Today was the last session for my End of Life Doula training. Although there is still coursework to complete, and I won’t officially be finished until the end of May.. it still feels like a mini milestone worth celebrating.

For me now, there is no wonder as to why so many of us are fearful of death. It is a subject we are so ill-informed about and one we hand over so eagerly to minimise our contact with it. We are truly doing ourselves a disservice by turning a blind eye to the end of life. Death should be spoken about openly, we should be informed of our options as the norm, educated in the processes, and treat it with the same reverence as most would a birth or a wedding. There is so much that can be offered to us in our final months, weeks, days, hours, minutes - and even more available to our loved ones as they journey through bereavement after we pass. Personally, I have found so much peace with the information I’ve learned, empowered by the choices I didn't know I had.

I didn’t expect to find my longing to advocate and my burning desire to “fuck the system” within the structure of this course. Death is so deeply entrenched in capitalism, ‘over the last century, death has been transformed into a multi-million pound industry’ (Dead Good). As with many things in Western society, it’s time for us to take our power back.

There is plenty more learning to be done, and I’m excited to continue to expand my knowledge around the practice of, and our options with, death and dying. I’m looking forward to sharing this information with you in the future, when my brain starts to thaw from its winter hibernation.

Anyways, this is my next round of death related reading.. which I really should make a start with, as the trashy romance novel pile has definitely been winning as of late.