Podcast Nadace rodiny Vlčkových
Podcast Nadace rodiny Vlčkových
Talking about death brings calm to the living, says Martha Atkins, death doula
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English despripiton is below the Czech text.
CZ
V tomto díle podcastu přinášíme rozhovor s Marthou Atkins, dulou umírání a lektorkou z Texasu v USA, která doprovázela více než tisíc lidí v posledních okamžicích jejich života a je zakladatelkou The Dying School (Školy umírání). Je to klidný a hluboký rozhovor o umírání, zármutku, rituálech, smíchu i lásce, která nekončí smrtí. Bez patosu, bez útěků a bez zbytečného zjemňování pojmenovává, co se s lidmi děje na konci života, proč se smrti tolik bojíme a co nám bere, když o ní mlčíme. Rozhovor je veden v angličtině, jeho český přepis je k dispozici na webu nrv.org. Rozhovor, který dává smrti lidskou tvář a živým větší klid.
ENG
In this episode of the podcast, we present a conversation with Marta Atkins, a death doula and educator from Texas, United States, who has accompanied more than one thousand people in the final moments of their lives and is the founder of The Dying School.
This is a calm and deeply reflective conversation about dying, grief, rituals, laughter, and love that does not end with death. Without pathos, avoidance, or unnecessary softening, it names what people experience at the end of life, why we are so afraid of death, and what we lose when we choose silence instead of conversation.
A conversation that gives death a human face and brings greater calm to the living.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Vilchek Family Foundation podcast. My name is Mirek, and I'm a member of the Foundation team, and this is the very first episode we are recording in English. Our guest is Martha Atkins, a death doula and teacher from Texas, United States, who has accompanied more than 1,000 people in their final moments of life. She is also the founder of the Dying School. Her visit to Prague and the conversations around end-of-life care were so meaningful that we decided to share this interview with a wider audience. For our Czech audience, I just would like to mention that the full interview is also available in Czech on our website. And now I invite you to listen to our conversations with Martha Atkins. Hi, Martha.
SPEAKER_01Hi, Mirik.
SPEAKER_00If uh you would like to explain to someone who does not know you and does not know your work, how would you explain it?
SPEAKER_01I help people understand and navigate end-of-life questions and experiences. I teach and I do counseling with people who are sorting out what death and dying means to them. And um I work with kids, I work with adults. I have a, it's called the Dying School, where I teach people who are interested in learning more about dying and learning more about how their mortality fits into their living now. They want to learn how to be a wise witness and helpful to people who are leaving the world.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned dying school. Yes. Actually, dying is not anything we learn in normal schools. It's something we don't talk about at all. Right. So how does it look like in a dying school?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's a funny name, isn't it? I started it after my dad died, and people were asking me questions about it. And I I'd worked at an end-of-life care home in San Antonio, Texas. I'd cared for a lot of people who were dying, and people around me wanted to know what it looked like and sounded like because most of us have a an idea of what dying is in our head, but we've never seen it. And when you don't see something and learn about something, it's frightening. So the idea of dying school is we have teachers who are people who uh I've cared for who have been willing to be filmed, and uh they leave a legacy and teach people about what dying was like for them. And it gives uh the students in dying school an opportunity to learn from them and figure out the things they did that were useful and maybe they want to do, and other things that didn't make sense and maybe they don't want to do. It's an opportunity just to see and explore and put some context to the words they've heard in their life.
SPEAKER_00Because actually many people don't uh see dying, don't talk about dying.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00So you show it to them and uh explain more about the process or improve uh their experience with dying?
SPEAKER_01So, for instance, uh my my friend Lydia was in her early 70s and she was diagnosed with cancer. She chose not to um pursue chemotherapy. She knew that the cancer was not curable, it was treatable, but it was not going to extend her life. It might have helped with pain, but the doctors were not certain. So she decided that's not what she wanted to do. She wanted to have the experience of being with her family as well as she could be, make memories, enjoy her time. And as she did that, she was very willingly exploring what was happening aloud with her spouse and with me. We did some filming and all along the journey, she she led us in. And she was a history teacher. So this was a way that she could continue teaching. She's been gone, she died five years ago. And uh every year, um, Lydia is a teacher in dying school, and it's it's uh it's really lovely. It's a lovely way to learn. She was very open in her life and generous and gentle and funny, and she is all those things. We when we start dying school, we say, This has already happened. She died several years ago. You're gonna have a relationship with her on the camera. You you hear her voice, you see her, you have a sense of her. And in that connection, you begin to um think about your own connections and your own internal structures about how you feel about dying, how you feel about grief, what kind of losses you've had in your life that maybe you need to uh look at again and maybe feel something about so you can feel more peaceful and move into other experiences in a different way.
SPEAKER_00It sounds very strong to be a teacher, actually after your life. Yeah, afterlife teacher.
SPEAKER_01Right?
SPEAKER_00I I mean it is it is something really special that she shared this experience uh and she allowed other people to share it with her. Yes. So it must be very strong.
SPEAKER_01It it is very strong and it does feel very special. And every time I share with the class and hear and feel their response and am reminded about my friend, I I feel that. I feel her strength, and I feel her um undergirding of our class, and I feel her love.
SPEAKER_00Thanks to this, she is still with you more than uh she would be without these uh videos.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it's true.
SPEAKER_00Today uh we had a workshop with you.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00And we saw a video with your father. Yes. Uh which was also very interesting. Being with him in the end of his life and also filming that. Was it difficult for him?
SPEAKER_01He wanted to live, and he understood when his kidneys stopped working that they were not going to work again, and that it was time to go home and let us love him until he died. He was a devout Christian and he believed there was something beyond here. He's told me many, many times he was not afraid to die. He was not interested in pain, but he but he didn't want to die. And he he was um he was somber about it. And he I think I think the thought of l losing contact with his children and losing contact with his friends, um, saying goodbye to all the people he loved at his uh care home was was difficult for him. He had been there for 10 years, and there was quite a um group of people that came to be with him and talked to him about what he had meant to them. And uh what a gift to be able to hear that before he died. My brother and I took turns um and eventually had someone, a third person, help us. And that was a long summer. Um, but we did it, and it was hard and it was meaningful. I'm glad it happened the way it happened, and that there was opportunity for us to be with him when he left.
SPEAKER_00Also, thanks to this approach that you are not afraid to talk about it, even document it, right? Then uh it shows that uh that you are open to talk about it because some people are not. Uh they they pretend that it's not part of our life, that it will not happen, or that it will happen later, that there is still a lot of time to talk about it later, maybe, and when it happens, then there is no time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So, what would you recommend to someone who is so much afraid of death and that he is not even talking about it, and then he maybe regrets that he would like to have said something, but it's not possible anymore.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a hard thing. I I I think for some people their their fear and terror takes over in their body, and they're just not able to say words or um communicate with family. Um sometimes if there's somebody in the family who can open the door just a little bit, and the person who is um sick or an elder is able to also open the door a little bit, those conversations can gently, gently begin to happen. And sometimes they can't. Some people leave without ever having the conversation, and that's something uh the rest of us get to just be with and um trust that the person was doing the best they could, um, be generous and um yeah, trust they were doing the best they could, even though they couldn't um say more or do more.
SPEAKER_00You showed us another video of a man who was already deaf, uh lying in a hospital bed, and he was there in a room with his uh wife, with his daughters, they washed him, shaved him, kissed him, said goodbye, and they stayed several hours together. Right. Why do you think these rituals are important uh for the family?
SPEAKER_01I think the physicalness of death, being able to touch someone when breath has left body, when it's just body, is a way that our body and spirit make sense of that person being gone, their spirit being gone. There's a a heaviness. You you saw in the video, my friend was trying to move the hand, and the hand kept falling on the bed. Yeah, it just kind of flopped on the bed and several, I don't know, three or four times. It's it's that simple thing that whatever animated that person's body before isn't there any longer. And the things we must do to care for a body then allows our heart and mind to catch up with each other and for us to really settle into this experience of someone we love has died, they're they're gone. And uh if there is space, if we stay and allow the space to be open in this um someone use this um sacred container, there are all kinds of sacred containers, that time around the bed is a beautiful sacred container, and it allows us to be there and to feel our feelings and to let the emotions move through and uh for us to begin to get our bearings and um move into living without that person there.
SPEAKER_00How many people have you been with the last minutes of their life?
SPEAKER_01Last minutes? I don't know, couple hundred. I've been with I've been with uh at least a thousand people somewhere in their dying process. Though those last moments are a little bit different. I had the opportunity um when I worked in a children's hospital in my very early 20s. Uh, I was in the room uh a fair number of times when a child was making their way.
SPEAKER_00Do you recognize that someone is going to die, or are there some signs that you see that uh the end uh is coming?
SPEAKER_01So here's the tricky thing. We humans are mischievous sometimes. It seems the spirit and the body are working together to let go of one another, and um, someone may seem to be right on the edge, and then they may make their way back or they spiral around. There are other times when someone is on hospice and it's very clear the the trajectory of this experience is moving, their body is changing, their breath is changing. Um I was less aware early on, and I imagined that I could tell. And sometimes I could, but sometimes I couldn't. There there is a um often a point in the last few minutes where the breathing moves from the stomach to the chest, and that is that's the indicator that they're they're really, really going. But I I don't presume to know now that I've been doing this a while like I did when I first started.
SPEAKER_00You also mentioned during the workshop something that people are looking for a map or they are going home. Yeah. Like the their mind or whatever it is, spirit, whatever, is already somewhere else. Yes. And the body stays here. Yeah. Could you say something more about this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I uh when my father was dying, I was also working on my doctorate in um counseling, counselor education. And I was given the opportunity to study about deathbed visions. My mother had deathbed visions, she saw her family coming to her, and I was fascinated by that and I wanted to know more. So I I did lots and lots of research over several years. And then as my father was ill in 2014, he demonstrated those things I was reading in my um material for school. I mean, it was uncanny, and I was certain he was gonna die. I had done a uh a talk, a TEDx talk on language of dying and the metaphors that people use, and he was doing all of those things, and then he got right to the edge and he came back. But watching him really solidified for me these patterns that people move through, can move through, not everybody does, but can move through as they're um approaching end of life. I I think being at the the home where I worked and being able to see people day after day, my brain was able to really pay attention to patterns and what was moving and shifting and how they were um interacting with the visions they were seeing and what the dreams were, and um, then people began to tell me stories and this picture of um changing metaphors and changing language and changing behaviors, it's a fascinating thing.
SPEAKER_00Could you mention uh some of these uh patterns?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's what it's what you were just talking about. There's a uh for me, I talk about the body and the spirit beginning to separate. And when a family member says to me, Oh, my dad was so confused today, this is an indicator to me that the body and spirit are starting to shift. And I ask what the conversations were about, and they wanted to go be with their friends. Um, maybe the person hasn't been out of bed for a month, but they're they they need to go, or they want to go home, or they want to go on a trip, or there's a car outside, but there's no wheels on it, or there's no door. So there's a um there's a journey to be taken. There is a vehicle, but something's wrong with the vehicle, which you know, their body isn't quite ready to get going. You see how the metaphor goes. Um, it's it's it's that. And as people progress, they they are sinking into themselves and they'll come back a little bit and the metaphors will change. And uh often there will be a door, but it's locked. And then they want to get upstairs, but they can't get upstairs. And then a few days later, they're upstairs and there's more locked doors, but then there's open doors, and then they begin to see people, but the people are not talking. Um, sometimes they recognize the people, sometimes they don't. Very often in that uh time frame, the the people they see are not talking to them. They see them, they recognize who they are. Um sometimes a little earlier they don't recognize who they are. That's part of the trajectory, I think. And and then eventually the people start talking, and you'll see somebody, you know, squinting and their mouth is moving, and you go over to talk to them, and they get very indignant that you have interrupted this conversation that's happening with the person that's clearly right here. Um we can't see them, but they're having this beautiful conversation. My mother got so upset with me one afternoon that I had interrupted this. I don't know who she was talking to, but I think back on that and it makes me smile. I as she was she was happy to be with whoever she was with. Those are the kinds of things that happen.
SPEAKER_00And what is your personal relation to death? Are you afraid of death?
SPEAKER_01I am not afraid of death. I'm not so interested in having pain. Uh I'm I want particular people around me. Um, I want particular energy around me. I want people who will laugh with me and be curious explorers with me as we're m moving into it. But I'm I'm not afraid, no.
SPEAKER_00You you mentioned I want people who laugh with me, which uh is uh I mean if you mention death, then not many people relate uh or connect this with love. How will it uh look like when you are dying?
SPEAKER_01I I um had the good fortune of being with a a man at the end of his life who was just full of life. And I remember he had a whole bunch of us in his room one evening and he was he started singing a song about a um Mercedes-Benz. Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz, and all of us started singing with him. I and I don't know, we were tired and punchy, and it was fun, but the joy of the fullness of life and connection and people, it makes me emotional, um heart people, um, people who really love you just because you're you, however you are, those were the people in the room. And there's a a fullness and a joy in that. Um someone I know calls it the good stuff. That's that's the good stuff of life. It's the it's the things that are not tangible, but you know them when you feel them. And um someone we love leaving, we we're gonna miss them. And there's joy there too. There's this relationship that has happened and um goodness that's been brought to each other, and there's a a lot of gratitude in that too. Can be if we'll let it.
SPEAKER_00And do you imagine sometimes what is afterlife? Maybe we can start with a simpler part. What is afterlife for those who stay here?
SPEAKER_01Hmm. That's a great question. There's um um ritual we used to do at a boat called the the crossroads ceremony, where after the person died, we'd gather the family together. I learned this from a uh colleague, Sarah Kerr, and there's different ways to do it, but the person who has died, their spirit has left, the body's in the bed, and the family gathers in a circle at the end of the bed. And we had a ritual, we had some kind of oil, and we would do a uh cross on each other's hands. We started with the elder, and the cross was just the crossroads, and for people who were religious, they um had had religious connotation for that. But we we started with the elder and we went who the next oldest and then and the next oldest all the way around, and um offered a blessing to the person who had left, and we offered a blessing to this new um configuration of the family that was here, and it wasn't that we were leaving them out, we were honoring that they had gone, and we were honoring this new experience of we're here together now, and the uh relationship now gets to be with the spirit of the person who's in the bed, so it was a way to to have a demarcation of what had happened. This they're going that way, and we're going this way. And um that was a really useful experience to do. Um, because it is different, the family's different. You sit down, and that person was the one who carved the turkey for Thanksgiving, and they're not there anymore. Or um some of the women I've worked with, their husbands, put gasoline in the car. They never put gasoline in the car in 50 years, and they gotta figure out how to do that. There's a this things of life that are evolved now, and they get to learn how to do those things and um find new ways of living.
SPEAKER_00And then there is also a lot of sadness uh after someone closed eyes. Uh is there anything you can say can help uh uh to overcome the sadness or to live with the sadness? Because the sadness is the it's the hard part.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think overcoming it is not something that I try to do anymore. I think it is more about being with it and being with it in community with other people who loved that person and other people who love the person who's grieving. It's tough to do those kinds of things alone. And if we can be vulnerable and gentle with ourselves and compassionate with ourselves and let other people know how we're feeling, that can be a shared burden instead of a heavy, heavy one. And the other thing is to let the emotions move through, let them rise and fall, and rise and fall as they do. We have these moments of being able to enjoy a moment of tea or enjoy sitting in the garden and then oh you have a memory and you miss that person and tears. And that gets uh longer. Those places of um gentleness and joy get a little bit longer and a little bit longer, and then we have sadness again. And I I talk with my clients about it being in a spiral. So we're not going backwards, we're we're moving through, and this is part of our experience of being human, is um is grieving those we love and creating a new relationship with them without them being here. Um I have a relationship with my brother Jim, who died. He's he died in 1993. I talk to him. I uh imagine what he looks like now. I um talk to him about his son sometimes. His son is an adult, and um and I fuss at him sometimes that he's not here. I think he would he would be excited I was here. And and I won't ever stop missing him. I just won't. And that's a beautiful thing. I loved him and he is in me, and um I love that part.
SPEAKER_00Was he the reason why you started to do what you do?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. He he was 37. He went to sleep one night and didn't wake up. His he had a heart defect called long QT syndrome. Um and his heart just it's an electrical malfunction and it just it stopped one night. And he had a he had a big heart in life. He he loved people and he was kind and I'm sure he was not kind to everybody, but these things you little sisters like to think they're big brothers or are all all the good things. Um he was human, but he he was good to me. And he was um I think about him and my mother. He was very tall, and he he would bend over and kiss my mother on the top of the head, and he would tuck her under his chin. And I can remember the look on her face, and I remember um being held by him and the the safety and the comfort I felt from that. And all these years later, I'm 56 now, um, he's been gone a long time. I can still get that felt sense of him, of that comfort. He wore brute cologne, and I can sometimes get a whiff of that brute cologne. Um all of that feels good to me. It's not tipping me over into a huge amount of sadness. It it just feels like part of the goodness of this life. Um when it happened, I I I didn't imagine it that way. But yes, his his death shaped our family, it shaped my heart. Um, it sent me on a path to examine what death and dying is, what it means to me, um what it looks like, what it feels like. And over the course of 30 plus years now, um I've learned and had lots of really great teachers.
SPEAKER_00What happened to your brother? This is uh, I imagine, one of the worst uh scenarios that someone dies totally unexpectedly. So it's not uh expected that uh it could happen in this age.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So is there a difference uh for um in grief for people who stay if someone dies uh so suddenly or if someone dies uh after a long illness?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So what can happen for families where there's been a long illness? Um sometimes much of the grief has moved before the person dies. And then afterwards, it's just relief. They have relief that they're not hurting anymore, relief that they don't need the care. Um, very often in this day and time, um, middle-aged adults are called on to care for their aged parents. Middle-aged adults have children, so they're need to care for their children, they need to care for the parent. Um, the parent has dementia, just can be rather exhausting, and you lose the person along the way. When someone has dementia or Alzheimer's, the meaning making that you had between you goes away. And that can be another layer of loss. It is another layer of loss, another layer of difficulty. Yeah, lots of that grief happens before, and then in in our situation, and has happened with so many people, you get a phone call and your life is different from one moment to the next. And uh all of the plans and ideas you had about what the future was shift, and it's quite something. Have you had a a sudden loss?
SPEAKER_00I have not had sudden loss. I had uh several losses, uh natural in a way that uh they were older.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Actually, I had a friend, a very good friend, who had a car accident uh in a very young age. Yes. So it was some kind of sudden loss. He was my very good, very close friend, but I think it's different than uh uh if it is someone from your family, like brother. So I I was very close to him, but it was not so hard for me as it was for his mother, for example.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I ascribe to this idea that we all feel our pain 100%, and his mother's pain, there's there's no comparison. She's her boy. You you lost your friend, and this shaped you somehow and shifted, and that was an important experience for you.
SPEAKER_00It was, yeah. At that time I did not know about palliative care, or even when my grandfather was dying, and I I spent a lot of time with him. Now, many decades, decades after that, yes, I realized it was really important for me, and I'm happy for this experience.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Isn't that the the wisdom of the years in between? And it it is it is something to look back and go, oh, that was I learned a lot from that.
SPEAKER_00Martha, one last question, which uh I think uh there is no one answer for it. Oh, good. But uh we we we were speaking about uh uh what is afterlife for those who stay here living. Yes. But uh do you have some idea what is afterlife for those who die, for us when we die?
SPEAKER_01It's fun to think about, isn't it? I I hear stories from people who go to that liminal space. Um they're in the bed and they're not talking for many days, and they come back with reports about where they've been and um visions they've seen and people they've seen, um uh people who've had near-death experiences where they've gone far and seen the light. And um, I'm I'm fascinated by those accounts, and I find comfort in those. I I don't know what happens, none of us know. Uh I want to believe there's something, and I want to believe that people come and help us when it's our time to go. I I've heard too many stories to believe otherwise, so that's that's what I choose to believe. Um, my friend Lydia said she wanted to go be on a work crew in heaven. She was gonna be helpful somehow with the new people who were coming in. She she worked for Habitat for Humanity, um, building houses when she was here. That was one of her volunteer things. And she imagined herself after she got to wherever she was going that she was gonna help new people when they arrived. And I I don't I don't I don't know what that is. I just I imagine it is the best kind of love that I can't uh I can kind of get a glimpse of when I think of the best love I've had or the most comfort I've felt from people, and if a thousand times that, um I think that would be pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_00It would be so uh it's good, I think, to finish uh our conversation on this not easy topic with this optimistic view.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I appreciate your questions and I appreciate your time. It's really great to talk with you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much.