Beverly couldn't lift a knife, or a fork for that matter. So she ran the kitchen with her voice. This is what you chop now. This is the knife you use. Use that cutting board, put it in this bowl. Nope, just a little bit more. When to turn the heat down, all of it. She directed the entire meal, and then she took bites of enchilada that my mother fed her, mid-sentence, with absolutely no ceremony.
At the time, I thought it was just lunch. This episode is personal. It's about one of the ways I came into death doula work without realizing the path I was on, and what I learned watching my mother care for her best friend.
Lunch at Beverly's house
My mother's best friend was dying of ALS. If you don't know what ALS does, it takes your muscles a piece at a time and mostly leaves your mind right where it is, so you get to watch the process. We were invited over to lunch at Beverly's house. She was in a wheelchair. She couldn't move much, and she didn't have the use of her arms. She couldn't cook, which mattered, because she loved to cook.
My mom and Bev had the protocol down pat, like they had done all of this before. Two friends making and having lunch, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Nobody tells you this is the moment
I was in my 40s, and I did not understand what I was watching. I didn't know it was exactly what I would spend the rest of my adult life doing. Nobody taps you on the shoulder in that moment and says, hey, this is the one, pay attention. These experiences don't announce themselves. They mostly just look like a Tuesday.
I talk a lot about breadcrumbs, things that seem random or get tossed aside. I followed a bunch of separate run-ins with death, all coming from different directions and all pointing to the same place: doula work. Beverly's kitchen is one of the clearest moments I can look back on.
Not the sadness, but how normal it was
Back then, I thought the sad part was the ALS. Believe me, it was sad, and it was hard. She was losing her body a piece at a time while keeping her entire mind, which was brilliant, and her memory was so good. But what stayed with me most wasn't the sadness. It was how normal it all was that day.
Nobody in the kitchen was pretending anything was different. Nobody was performing. We weren't treating Bev like a tragedy in progress. She was bossing my mother and me around, just like she had for as long as I knew her. She was exactly herself. I say it all the time: we die how we live. Beverly lived in a kitchen telling people what to do (honestly, in any room telling people what to do), and that's what she was doing until very close to the end. I didn't have language for it. It just landed as: you could be dying and still have lunch.
Seeing my mother whole again
Here's the part I really want to talk about. I saw my mother in that kitchen in a way I hadn't since I was a child. Somewhere in your teens, your mother turns into a sort of furniture, the person who nags you about the trash or the dishes. You stop actually seeing her. Then I watched her feed her dying friend bites of lunch without making it a thing, and the edges of her I'd forgotten came back: the steadiness, the competence, the complete lack of fear. She wasn't afraid of Beverly's body or the wheelchair or any of it. She showed up and did the next thing that needed doing. And they cracked jokes the whole time.
It reminded me of being a child with growing pains, debilitating pains in my legs. My mother would let me snuggle up in her bed or on the couch, and she would rub my legs for one show, sometimes two whole shows. When she woke me up in the morning, she would rub my hair with her perfectly manicured nails. We called it waking me up nice. Mom, wake me up nice. Sometimes I pretended to be asleep, and she knew I was pretending, and she woke me up nice anyway. That moment in Beverly's kitchen gave my mother back to me whole.
Your ordinary afternoons are forming you
None of it registered at the time. It felt like a nice, slightly sad afternoon. I went home. I didn't journal about it or tell anyone it changed my life, because as far as I knew, it hadn't. It took me years of doing this work and being at the bedside to look back and see that I had already been shown how to do it, in a kitchen, by two women who had been there all along, one of them dying and both of them completely at ease.
So whether you're a caregiver, a doula, or just a future dead person like the rest of us, you're probably in the middle of one of these moments and don't even know it. We can't recognize them from the inside. My invitation this week is to pay a little more attention to your ordinary afternoons anyway, especially the ones with the people you love still in them. They won't be here forever.
In this episode
- 00:01 The lunch I think about more than any other
- 00:20 Beverly and ALS
- 00:55 Bev runs the kitchen with her voice
- 01:33 Bites of enchilada, with no ceremony
- 01:48 Nobody tells you this is the one
- 02:25 Breadcrumbs pointing toward doula work
- 03:09 Not the sadness, but how normal it was
- 04:31 Seeing my mother again
- 05:48 Growing pains and waking me up nice
- 06:59 It didn't register at the time
- 07:49 Pay attention to your ordinary afternoons
Feeling the pull to do this work? Pay attention to that. I teach it at Compass Doula Academy.
Caring for someone near the end? You don't have to figure out the last days alone. Book a Guided Care Planning Call and we'll talk through what's ahead.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · 9 minutes
If there's anything else you're dying to ask, let me know: christy@christybraun.com
