Why the ‘Good Death’ Is having its moment: Candid conversations are reshaping life’s end

TO HEAR FRANCESCA ARNOLDY TELL IT, birth and death have striking similarities. A community doula and death literacy educator based in Vermont, Arnoldy spent years guiding expectant mothers through the arrival of new life. In 2015, however, she shifted her focus to help people face their final days. The change came after a period of personal loss when, in short order, her grandfathers, father-in-law and her favorite Labrador died.

Arnoldy’s practice has expanded dramatically since she attended her first hospice volunteer training program in 2016. Over the past decade, she has trained other death doulas and published four books on death, community and grief, with a fifth on the way. She created a curriculum for a death doula certificate program at the University of Vermont. And she teaches students at Middlebury College to use storytelling as a way to talk about death and the vulnerability of being human. Death, like birth, is a mysterious passage, she says, one with its own rhythms and uncertainties that asks those present “to meet the moment.”