A Sweet Conversation About Dying with Death Doula Alua Arthur | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

1. SSSimon Sinek0:00

   What is the most interesting secret or story you've ever heard somebody tell you on their death bed?

2. AAAlua Arthur0:04

   I've heard so many secrets.

3. SSSimon Sinek0:06

   Oh, tell one. What's your favorite? Come on, come on.

4. AAAlua Arthur0:09

   Um, about the kids, about mistresses.

5. SSSimon Sinek0:11

   The kids.

6. AAAlua Arthur0:12

   Yeah.

7. SSSimon Sinek0:12

   Other families.

8. AAAlua Arthur0:13

   About like other families. There's so many other families. So many other families. And I think that 23andMe and ancestry.com and all those places, we're about to find out a whole lot of families.

9. SSSimon Sinek0:23

   That's right. [laughs] It's all coming out.

10. AAAlua Arthur0:25

    Yeah. Nobody's dying with secrets anymore. [both laughing]

11. SSSimon Sinek0:29

    Let's talk about death, dying, being dead. Those words are so jarring, literally just hearing them make many of us squirm. It's such a morbid conversation. Who wants to have it? Or maybe we're thinking about it the wrong way. That's where Alua Arthur comes in. She's flipping the script. She's a New York Times bestselling author and one of the leading death doulas. Like a doula helps some people prepare for birth, death doulas help other people navigate life's final chapter with clarity and grace. But for those of us who aren't currently in the process of dying and aren't navigating grief, thinking about death may actually be the best hack to focus on life. This is A Bit of Optimism. [upbeat music] So I'm always fascinated by people's career paths, right?

12. AAAlua Arthur1:27

    Mm-hmm.

13. SSSimon Sinek1:28

    Doctors and lawyers tend to know pretty young that they're gonna be a doctor and lawyer 'cause you have to make a decision, you know, pretty young to start going through that amount of schooling, et cetera. And I have to believe that being a death doula wasn't like your childhood dreams. You weren't helping your teddy bears take their final breaths. I'm so curious how someone finds themself doing this.

14. AAAlua Arthur1:49

    It was a sharp right turn. I was a lawyer.

15. SSSimon Sinek1:53

    [laughs]

16. AAAlua Arthur1:53

    I started out on the path of lawyer, so I did all the schooling and took the bar and started practicing and was not having a good time. It was not working for me. It wasn't a fit. And I also just felt frustrated, and still do, that we ask young people to choose their profession so early in their lives, you know, and like commit to something, something with the big financial responsibility of law school. I'll put that as a side. But I was a lawyer, and then life came and worked its magic on me, and grief worked its magic on me, and here we are. I'm practicing death work instead.

17. SSSimon Sinek2:23

    So did you start in grief work and find yourself to death work, or do you, do you talk about them, or is that one thing?

18. AAAlua Arthur2:28

    To me, they're inexorably linked. You know, they belong together.

19. SSSimon Sinek2:32

    Right.

20. AAAlua Arthur2:32

    They can be separate though, because grief doesn't exist only with death. But you know, it's like an open marriage where death is married to grief and monogamous with grief, but grief is super polyamorous and goes wherever it wants to. [laughs] Yeah. So when talking about death, I can't help but talk about grief. But I'm mostly talking about-

21. SSSimon Sinek2:48

    But I mean your, but the way you got in, like what came, what was, what was the chicken, what was the egg? I guess that doesn't help resolve the problem because that's actually a debate. But you know, for, in, in the actual way and thick [laughs] the way things worked out, like what happened?

22. AAAlua Arthur3:00

    Yeah. Well, what happened-

23. SSSimon Sinek3:01

    What happened that you're doing what you're doing now?

24. AAAlua Arthur3:03

    Okay. So I was-

25. SSSimon Sinek3:04

    I didn't even know death doula was a thing.

26. AAAlua Arthur3:05

    It's super a thing. So I was practicing law at Legal Aid. I got really burnt out, absolutely depressed, and like a clinical depression. And I took a leave of absence where I went to Cuba and I met a young fellow, fellow traveler on the bus. We started talking a lot about her life and we started talking about death. She was traveling because she wanted to see the top six places in the world before she died 'cause she had uterine cancer. And so that initial spark was like, "Oh wait, hold on a minute. People die?" And I'd been privileged enough in my life not to have known anybody who died. All my grandparents were dead by the time I was of age. Uh, so nobody close to me had died. I hadn't had that experience yet. And I was really fascinated that she was looking at the end of her life or at least contemplating it. So we talked a lot about her relationship to her death. I asked her a lot about her life and what meaning it had and what she'd made of it thus far. And it helped me look at my own life through some lens that I hadn't previously considered. And that lens helped me see that I did not like the life, the life that I was living. Like it wasn't, it wasn't what I'd wanted out of my life, you know?

27. SSSimon Sinek4:06

    Mm-hmm.

28. AAAlua Arthur4:06

    So I, on the bus, was like, "Well, shoot, if we can talk about this and it can create purpose for people like it did for me during that very brief exchange that we had about our mortality..." Well, it was 14 hours. It wasn't brief. But in that one moment of time-

29. SSSimon Sinek4:21

    Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

30. AAAlua Arthur4:22

    ... then it held so much, it held so much weight for me. And so I started really leaning into that for myself. When I came back from Cuba, my brother-in-law became sick, my older sister's husband. His name was Peter St. John. And I got to journey with him through the last two months of his life really, really closely. And I saw how isolating it is to be, uh, dying, to be in the system and not have the support there that we needed. You know, there were plenty of doctors, there were plenty of medical folks, but there wasn't somebody just to hold our hearts and to, you know, remind us that it was hard and to offer resources and a kind word and a listening heart. There was nobody like that. And so I really decided that I wanted to do that for other people. So grief came first in the way that I was grieving deeply. I was grieving my brother-in-law.

Episode duration: 45:05