The “Wild West” of Death Doula Training What one Humanist Celebrant’s experience reveals about professional standards, accessibility and worldview inclusion in end-of-life care
Photo by Mehrab Sium on Unsplash When Micah Kennedy described death doula education as “the Wild West,” ey meant it as both encouragement and warning. The field’s accessibility allows practical knowledge about dying, funerals and grief to circulate beyond hospitals and funeral homes. But without widely recognized professional standards, it can also leave students navigating training programs that treat supernatural beliefs as universal truths.
I encountered these questions while working as an education intern for the American Humanist Association and learning more about the forms of care Humanist Celebrants provide. Death doula work was new to me, and Micah’s experience revealed how much the emerging field has to offer, as well as whom it can leave out.
Micah, an Oakland-based Humanist Celebrant who uses ey/em/eir pronouns, grew up in the Presbyterian Church and entered seminary after college. As part of eir theological education, ey completed Clinical Pastoral Education in the emergency department of a Level I trauma center, working overnight shifts and responding to medical emergencies alongside hospital staff. Ey later earned a master’s degree in Ethics and Social Theory as an open skeptic and became a Humanist Celebrant.
Eir current deathcare work includes advance-directive workshops, green-burial education, grief-related art gatherings, bedside presence, patient advocacy and referrals to hospices, home-funeral organizers and other specialized services.
Note: Micah uses the widely recognized term “death doula” to describe eir profession, although ey has reservations about its inclusivity. Because doula is commonly associated with birth work and femininity, the term can leave male and nonbinary practitioners less visible within the field. Practitioners use several alternatives depending on their work and personal preferences. For clarity and consistency, I use “death doula” throughout this article.
In the introductory email I received, Micah described death doula education as something of a “Wild West.” The phrase immediately caught my attention. It suggested an emerging profession filled with possibility, but also one whose expectations, standards and underlying assumptions remained unsettled.
I asked Micah to explain what ey meant. Eir answer became far more than a response to an interview question. It was a history of deathcare, a defense of accessible education, a warning about weak oversight and a critique of the supernatural assumptions that can make end-of-life training alienating to humanists and other nonbelievers.
Micah began with a history lesson.
From Family Care to the Funeral Industry
Any time someone refers to sex work as the oldest profession, I like to imagine that Sex Work and Death Work have spent millennia locked in an argument overwhich one of them is actually the eldest. Every human culture has had some practice around taking care of its dead since the moment we figured out what death meant for us in a purely practical sense: We’ll debate later whether Grandfather became a star or a tree. Right now, we need to figure out what to do with his body, both because our love for him endures past his lifespan, and because if we leave him as-is he’s going to start attracting predatory animals.
As the ways in which we cared for the dying and the dead multiplied, so did customs over who could perform these rites. Depending on where or when you lived, tending to the dead might be the purview of specific family members, or a sacred task performed by the clergy, or be shunted onto a social underclass because of the perceived risk of spiritual contamination.
Deathcare among those colonizing the United States was initially a family affair—your loved ones tended to you as you were dying, then washed your body, sewed your shroud, called on the local cabinetmaker for a coffin and your community helped dig your grave.
This paradigm rapidly shifted during the mid-19th century. The sheer number of soldiers dying far from home during the Civil War sharply increased demand for embalming because it allowed bodies to be transported longer distances. Over the next several decades, demand for this type of preservation increased until it was essentially normalized in the United States.
Caring for the bodies of the recently deceased was no longer an intimate,deliberate act performed by friends and family. Those friends and family called the local funeral home. Death had become the purview of specialized—and comparatively well-compensated—professionals.
Micah’s account also emphasizes that this professionalization was gendered. In fact, the term “doula” translates to “female slave” in Greek. Work that had frequently been performed without pay by women within families and communities became a compensated occupation associated overwhelmingly with male professionals and the authority of science.
The contemporary death doula movement reverses parts of that history. It attempts to return knowledge and agency to families while challenging the assumption that every aspect of dying and death must be delegated to an institution or commercial provider.
The movement is again predominantly composed of women, at least in Micah’s training experience. That demographic shift, however, does not automatically make the field inclusive.
In both death doula programs I’ve attended, the participants and instructors were overwhelmingly cis women—I would estimate at least 85 percent—and in both instances I was the only trans person in the room.
It is not a comfortable experience to have to explain the special considerations of laying out a trans person for a home funeral to a room full of people who are misgendering you while you do so.
Deathcare requires close attention to dignity, identity, embodiment, family relationships and personal wishes. A practitioner may be invited into some of the most intimate moments of a person’s life and death. Inclusion therefore cannot be treated as an optional addition to otherwise competent care.
Who Gets to Call Themself a Death Doula?
Micah sees the contemporary death doula movement as a response to the distance that has developed between ordinary people and the practical realities of death.
A lot of the grassroots, environmentally conscious, anti-capitalist, DIY aspects of death doula education are a direct response to the modern Funeral Industrial Complex. And while I occasionally worry that empowerment has become something of a marketing buzzword, that really is the driving motivation behind this type of training:
Being able to care for your own dead represents an opportunity for profound catharsis, and we lose out on this opportunity when we reflexively delegate those duties to strangers.
The role of a death doula is frequently one of preparation and navigation: helping people ask questions, articulate their priorities and recognize when another professional’s expertise is needed. However, some parts of the work do require technical knowledge, particularly around home funerals. Micah notes that students may learn basic procedures for preparing an autopsied body before loved ones help bathe and dress it. They may also learn practical information such as why a pacemaker must be removed before cremation.
Other skills are difficult to measure through a conventional examination. How does someone learn to sit quietly beside a dying person without filling the silence? How does a caregiver remain present without imposing a theory about what death means? How can family members be reassured that tenderness remains meaningful even after the person they love can no longer experience it?
Back during our initial introduction, I referred to death doula education as “the Wild West” because, although certain training programs have existed for decades and interest in the vocation is growing, there is not yet a single accreditation council or nationally recognized standard for who gets to call themself a death doula.
There is no universal standard for the types of assistance doulas are expected to provide or the minimum number of hours they have to complete through home visits or hospice volunteer shifts before they are formally certified.
To an extent, this lack of standardization is beneficial. Most of the material taught in these programs is practical—if not necessarily common—knowledge, and the comparative accessibility of this education allows the information to spread more easily.
When I say, “Anyone can become a death doula,” I primarily intend it as encouragement. But, particularly when speaking to atheists, agnostics and skeptics, I also need it to be understood as a warning.
Deathcare Without an Afterlife
Much of death doula education is practically secular. Filing an advance directive, understanding the physical process of dying, discussing funeral costs, planning a memorial and listening to someone’s fears do not require belief in an afterlife.
The difficulty often arises when training moves into ritual and what is commonly described as spiritual care.
Rebecca Hensler has written extensively about the unique characteristics of secular grief. There is considerable overlap between the challenges skeptics can face when trying to access appropriate grief support after someone’s death and the challenges we can face when trying to find a death doula whose views align with our own—or when seeking relevant end-of-life education for ourselves.
In nearly every instance I’ve encountered, training around ritual design and other aspects of spiritual care has assumed that aspiring death doulas—and the dying people they will assist—believe in some form of afterlife or continuity of consciousness after death.
While I hope my experience is not universal, both of the longer death doula trainings I completed met the presence of Humanist clergy with confusion, dismissal or outright derision:
“Why would dying atheists need clergy if they don’t believe in an afterlife?”
“This is a phase. You’ll change your mind when your spirit has had more time to evolve.”
An insistence on the literal existence of the Bardo, heaven, or reincarnation.
An insistence on the healing properties of essential oils, reiki, or unasked-fordrum circles.
An insistence that students participate in guided meditation to befriend spirit guides and guardian angels they can call on whenever they need to ease the passing of a dying person.
An insistence that students’ chronic health conditions—or the circumstances of a loved one’s death—were something they chose during a past life.
Micah does not reject ritual because it emerges from a religious tradition. Eir education in comparative religion and at an interfaith seminary taught em to look beneath a practice’s theological language and identify the emotional purpose it serves.
Ey calls this ability spiritual translation.
Even when the particulars of a ritual aren’t something I literally believe in, like the deities invoked or specific points of theology, I can still identify the emotional needs being met for its participants.
In situations where clear mutual respect exists between diverging worldviews, translation work lets me be a good houseguest in the holy places of others.
But in situations where it’s clear my hosts view my perspective as fundamentally inferior to their own, translation work becomes exhausting.
At one point in eir longest training program, Micah stopped silently translating the material and began asking instructors to explain rituals in terms of the emotional needs they addressed rather than the New Age or religious beliefs they expressed. According to Micah, this conflict eventually reached the point that the program would not acknowledge that ey had completed the requirements for graduation.
Asking a training program to account for atheist and other nonreligious clients should not be treated as a disruption. It is evidence of the cultural humility end-of-life care requires.
Micah’s criticism does not demand that all deathcare become stripped of religion. It asks that religious and supernatural frameworks be presented as options rather than universal truths. A competent doula should be able to support a Christian who anticipates heaven, a Buddhist who believes in rebirth, an agnostic who remains uncertain and a humanist who believes that death is final.
Many types of spiritual support taught in the doula programs I’ve attended either couldn’t or wouldn’t account for the needs of someone who believes that prayer does not benefit them and that death is permanent.
But I believe that my instructors’ impulse to dismiss or ridicule the specific considerations for caring for atheists at the end of life largely comes from a place of their own fear.
It’s probably easier to vigil with a dying person who believes the support you offer is genuinely intercessory—you’re easing them into the arms of angels, or coaxing their spirit out through their crown chakra, or working to grant them greater peace in the liminal space between incarnations.
A dying person who believes that this life is all that we get is asking for something comparatively simple but potentially more intimidating:
I am walking towards oblivion with the knowledge I will enter it alone.
The journey itself doesn’t have to be solitary.
Will you accompany me, for as far as you’re able?
This was the point in Micah’s response when the purpose of humanist deathcare became clearest to me. Humanism does not remove the need for ritual or existential conversation. It changes the terms under which those things are offered.
A humanist doula or celebrant cannot promise that death is a passage to another realm. They can still help someone review a life, express love, resolve unfinished business, preserve memories, communicate healthcare wishes or develop a ceremony that reflects the person’s values.
Micah provides one concrete example. During a training, ey asked how a ritual centered on deceased ancestors waiting for the dying person in an afterlife might be adapted for someone who did not share that belief. The instructor told em that ey was on eir own.
But Micah had already imagined an alternative.
Rather than asking participants to envision the dead awaiting someone in another realm, the ritual could begin with a litany of people who came before the dying person. Friends and family could name a value each person taught and explain how the dying person carried that value throughout eir life. They could then name the values the dying person had given to them and describe how they intended to carry those values forward.
The supernatural claim disappears. The emotional purposes remain.
That is what worldview-inclusive education can make possible. It does not require instructors or students to abandon their own traditions. It asks them to distinguish between the human need a practice addresses and one particular theological explanation for that need.
Micah’s experience suggests that death doula education needs both stronger professional expectations and a more serious commitment to worldview pluralism. Training should clarify scope, ethics, referral responsibilities, practical competencies and the limits of a doula’s role. It should also prepare students to serve people whose understanding of death differs fundamentally from their own.
Micah ends eir answer not by abandoning the field, but by imagining what humanists could contribute to it.
The majority of information imparted in death doula training programs is essentially secular. Everyone can benefit from knowing how to file an advance directive, or what to expect physically as a loved one’s body begins to shut down, or how to interpret a funeral home’s general price list.
Unfortunately, the tendency for workshops on ritual design to focus on specific beliefs in supernatural means rather than more universal needs at the end of life can signal they’re often either of limited use to—or actively antagonistic towards—nonbelievers.
But, having seen the sheer variety of professional backgrounds, academic interests, and artistic abilities already present among my fellow skeptics, I can pretty confidently say that we are not on our own.
The creation of a death doula curriculum grounded in humanist perspectives would require collaboration between several distinct areas of expertise, but I believe it’s imminently achievable.
If this type of education is likely to remain “the Wild West,” it’s time for skeptics to saddle up.