Last Day Presents: “Making Peace with The End” (Squeezed Ep 7)

Let me know what you think about this video. What's it take to be a mentor with big brothers, big sisters? It takes 30 minutes in a cup of coffee, a video game, best 2 out of 3. It takes sharing thumbs up emojis, clapping emojis, and loaded nachos at halftime. That's how you make an impact on a young kid's life. So go on, share a few hours a month, because mentorship may sound huge, but the truth is, it takes little to be big. To learn more, volunteer or donate, go to bebignow.org. Hey everybody, it's me, Yvette Nicole Brown. So I have a confession. I am one of the most morbid people you will ever meet. Whether it's heartbreak or even just a traffic jam, I remind myself on the regular, we're all going to die someday. I know it's a little weird, but it takes some pressure off and reminds me that nothing is really that serious, and that it's important to just keep living. But recently, I've been thinking about death in a different way. My dad, Omar's health, hasn't been great these days. A few months ago, he fell, broke his hip, and landed in the hospital. It was touch and go for a while, and we didn't know what was going to happen. And since, he's been recovering in a nursing facility instead of at home, with me. I miss my dad being around. It's been really, really hard for both of us. Lately, I've been having talks with his doctors about things like resuscitation and intubation, if my dad's health were to get worse down the line. The whole experience has forced me to think more about what the rest of his life and his passing will look like. I know a lot of you listening can probably relate to this. As caregivers, especially if you're caring for a parent, death looms large. So how do we face the reality of it? That's what we're going to focus on in this episode. How can we plan for the death we hope to have? And how do we help our loved ones do the same? To do that, we'll hear from a fearless death doula challenging us to face our own mortality. This is Squeezed. I'm your host, Event Nicole Brown. The So 7, Meet Aelua. I want the sun to be going down, so the sky is changing color. I want to see all of the ships in color because it's so beautiful, such a painting of watercolor oranges and yellows and hot pinks and blues stunning. When I sat down to interview Aelua Arthur about death, I didn't expect to talk about beautiful sunsets, but if you spend even a minute with her, it makes sense. She sees the beauty in everything, including her own imagined death. I would love to be at home, at my home. I want the people that I love nearby. Hopefully they're like eating cake or, you know, doing something delicious. I would like to smell some incense that I love. I'd like to have something soft and cozy on my body. I don't want any hospital machines, I don't want any beeping. I want to feel comfortable, I want to feel safe, I want to feel at home. I just want to die grateful. Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge that dying usually doesn't include sunsets, incense, and beauty. Sometimes it's scary or even violent, so we can't always plan how it happens. But as a death doula, Aelua sees the potential for death to be more healing, instructive, and maybe even beautiful. I think that one of the things that we often forget about the bedside is that people are so human. There are jokes, there is laughter, there's beauty, there's joy, there's also sadness and tears, but there's also, like, awe and wonder and like seeping in. When I think of the word doula, I tend to think of birth doulas, the people who support parents as they bring life into the world. You can say Aelua does that in reverse, she's there on the other side, guiding folks off into that great beyond. A death doula, somebody who does all of the non medical and holistic care and support of the dying person and their entire circle of support through the process. When I mean the dying person, I also mean anybody who is in relationship with their mortality, anybody who has some awareness that one day death will come. So death doulas aren't just for the dying, they're for healthy people too, at any stage of life who want to get a jumpstart on their end of life plans. We'll get more into that in a bit, but let's get back to Aelua. When it comes to death doulas, she's kind of a superstar. She's at the helm of going with Grace, her end-of-life planning organization, plus she just put out a New York Times best-selling memoir. But you might know her from her popular TED Talk. Why think it about death helps you live a better life? I want to die with socks on my feet because I get cold and if I die with a bra on, I'm coming to haunt everybody. I will terrorize you and that is a threat, okay? Aelua didn't always help people die for a living though. When I sat down to chat with her, we turned back the clock to talk about who she was before, when she was an LA lawyer at Legal Aid working on heavy stuff like domestic violence. By 2012, she was burnt out. I did not feel really connected to it. I mean, I was also wearing like pinstripes suits and that is just not my jam, like it just wasn't working. I was clinically depressed. I had a major depressive episode and I took a leave of absence and I went to Cuba where I met a fellow traveler on the bus who had uterine cancer. We talked a lot about her life, then I started to ask her a lot of questions about her death. Speaking to this stranger on a 14-hour bus trip across Cuba, Aelua says she started to think about her own mortality for the first time. With 34 years old, she was questioning everything. I did not like what I saw. The life that I lived was not authentic to me. I didn't feel like I lived out the edges of it. I felt small and purposeless and I was embarrassed. I was full of shame that the life that I had lived as far wasn't what I wanted it to be. That awareness of mortality became even clearer for Aelua six months after she returned home from Cuba. Her brother-in-law had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She moved in with him and her sister to support them for what would be the final two months of his life. And that's when I saw firsthand what it's really like and it wasn't pretty, so I wanted to do something about it. Aelua became the resource her brother-in-law and family needed, a guide and an advocate through the dying process. She realized it was her calling. I felt on purpose, I could be emotional, I could be logistical, I could pull up the checklist, I could ask the questions, I could hold hands, I could cry alongside everybody. These are things that I do very, very naturally. Aelua took a death doula course in LA called Sacred Crossings. From there, she worked part-time jobs at a hospice in a funeral home before transitioning to full-time work as a doula. Eventually, she started her organization and added a death doula training program in 2018. The role of the death doula, what does love look like in the face of death? This is a huge question. Aelua told me she thought maybe 10 people would sign up, but the first group had 57 students. Since then, Aelua has continued to pass along her wisdom to students through a 12 week online training program. Since you're going to treat each death like the first, you're going to have to come and open to whatever it is that you may be receiving in that room. Ask questions, ask questions, ask questions of the person who's dying. Pay attention to that. I love that you found a need and you fulfilled it and now you're equipping people to continue to fulfill it. I think that is brilliant. I am curious about the people who apply and turn up to do the doula training. What are they like? Is there anything that they all have in common? I think what they most have in common is their comfort and emotional depth. Because you have to be willing to play in really deep waters in order to do this work. I also think it's wildly important that people who have also spent some time on their privilege and their bias and their judgment and their anger and have found ways to inject compassion and wonder and awe into the inquiry are people that are best suited for this work. So far, she's trained over 2,000 people from 17 countries. One of those students was Lupé Tejada Diaz. She thought about death and humans in a way that I hadn't vaguely considered yet. These days, Lupé is a death doula and community organizer based in Minneapolis. But back in 2018, she applied to be in the first group of a Lewis training program. She was just 20 years old. It was around 2 a.m. that I submitted this application for the going with Grace program. And I had sort of forgotten that I did it until I got an email back saying, "You've been accepted. Let's do this." 2 a.m. is usually the time. I'm buying new Lego sets online, not making a life-altering decision. But for Lupe, this decision was easy. Pursuing death work was a no-brainer. Unlike Elua, she was thinking about her mortality from almost day one. I was a very death-accessed kid, so I kind of took that into the rest of my life, and here we are. More of Lupe's story after the break. If there is one thing I am happy to invest in, it is getting a good night's sleep. I need it, and Quince makes it easy to bring a little everyday luxury into your nighttime routine. Or maybe just find a thoughtful gift for someone on your list. I recently picked up the bamboo sheets from Quince, and I'm just so impressed. They are incredibly smooth and comfortable, and honestly, getting into bed at the end of a long day has become something I'm looking forward to even more. It's such a simple upgrade, but it makes my whole bedtime routine feel a little more luxurious. Quince price is everything, 50-80% less than similar brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen, so you can give luxury quality without the luxury price take. Give the gift a quality this holiday season, download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too, and when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was last day. It's the best way to support the show. The drug landscape has changed, and most parents are working from information that's out of date. Fake prescription pills made with fentanyl and other dangerous chemicals are promoted on social media, pressed to look like Xanax or Adderall. THC vapes can hit 90%, nothing like the cannabis we remember. Cratum sits on the counter at the gas station, marketed as natural, and it can be habit forming. You don't have to be an expert to start this conversation. Lead with facts, not fear. Teens can tell when you're exaggerating and they tune out. Ask questions, listen, it's not one big talk, it's a series of small ones. And morning teens, what not to use, doesn't teach them what to do instead. Helping them build healthy ways to handle pressure gives them better options. The new drug talk is free, science-backed, and made to help parents start these conversations. Visit thenewdrugtalk.org. My family is Indigenous-Mexican-American, and we grew up with Day of the Dead, and we grew up with ancestral veneration, and death was never something that was taboo. I could always ask my parents about it, and they would tell me as honestly and as age appropriately as they could. I met Lupe over Zoom. Since she graduated from Aloo's death doula training six years ago, Lupe has been busy serving Indigenous and immigrant populations in her community. Lupe herself is Nahua, and a few years ago she learned her tribal language and got a face tattoo to honor it. Her cultural background has made her view death in a different way than we do here in America. Like you heard earlier, death wasn't a taboo topic in her house growing up. It wasn't until I got to America, and I started getting older, and my friends' family members started dying, that I realized, "Oh, we handle this in very, very different ways." And I have a very vivid memory of being in grade school, hearing that one of my friends' fathers died, and in my head, you know, when somebody dies, you have a nine-day ceremony, and folks come from everywhere, and you're taking care of. And for her, it was very sterile. It was very like, you know, dad died one day, funeral the next day, you're back in school. And that to me was so foreign, and it was so strange. And I could see my friend suffering, and I said, "There has got to be a better way to do this." Remember how Aloo said the best spokes for this work are those that can sit in discomfort? Well, for loopay, that looks like consistently showing up in her community, and working outside of what she calls the funeral industrial complex. A lot of my community, unfortunately, has, they're either undocumented, or they don't speak English, or they don't have any sort of financial literacy or medical literacy, right? And another thing is that the grieving process and the cultural traditions are so different, and America doesn't necessarily make room for that, right? So I was constantly running into folks saying like, "Oh, well, we couldn't play our drums at the funeral home, or we couldn't have our music, or they kicked us out because there were too many people, or they don't want to work with us because we're black, brown, whatever." And I just remember hearing that, and just being like, "This is not right. We cannot continue to do this." Yeah, I mean, that's as a black woman in America, I totally understand everything you just said. In the black community, we call funerals home goings. We celebrate the life of our loved ones, and then dance, and sing, and shout them on the glory. But our joy of life and celebration of it, even in death, isn't always welcome or understood in some spaces. So I love that loopay is pushing back against the norm to provide culturally competent care for her community. That looks like advocating for people like Shane, one of her current clients. He's part of her tribal community. He is a traditional Aztec dancer. I'm a traditional indigenous healer, so my close friend here introduced us because she said, "Oh, Shane needs some help with some spiritual stuff he had going on." And I said, "Sure." Together, loopay and Shane have been working on his end-of-life plans. He's 53, and making these plans while he's still healthy. Right now, we are headed to Palau Grounds, and it's one of my favorite coffee shops here in the cities. Before meeting up with Shane this past April, loopay stopped by a local coffee shop. She told me, she usually picks up a treat for the elders that she works with. And personally, I will be talking to loopay about calling somebody who's 53 years old and elder. Can I get two fried bread tacos, and then can I get an iced sugar-free vanilla latte with oat milk? In her apartment building, loopay waited for Shane to arrive. So, Shane, he had a really terrible accident and suffered with a lot of post-traumatic stress, and just a lot of physical ailments, right? And so, Shane and I have slowly been kind of working on putting a plan together, and I say slowly because for him, it still comes with a lot of trauma and a lot of stress. In 2018, a car struck Shane while he was on his bike. He flat-lined at the scene twice. It was a wake-up call. What if he had died? He hated the idea of leaving his two daughters to figure out what to do for him without any end-of-life paperwork. So, right now, we're trying to get an advanced directive for Shane, and now I think that we're at a place where we're ready to put pen to paper and say, you know, my name is Shane, this is what I want, and this is who I want to support me in that. And loopay is really good at educating, explaining to me, and the way my brain is, sometimes it does, sometimes with a brain injury, it doesn't want to operate very well. And loopay, she should sit down and really focus on things and separate things out, make it simple. Would you want like a traditional funeral? Yeah, yeah, you know, we get together for nine days and sing and hang out and, you know, tell stories. Tell stories? Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe bury me and see, but just put a note saying, save the ocean. Right. You know, sure. Pass me out there so I can surf. Gosh, I wish it was so easy. loopay and Shane were working on an advanced directive, which is a legal document to communicate your medical care preferences. Making a will is important too. That's where you can handle your financial assets, make burial plans, and name dependence. I think it's really important to have people who know exactly how you want things done, but also who are able to have those hard conversations. So one of the things that I like to think of is like having documents like this written out is like the ultimate extension of love, because it's like, we're done. We're good. Everything's fine. Just reflecting on what you want is a good place to start. And at the end of that reflection, it never hurts to treat yourself to a fried bread taco. I was fortunate enough to have an end-of-life conversation with my mom before she passed three years ago. Actually, it was more like an ongoing conversation. Our entire life, she would tell me and my brother, I don't want anything heroic done to keep me alive. That was my mom. She was always clear about what she wanted. So when she got sick with leukemia and found out chemo was coming, she said nope, I'm good. My little franny lived a big life. She raised kids, had been in love, retired from a job, and played a hell of a lot of bingo. So she chose hospice, and we let her go. We said our final goodbye 12 hours later. She truly was ready. Like you heard, Lupet calls end-of-life plans an ultimate extension of love. I couldn't agree more, but I also know these can be difficult conversations. When we come back, Alua has advice on where to begin. By the time you get sick, it's kind of hard to think clearly about what you might want. But if I can do it now, I also have the potential to influence how I'm living daily before I get sick. That's after the break. Hey, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus from The Wiser than me podcast, among other things, and I've got a little holiday wisdom for you. Hosting during the holidays means lots of cooking, and that means your trash is going to be full of smelly, rotting food, yuck. So here's the wisdom. Get a meal food recycler. I did. We've had hours for years, and it is totally transformed our kitchen. It's unbelievable how much less waste and less odor there is now. Plus, it's so easy to use. You toss in basically any food you don't eat, peels, pits, meat, dairy, bones. Last year we put in a whole turkey carcass, really. While you sleep, meal automatically dries and grinds all your food waste down to about a fifth of its size. That means at night you can fill it after a big, elaborate dinner, and by morning they'll be room for breakfast. Nothing rots, nothing stinks, no fruit flies. And my favorite part, using meal means none of our food ends up in landfills, which means we're doing a little good for the planet while keeping our kitchen tidy. If you want to manage your food waste in a cleaner, calmer way, this holiday season, go to mill.com/wisor for an exclusive offer. That's mill.com/wisor. Happy hosting. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. How did some of their remains end up in the world's largest landfill? They treated my son like garbage. So while the people who killed my son, I have a certainly an animosity for them. I have a huge animosity for the people who were running New York. On the latest episode of Revisionist History, the story of a battle over what some see as a pile of dust and other see as the remains of the dead. Listen to Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts. One message kept coming up over and over again when I was talking to Alua and Lupe. We need to make end of life plans for our loved ones and for ourselves. Unfortunately, my dad and I didn't get the chance to do that before his memory started to go. That's something I wish I'd done. The mention is a weird disease though. Sometimes he is more present, so I haven't given up hope that we can still have that conversation someday. But even if your loved one is in good health, this topic can still be tough or awkward to bring up. So I asked Alua for some guidance. There are a lot of different places to begin depending on you and your relationship. So it really depends on the set and setting the person that you're talking to. If it's difficult, I suggest often trying to tie it to public events or celebrities or people in the news or things that are happening. I was in a room full of black elders around the time Aretha Franklin died around the time of her funeral. And one of them was like, "I can't believe they have her out here and like three different outfits because they kept changing her outfit." They were like, "Why are they doing that to her? They should let her rest." And so I turned and I said, "Is that mean you only want one outfit?" And she said, "Yeah, I would like one." And I said, "Great. Do you have one in mind? Why is this purple suit that I wore blah, blah, blah, blah?" It's an in. It's an in. Lastly, I think paying attention to any quiet moments that seem like reflection. I've noticed with my father, he's almost 80 and he has and stage kidney disease. And he started to tell a lot of stories about his life. And so when he does that, I'm like, "Wow. Is that a story that you'd like us to tell about you at some point?" Yeah. And he's like, "I love it if that story lived. No, no, no, no, no, no. You better not tell anybody that story." But it's also a way in. There's a lot of conversations we don't want to have because we're sad. You know, I had a conversation with my dad this morning because he's 81 and he has dementia and I can see him sleeping more, eating less and talking more about the good bye and bye, right? And I have to get over myself because I love my dad and I want him to live to 127. So what advice would you give to those of us who need to have the conversation, but are afraid or scared or sad to do it? First, I understand, it's hard. I get weepy thinking about my dad's death and my mom's death, you know? My dad, as I mentioned, is ill. He's been ill for a while. And it, like, something in me ceases up when I think about how close we are. We might be to the end. And that our grief is not going to be impacted one way or another by having the conversation. That the sadness that I carry now will stay with me whether or not I talk about it. It might actually be greater impacted by it if I don't talk about it. And so I encourage us to just be with our sadness from them and acknowledge it, put it in our back pocket, stay with it because it's serving you and move with it, move with it. How can a loved one or a family member help someone who is ill and cannot face it? How do you find a way to bring them out of that space to where they can talk about what they would want for their transition? It's hard when people aren't trying to have the conversation because we so desperately want them to, you know? And my job as a doula rather is just to honor the people for where they're at. There's a client that I wrote about. She'd been ill for a very long time and had been in a bed for months at this point. And her son called me because he said that she was finally ready to talk about the fact that she might die. So I went to go visit her and that day, however, she decided she was not ready, which meant that I didn't have that much to do other than listen to her and reflect back what I heard and also help her figure out what she wanted to experience in the time that she actually had left. So I was actually able to show up in my doula capacity for her, just not in preparing her for her death rather to prepare her or to encourage her to live as fully as she could for the time that she was here. So those are some of the things that we can do. How can I support you in this? What do you still want to experience? What do you want to eat? How do you want to be? Who do you want to see? Who do you want to spend time with? Because that also is preparing people for death. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. What are some practical steps we should take to prepare for our own deaths? Pay attention to things like what you want to have happen to your body after you die. What type of life sustaining measures do you want? Select somebody to be your healthcare proxy. The person is going to make your decisions for you in the event that you can't. We can also think about our possessions, what you want to happen to all of them after we die. Should they throw away all your crusty socks or do you care? Do things like check in with any dependence that you have. Those are little steps that we can take. And doing any one of those is better than doing none, doing all would make me very, very, very happy. Listen, having my affairs in order, socks in all would put me at ease. And guess what? That's something we can all do now, even if death feels far away. Those are the practical considerations. But I think the other important consideration is that we have to come to terms with the fact that none of us really know what happens after we die. The uncertainty can be scary. So I asked Elua about that. What do you think happens after we die? I like to think that it is an endless wave of beauty, beauty, because it's one of my core values while I'm living. I would like to feel as though every piece of who I've ever been, the things that were important, the things that touched are the people, the things that are actually my legacy have stuck with the people that I touched and for all the rest, like my bonnets and my secrets, those things will just be enveloped back into the collective consciousness. And I, as I know myself, will, yet I will live on in the people whose lives have come across. And then I can just sit back and look at all this beauty. I would like that a lot. We all have different relationships with death, and they're ever evolving. Maybe you're a little less morbid than I am, or maybe you've already planned out your whole funeral with three outfit changes. Whatever the case is, I hope Elua and Lupe's words have resonated, because I know for my own experience of losing my mom how important it is to talk about death freely and openly. Knowing her wishes made it easier for me to be in the moment when it was her time to go, even though not everything went as I would have hoped. It happened during the pandemic, and I was working out of the country so I couldn't be there with her. My brother propped up his phone so we could all be together from afar. I watched her final moments over FaceTime. I can still see her in my mind as she passed. In that moment, I felt myself take a deep exhale as I saw the essence of her leave that weary little body. I knew she was no longer suffering. I'm using that moment, my faith, and my conversations with Lupe and Elua as I mentally prepare for my dad's eventual death. When I think about his passing in my own inevitable departure, I say to myself, "Death will be an exhale." When I set out to host this podcast, I wanted to look at what it means to be a caregiver in this country, whether that's looking after children or caring for a parent or both. I wanted to show how much strength and love it takes to do this work all day, every day, and I wanted to make us caregivers feel seen. All there is beauty in caregiving. It's hard and often lonely work, but you know what? There's a lot of us. And together, we are powerful. We can support each other, care for the caregivers, and make our voices heard when it comes to demanding more support for families and caregivers in this country. We can do this work with dignity, but we can't do it alone. This is Squeezed. I'm your host, Ivetna Cobrao. There's more Squeezed with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like previously unheard clips from all our voices in this series. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. Squeezed is a Lemonada media original. Crystal Genesis is our senior producer, Julia Yurt, Tess Novotny, and Hannah Boomer-Shine are our producers. Field production by Nancy Rosenbaum. Ivan Kurayev is our engineer. Our theme music is by Andy Kristen's daughter with additional music by APM Music. Jackie Dan Zigger is our VP of narrative content. Executive producers are me, Ivetna Cobrao, Jessica Cordova Kramer, and Stephanie Widdle's Wax. This show was created in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a leading national philanthropy dedicated to taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime and pave the way together to a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Follow Squeezed wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime Membership.