Death Doula Alua Arthur on How and Why to Prepare for the End

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alua Arthur is a death doula — someone who helps people prepare logistically, mentally and emotionally for the end of life. There are practical considerations, like memorial planning and medical directives. And then there’s the act of thinking how we’d ideally want to die — outdoors or indoors, surrounded by loved ones, arguments resolved — that shows what’s most important to us and can help us live in alignment with those priorities. Arthur’s new memoir, “Briefly Perfectly Human,” is an account of the relationships she formed with her dying clients and the reflections they shared with her — including regrets in romance and work, their vulnerabilities in a failing body and what brought them authentic joy. We’ll talk to Arthur about how to ease our transitions to death and hear how tending to the dying has shaped her own life and outlook. Guests: Alua Arthur, death doula, attorney, and adjunct professor; author, “Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End"; founder, Going with Grace — a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:58.0	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.
1:18.5	Coming up on forum, Alua Arthur is a death dula.
1:21.8	She spends a lot of time thinking about, talking about, and helping people prepare for the end
1:26.6	and teaching other death
1:28.1	doulas it's her deep involvement with death that has informed her life
1:32.9	Arthur says imagining our ideal death where we are and who is with us helps us
1:38.3	realize how we want to live what we need to do to achieve that end we'll find out what
1:42.7	led Arthur to becoming a death douula and what she's learned from her
1:45.8	clients facing death about our most essential needs as humans.
1:50.2	Her new book is called Briefly, Perfectly, Human.
1:54.0	Join us.
1:58.8	Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim. As a death dula, Aulua Arthur has learned a lot about what it means to live, because thinking about our deaths helps us take stock of whether we're happy with how we're living our lives.
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