How Would You Choose to Die?

There’s an incredibly important concept in death midwifery: Empowering individual and self directed choices at end of life

If you read my “about me” page, you already know my babies’ births have been integral to my choices to become a death midwife.

Birth is where I’ve found my unfathomable strength, my darkest depths, and my true limits. Birth is where I established just how dependent I am on my closest people for that strength when I plumbed my murky limits and scraped at them my with profanities and my prayers.

And birth was all of these things for me because I claimed my rights to labor and birth the way my heart and body wanted to.

I’m certainly not shaming births that have choice taken away. I’m frustrated with you about this, and you did amazing with the room you were given! Or births that embrace medications, surgery, etc. Those are valid birth choices and often necessities.

But I had a birth where the choices felt stripped from me — My first birth. It was beautiful in its own way, and my bond with my son is no less lovely. But the labor and birth were so far out of my control and my consent that I still feel like something was taken from me in the process.

That’s why I fought for choice and consent with every.little.detail of my next 3 births (Shoutout to the real MVP: Stephanie Benson, MD, my former Family Doctor, for her grace in this)

Most births in the US follow a predictable “cascade of interventions,” and a doctor/facility directed timetable. The contrast between this conventional script and the strikingly different, more “improv” feel of a birth that is parent-directed, is night and day.

(I promise we’re getting to the Death Part)

I want families and individuals to understand what their rights and options are in death, because if they don’t there are a lot of (sometimes very wonderful and well-meaning, and sometimes predatory) voices who will follow a script that may just not suit them— financially, spiritually, and personally.

As death approaches for you or a loved one, you may feel helpless.

Helpless to process the information being fire-hosed at you

Helpless to find time and mental energy to sort through options for funeral homes, disposition, medical care, etc.

Helpless to make the choices you’d want if finances weren’t an issue

I’m here for you.

I want to hear what’s important to you — most important to you — and give you access to my mental space and energy to chart the path forward that YOU choose, with your goals and desires front and center

You don’t have to follow the script given to you. You don’t have to keep intervening when your heart and body want to stop and enjoy your remaining days. You don’t have to have your beloved’s body whisked away before you’re done touching and seeing them.

And (this is important), you can follow that conventional script if you want to! You can choose that. But with all my heart I want it to be your choice. When you feel helpless, I want you to empower you to have agency to make your choices and not have them made for you.