'I Help People Die With Peace'

END-OF-LIFE DOULA MARTHA HEYMANN HELPS CLIENTS FACE THEIR FEARS TO FIND COMFORT-AND EVEN BEAUTY-IN THEIR FINAL DAYS: 'WE NEED TO HONOR DEATH'

- EILEEN FINAN

In a candlelit room in a Houston home, Martha Heymann has set up a makeshift altar at the bedside of her client Richard Branscomb. She picks up a Tibetan singing bowl and strikes it three times, marking the beginning of a ritual to focus all thought on a stark reality: Branscomb, 64, is dying. As an end-of-life doula, Heymann is here to help Branscomb, who has cancer, accept the fact that he may have only weeks to live-and to make his remaining days as meaningful as possible. "We help people do the work of dying," she says. "When someone companions you down that road, you can remove some of the fear and create beauty and sacredness."

That kind of companionship was something Heymann, 62, longed for 30 years ago when she was a new mother caring for her dying husband, Eddie. Before his death in 1993 at age 44, "no one was there to help Eddie know how to die or to teach me how to help him die," she says. "We missed many an opportunity to create a beautiful space around the end of his life." Today Heymann sees her work as a calling and a healing of that wound: "I like to think that I am who we did not have."

Like birth doulas, end-of-life doulas (sometimes known as "death doulas") offer care and comfort rather than medical treatment. "Hospice workers do a lot, but they can't invest in a family emotionally," says Heymann. "We do." Because the profession is unregulated, exact numbers are hard to determine, but the field has been growing over the past few years, says Doug Simpson, executive director of the International End-of-Life Doula Association. "As a culture, we avoid conversations around death, but during the pandemic, when loved ones were dying, we had to face it," Simpson says. "That was transforming."