between, I am still finding some of my safest and happiest moments in much the same places.

For more than forty years, natural therapies have also been part of my life, beginning with acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and later Reiki, which remains part of my daily practice. More recently I have been having regular Kahuna bodywork, and it has affected me much more deeply than I anticipated.

I spend an enormous amount of my life thinking, talking, organising, teaching, supporting, creating and holding space for other people. Kahuna has been inviting me to come back into my own body, to soften rather than organise, to receive rather than provide, and sometimes simply to notice what is there without immediately trying to do something about it. That is not always as easy as it sounds. Having a skilled, present and grounded practitioner opens a space for my healing; mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Thank you Rob.

The timing feels particularly lovely because I am preparing to speak at the Natural Therapies Expo in Mittagong at the end of this month. I will be speaking about the intersection between natural therapies and end of life care. So many natural therapists already know how to sit with a whole person rather than simply a condition. They know that somebody arriving with shoulder pain may also be carrying grief, fear, family stress, a diagnosis or a life transition they have barely spoken about. Death, dying and grief are already walking through the doors of natural therapy practices. My hope is that we can help practitioners become more comfortable recognising that, talking about it and knowing where their role begins and ends.

The more I do this work, the less interested I become in drawing hard lines between living and dying, wellbeing and illness, grief and love, professional and personal. Human lives simply do not arrange themselves into those tidy boxes.

There are days filled with strategic plans, conference abstracts, presentations and conversations about how we build sustainable education across Australia, and there are days spent travelling to communities and talking with rooms full of strangers who, by the end of the day, have shared extraordinary pieces of their lives with one another. Then there are other days when the thing that matters most is sitting beside someone, hearing a story, remembering a friend, spending an afternoon at a winery, coming home and closing my own front door, cuddling a dog or a cow, or allowing somebody else to look after me for a while.

Perhaps one of my biggest reminders lately is that I am included in the care equation too. Those of us who work around illness, caring, grief and death can become very skilled at giving and making room for other people, sometimes so skilled that we forget to make room for ourselves.

I am learning, again, that self care is not something separate from my precious work. Neither are friendship, home, laughter, massage, quiet afternoons, beautiful places, good food, animals, people who know us well, or simply having nowhere else we need to be for a few hours. They are part of the ecology that keeps us able to care.

So that is a little window into my world at the moment. There is Brisbane ahead of me this week, a friend to honour and a family to be with. There are more community events on the horizon, more teaching, more conversations and, no doubt, more planes and road trips. There is my little house in Orange waiting for me to come home again, the people and animals around me who help make this place feel like home, and a growing understanding that breathing space is not an indulgence but something I need to protect.

There has been death and there has been enormous life. There have been tears and a ridiculous amount of laughter. There have been rooms full of people willing to learn, communities willing to talk about things we were once told should remain behind closed doors, families trusting me with precious stories, friendships reminding me that I am human before I am a doula, and some beautiful invitations to come home to myself along the way.

After all these years, I still feel incredibly privileged to be doing this work. Perhaps I also understand more clearly than ever that preparing for death has never really been about death alone. It is about how we care for one another, how we allow ourselves to be cared for, and how we choose to live while we are here.