Making Space for What We'd Rather Avoid
Most people will rearrange an entire day to avoid entering this type of room. The air itself feels different in there, heavier somehow, like even breathing too loudly might be the wrong thing to do. It's the room where someone is actively passing away.
I've started walking into that kind of room on a fairly regular basis now, doing vigil volunteer work in my community. (For those who don't know, vigil volunteers are called in specifically when someone is close to death.) Sometimes I’ll enter a room full of family members, having to read the immediate emotional landscape present in that space. Other times it's just the patient and me, keeping silent company with one another as the clock keeps ticking forward. Sometimes no words need to be said at all.
Doing this work has rearranged how I think about every other tough moment in my life, hard conversations included. When you purposely give up your time to be with people who are dying, it has a way of sharpening your focus on everything else, putting the rest of life into a perspective you didn't have before.
You spill coffee all over yourself this morning? That's fine. You woke up without any physical pain today, so that's a plus.
You discover an old friend blocked you without explanation? Confusing for sure, but that's alright, we'll talk and figure out what happened, probably just a misunderstanding. I'm just glad I have friendships I care enough about to want to maintain.
You forget to book that very important hotel reservation for your trip? Check their website, and now they're all booked up. But hey, nothing to fret over. I'm just glad I have the opportunity to travel in the first place.
(For the record, all three of these things happened in my life this past week.)
Pitting everyday occurrences against the reality of death and loss will always make the everyday stuff come up short by comparison, so it takes some balance to keep that from tipping into “not caring about the small stuff” at all. Still, the past few months in this new field have genuinely changed how I respond to situations that used to leave me flustered.
EQ TRAINER AND....END-OF-LIFE DOULA? HOW DOES THAT WORK?
Earlier this year, I went to one of the Death Cafés right here in my own community, organized by the Westerville Public Library. Attending that single event rerouted my whole summer (if you're curious what that experience was like, check out this earlier post). It's also what motivated me to train as an End-of-Life Doula through INELDA, the International End-of-Life Doula Association, a nonprofit formed back in 2015.
At first, I expected this training to be an intriguing side quest for my own personal development. Going in, all I really knew was that EQ skills likely mattered more in these sensitive spaces than almost anywhere else I'd worked before. And for those who know me, that alone was enough to pull me in, as my brain is always looking for the next unfamiliar thing to understand.
One thing that surprised me early on about this work: those operating in this space don’t all go by the same title. Depending on who you ask, these individuals may prefer to go by:
End-of-Life Doula
Death Doula
Death Coach
End-of-Life Educator
To clarify: the role of an end-of-life doula is not to encourage dying. Their role is to advocate for self-determination and provide non-medical support to individuals and their families who are navigating the dying process.
People in this space can offer drastically different services, too, with some individuals leaning into legacy project work, obituary writing, financial death planning, family mediation in the final weeks, etc. Others like myself lean more toward advocacy work, working to reduce the stigma in our communities when it comes to talking about taboo subjects like grief and loss. When it comes to titles, I've personally landed on calling myself an End-of-Life Educator more often than not, since it lines up with my background in corporate facilitation and the kind of teaching work I’ve been doing for years.
That being said, I was not expecting to come out the other side of this new training with an expanded business plan for my own company. Since going through this program, I’ve now added grief literacy workshops to my arsenal alongside the other trainings that I offer (my business plan from a year ago did not see this coming, for the record). In the end, going through this training felt like a natural extension of my current work in EQ, rather than a random offshoot from it. Once you notice the connecting threads of empathy, deep listening, and non-judgmental understanding running through both, it's easy to see how much harmony they share.
OUR PERSPECTIVE DETERMINES THE DIFFICULTY
When it comes down to facing hard situations, it can be easy to tell yourself it's just not the right time. Most of us aren't avoiding these conversations because we don't care about the people around us; we're avoiding them because we're running on empty ourselves.
According to the 2025-2026 Aflac WorkForces Report, burnout has reached a 6-year high, with 74% of Gen Z workers and 66% of Millennials reporting moderate or higher levels of burnout. And as we know, being burnt out doesn't leave a lot of energy left over for anyone else's hard moments, including the conversations we need to have with the people we really care about.
Knowing that statistic doesn't excuse the avoidance, but it does help explain it somewhat. It's also worth revisiting that perspective-shifting that I mentioned earlier - comparing everyday annoyances against the finality of death - because that same sort of mindset shift can apply here, too. If something happened to your friend tomorrow, would you be at peace with how you left things? Most of us probably wouldn't say yes, and yet we still let their calls go straight to voicemail, still put off texting them back, still tell ourselves that tomorrow (or even next week) will be a better time.
If you feel seen here, know that you’re not alone. I’d put myself into this bucket as well on some days. But the good news here is that turning toward someone who’s going through a hard time doesn't require End-of-Life Doula training or a specific crisis to prompt it. It just requires that you decide to do it before the urgency of a situation makes the decision for you.
THE INSIGHTS: FOR INDIVIDUALS
If you know a friend who's been going through something hard lately - a loss, an illness, a breakup, a season that just won't let up - here are a few ways to actually show up for them:
Ask them a specific question instead of a general one. "How are you holding up with your mom's diagnosis?" gets you a more honest answer than just a blanket question of "How are you?" which can be easily dismissed.
Follow up without being asked. Put a reminder on your calendar to check in again in a week or two, and consider what method of communication they prefer best. Most of the support that shows up surfaces in the first few days after an event, then disappears in the weeks that follow, which is often when people feel forgotten about most.
Sit in the discomfort instead of rushing to fix their feelings. This is one I have to remind myself often, and it’s a skill that death doula work has taught me to lean into the most. You don't need to have the right words. There’s no requirement to "solve for the negativity.” Sometimes you just need to stay in the room a bit longer with them even when it’s uncomfortable (at least be willing to walk into it, as not everybody does).
How you show up for others usually mirrors how you handle hard things in your own life, whether your instinct is to avoid them or turn toward them. I've noticed this firsthand. Since I started vigil volunteering earlier this summer, I've found myself turning toward my own challenging situations more readily, whether at home, with friends, or at work, instead of simply reaching for the nearest distraction.
THE INSIGHTS: FOR LEADERS AND MANAGERS
This kind of topic gets far more complicated in the workplace, where there's often a palpable tension between professional boundaries and genuine support from others.
If you’re a manager and someone on your team loses a parent, gets a hard diagnosis, or is going through a rough divorce, how do you show up without overstepping, or making things feel awkward? Managing these situations in the workplace is hard. It's also one of the clearest indicators of whether a person, a team, or a whole organization actually has the emotional skills they claim to have.
A few strategies can work well in these spaces, particularly when someone on your team is going through a hard time:
Say something specific, even if simple, rather than staying silent out of fear of saying the wrong thing. Often the lack of acknowledgement hurts worse than whatever imperfectly worded thing you might have said instead.
Offer to adjust their workload or deadlines before they need to work up the nerve to ask for it. Silence from a manager during a hard season doesn't read as professional distance, it reads as absence, and people remember who showed up when things were difficult, long after the hard season itself has passed.
Give people control over how much they want to share and when. Not everyone wants to discuss personal challenges at work, tough times especially, but creating the space for it to surface organically within the team can make all the difference.
Don't wait for something to happen on the team before you start showing personal interest in the group or carving out time for team camaraderie. When tragedy strikes someone on your team, the existing routine is what everyone falls back on. If that routine doesn't exist yet, it becomes obvious fast, and a hard moment is not the time to introduce a new weekly touch-base or team-building session. By then, you're already behind.
WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND ANY ONE CONVERSATION
Every time we turn toward another person's hard moment instead of away from it, it gets a little easier for the next person to do the same. There's an excellent quote I heard recently as part of my end-of-life doula training this summer, though I can't remember where it came from directly:
"The more we turn toward the suffering of others, the more compassion can grow."
That's how we build up empathy for one another too, one conversation at a time, even the small, seemingly unremarkable ones. The rooms we're most afraid to enter are usually made of people, not walls: the coworker who had a loss we still haven't spoken to them about, the friend who's pulled away without saying why. Those are the exact situations where our presence can matter most. Making space for those conversations isn't only good for the person on the other side of them. It's how the rest of us get better at being human together.
RESOURCES
Previous Blog Post: Visiting a Death Café – An Emotional Intelligence Perspective
Westerville Public Library: Death Café
