Future death doula Jessica: "I love talking about death"

It was after she was close to death in various ways that therapist Jessica Cederholm decided to become a death doula.

She had then followed her mother into death when she was in a hospice because of her incurable lung cancer, and a few years later she also suffered from cancer.

There were operations and chemotherapy and she was very ill for a long time.

- But instead of being terrified, I became curious.

And every time I talk about death, I feel safe and everything becomes so clear.

Maybe a lot to say that I love talking about death, but yes, I do.

Make death talkable

Jessica Cederholm will soon be a fully trained bereavement doula and she hopes to help others who are in a similar situation as her mother was and also herself as a relative.

- I was so lost and scared, so if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and offered this support function, I would have taken it fully.

She thinks that death has an undeserved bad reputation and she wants to work to make death more talkable because she notices that something dissolves inside when people are allowed to talk about death.

- We may not be able to make friends with death, but we can at least become familiar with it and get to know our own fears around it.

Then it won't be as scary and can be something of a gift in the end.

Went to therapy

She wants to emphasize that those who act as death doulas should not replace the palliative care that exists today, which she thinks is fantastic in many ways, but which, in her opinion, is not fully sufficient.

- Through the training, we get lots of great tools to guide the dying person and their loved ones to a safe place to be with death in a responsive and empathetic way.

You are one of 40 prospective death doulas, is there a need for that many?

- We are 10 million people in Sweden, so I think we need even more bereavement doulas, says Jessica Cederholm.