Chloe Hope, The End-of-Life Doula

What might change if we allowed ourselves to really be with death? If we turned towards our mortality, rather than away from it?

In this episode of Awakening Doctor, host Maria Christodoulou speaks with end-of-life doula, death educator, and writer Chloe Hope about what it takes to accompany people at the threshold between life and death.

Chloe shares the childhood loss that shaped her relationship with death, why she prefers the 'big talk' of doula work over superficial small talk, and how her wildlife rescue work with hatchling birds mirrors her experience at the bedside, with both beginnings and endings demanding full attention and a willing heart.

Together, they reflect on the love and grief that weaves through this work and explore the cultural tendency to label death as failure. They also consider the subtle violence that arises when we try to solve the 'problem' of dying, and the challenge of discerning what needs intervention from what needs witnessing.

Through personal stories of ritual and community, we learn how presence can transform care, and that acknowledging that the body knows how to die might change the choices we make for ourselves.

Join us for a thoughtful conversation about humanity, mortality, and the courage to stay present at life's most tender edge.

Find out more about Chloe's work here: https://www.liminalcompanion.com/

Read Chloe's Substack, Death and Birds here: https://www.deathandbirds.com/

Transcript

Meeting Chloe Hope

Maria Christodoulou 0:00

Welcome. I'm Dr. Maria Christodoulou, and this is the Awakening Doctor Podcast, a space where we discover the personal stories of those who work in the medical and health professions. Join me as I explore the hopes, the fears, the aspirations, and the real life challenges of those who carry the title, responsibility, and privilege of being a doctor. With me today is liminal companion Chloe Hope, a UK-based end-of-life doula, death educator, and writer. Chloe works at the edges of life, blending practical compassion with deep philosophical curiosity to invite people into a more honest, less avoidant relationship with our own mortality. She's also the writer behind Death and Birds, where she reflects on death, nature, and what it means to be human, often through small attentive moments that reveal profound truths. Alongside her doula work, Chloe volunteers in wildlife rescue and at an animal sanctuary, where the animals keep her grounded and remind her regularly that she is not in charge. I had the privilege of encountering Chloe through her writing a few months ago and found myself incredibly moved by her perspectives. And so, in the spirit of redefining who is a doctor and what it means to be an awakening doctor, I'm really excited that Chloe agreed to meet with me today. Welcome, Chloe. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Chloe Hope 1:30

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the invitation.

Maria Christodoulou 1:33

My absolute pleasure. Partly my hope for today is that we can learn a little bit more about you and your personal story and what led you to the work that you do in the world today, but also that we might explore some perspectives on death, on grief, on medicine, and what it is that those of us who work in healthcare can learn by observing life perhaps a little bit more closely. So, where would be a good place for us to begin to tell your story?

Chloe Hope 2:02

Well, I suppose if I share what led me into this role as a death doula and liminal companion, I think it's one of those things, isn't it, where it seems like it was a bit spur of the moment, but then you look back and you realize it actually unfolded over decades. So my mother died when I was three years old. And I spent a lot of my childhood holding her absence in a way that felt quite lonely because I think I learned early on that the subject of death isn't enormously welcome the majority of the time. My aunt ended up raising me, my mother's sister. And I've got memories from being, I must have been quite young, I don't know how old exactly, but you know, being in a shop or something, and the person behind the counter handing a bag over and saying, Do you want to take that or do you want to give it to mummy? And me feeling the need to correct them by saying, Oh, my mum's dead. You know, to a child, it's just the most, you just like, I'm just letting you know the facts. And then, of course, seeing the look of horror, and then my aunt feeling the need to apologize and this sort of, you know, these small frictions that we learn so much from when we're young. Death was something that I gave a lot of thought to and had a lot of big feelings around throughout my whole childhood, and then into my teens, and my relationship with death has lived through many different phases, some certainly more healthy than others.

Maria Christodoulou 3:55

I'm sure we'll talk more about that, yeah.

Childhood Loss And Early Silence

Chloe Hope 3:57

Yeah. But, you know, it never stopped being something that was fascinating to me, but it was also something very personal to me. It wasn't something that I really got the opportunity to talk to many people about. And I always felt such an enormous relief on the few occasions where I would meet someone that was really open to getting into that conversation. And so I worked in the music industry in my 20s. We moved to California, I went to college out there, studied art and philosophy, and then we moved back to England, and I saw the end-of-life doula training that was relatively young then, but I immediately knew, like, yes, that. That is without a doubt something that I should be doing. And I just had a sense that it would be something I would find.. easy, isn't the word, but that would feel resonant to me. And it has been more rewarding and perhaps ironically life-giving than I ever could have imagined.

Maria Christodoulou 5:10

And how has doing that work shaped your reflections on that early childhood loss?

Chloe Hope 5:16

You know, it's interesting. I was speaking with a friend recently about, you know, our motivations for doing things. And I think sometimes people can get sort of caught up in is my motivation for doing this pure? Like is this purely altruistic? And it's okay if it's multiple things. In hindsight, I think when I first started doing this work, yes, there was definitely an altruism to it, but it was also because I find small talk extremely difficult. And so having a day-to-day existence where I get to do big talk more often than not, it makes life easier for me. So there's that. And then something that I realized a few years into the work was that there had been a part of me that I hadn't managed to quite identify, but there had been a part of me that had actually wanted to do this work because I had so much wanted to be present to my mother's dying and death. And of course, I was too young, I wasn't able to be. And so I think in hindsight, there was a part of me that was wanting to almost have some kind of corrective experience, if that makes sense.

Maria Christodoulou 6:41

What is your memory of her death?

Chloe Hope 6:43

Yeah, interesting. Who knows how accurate these memories are? It was a couple of months before my fourth birthday that she died. And the memories that I have are I remember her being in bed at home a lot. I have one memory of, and I don't know when this would have been, but I have one memory of being at the bottom of a staircase and looking up and seeing her sitting on the top of the staircase with her head in her hands, and she was crying. And I think about that a lot. I don't know when that would have been. A more vivid memory is of the hospice, and I've run this by a few people, and it does seem to track. She had a hospice room and it was kept quite dark, but there was a patio outside. And I remember her hospital bed being up, so there was this sort of triangle of space beneath her head, if that makes sense. And I remember sort of being in that, being tiny enough to sort of have like my top half in that and playing with some stones, and then I also remember being outside and speaking to an elderly man in a wheelchair about a robin that we'd seen. And that is pretty much it. I think there was a fairly profound level of denial. You know, she was 39. And I think there was a denial to the point that things perhaps weren't put in place. Things could have gone very differently, let's just say. You know, I think knowing that has definitely fueled my desire to find ways into difficult conversations. The conversations that really, really need to happen. Yeah.

Maria Christodoulou 9:45

It feels like even in this conversation we've dived quite deep, very early, and I'm moved by your willingness to talk about the death of your mother and those early experiences that shaped your journey. What's it like to talk about it?

Chloe Hope 9:45

It's interesting. It's one of those things where, you know, every time you go back to it... It feels to me, anyway, as though I sort of literally have a toe in it. In the actual time itself, so to speak. And so, it feels tender, but it also feels... It feels sweet in a way, because I think something else that I've noticed over the years of doing this work is that, I think when I was very young, if there had been a me now involved, things would have been so different. And so there's something quite healing about becoming the person that you once needed. Yeah. There's a sort of funny thing that happens with time in its nonlinear way.

Maria Christodoulou 9:52

I did find myself wondering what people said to you back then. How three-year-old, four-year-old you made meaning of that experience.

Chloe Hope 10:01

Yeah, I have just a few memories around that. Because of course, you know, at that age, impermanence isn't something that I'm gonna have a grasp of. But I have a memory of being, I suppose, at play school, and someone showing me this book that was obviously about, you know, like death for kids, basically, and it was using the metaphor of a cassette tape, right? And the cassette tape comes to an end, and then when the cassette tape comes to an end, you can't hear the music anymore. But the cassette tape is still there, and I was just like, Well, yeah, but you, you take it out and you turn it around.

Maria Christodoulou 10:44

Yeah, and you press play again.

Chloe Hope 10:45

You press play. What? It was just a terrible metaphor. I don't know how old I must have been then, but I remember thinking like that just doesn't make sense. So, you know, I think it can be really clunky, can be really clunky trying to talk to someone of that age about those things. And I think that, you know, there were definitely certain people in the family that really didn't have the tools to have the conversations that should have happened. They just didn't, they just weren't available to them.

Maria Christodoulou 11:23

Yeah, I remember growing up in an environment where we were shielded from death. And my first sort of memory of someone in the broader social circle dying was when my godmother died, and she'd been ill for quite a long time. She'd been in bed and then in hospice, and my parents had to travel to her town to attend the funeral. And so my aunt and uncle came to stay with us. So it was always this thing that something had happened, something terrible had happened, but we couldn't really talk about it. And we lowered our voices when we talked about it, and people spoke hush, hush. And when the children entered the space, then people would stop talking about it. But everybody wore black to the funeral, you know. And still to this day, sometimes in the Greek Orthodox culture or the environments I move in with my family, you don't easily talk about the word cancer, even. You don't say the word cancer out loud. And to say it is to invite something terrible.

Chloe Hope 12:17

Yes, to invoke it.

Maria Christodoulou 12:19

Yes, exactly. And I have visions in my mind of women, you know, lowering their voice when they say the word and then making the sign of the cross to protect themselves from any invocation that that might bring.

Chloe Hope 12:33

How old were you then when your godmother died?

Becoming An End-Of-Life Doula

Maria Christodoulou 12:36

I was probably nine or ten. I remember I was in primary school, and I didn't know her very well because they didn't live in the same town, but she always sent me the most amazing gifts for my birthday. And then she was gone. And yeah, that was that. What I do remember about that time, what stood out for me was everybody talking about how my godmother's dog had lain by her bedside for the entire time of her illness and had died shortly after she died.

Chloe Hope 13:13

Yeah.

Maria Christodoulou 13:14

Exactly. But my godfather used to tell stories, and I remember sometime in my teenage years him trying sort of clumsily to have a conversation with me about religion and spirituality and how it was the role of the godfather to have those sort of deeper conversations with me. But yeah, I don't remember anyone talking to me about death until I encountered my first dead patient.

Chloe Hope 13:38

I was going to ask, so that was the first time. Okay. And then when people did speak to you about that, who was that? Who were you having those conversations with?

Maria Christodoulou 13:47

It's an interesting question. I'm supposed to be interviewing you.

Chloe Hope 13:50

Sorry.

Maria Christodoulou 13:51

No, no, don't apologize. People aren't often brave enough to ask me questions. I'm trying to think, it's only in recent years that I've got people in my life that I can have those deeper conversations with about death. Medical training certainly wasn't a conversation about death and the deeper meaning thereof. If it was talking about death, it was how to prevent. And I remember in my early days in practice when I started working with women primarily who had cancer, even my inclination was to avoid the conversation about the actual death. Even though I would say, you know, we need to prepare for both eventualities. One that you might live a very long and healthy life beyond this illness, the other that maybe this illness will be a gateway to dying. But it was not a comfortable conversation.

Chloe Hope 14:45

No, no, of course.

Maria Christodoulou 14:47

And you've reminded me now that my first, sorry, I'm making this about me now.

Chloe Hope 14:51

No, no, no, please.

Maria Christodoulou 14:53

The first time I saw a dead body was actually in forensic medicine lectures when we had to witness an autopsy.

Chloe Hope 15:00

Wow. How was that for you?

Maria Christodoulou 15:02

I've spoken about it in a previous podcast conversation. It was the most surreal experience because we walked into the room and it was one of those sort of amphitheater style lecture halls, and there was a stainless steel table in the center of the room with all the lights on the table, and this naked dead body, a young man lying on the table. And I remember the contrast between his very beautiful, youthful body. I remember it going through my mind that this was such a perfect human body. And the contrast between that and the forensic pathologist who came into the room, who was a very overweight, bearded... Yeah, as a young woman, I was not drawn to his presence or his energy and his big pudgy hands. And then he took the scalpel and he just cut this body open. And because it was an autopsy, there was still some blood. The person had died quite recently. And what I remember most about all of that was that my colleague, a few rows down, keeled over and collapsed. And everybody just got quiet. Nobody spoke. Even the lecturer or the pathologist didn't say anything. We all just waited. And he somehow revived himself, sat back up, and we carried on as normal. And we never talked about what had happened or the fact that this colleague had keeled over.

Chloe Hope 16:26

I mean, doesn't that just say something.

Maria Christodoulou 16:29

Exactly.

Chloe Hope 16:29

Gosh. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate hearing it. I was thinking the other day about... you were saying about how beautiful his body was. And I noticed how when I first started working, how, as you know, dying can change the appearance of a body an extraordinary amount. Depending on the cause, it can be really, really, very dramatic. And of course, to anyone who has spent many years loving that body and knowing it in a particular way can be very, very difficult. But I was amazed how beautiful I found the dying body, the colours that would appear. And yeah, it's interesting. I used to feel quite almost awkward about it, like it was something that I shouldn't share. Like maybe there was something wrong about finding that beautiful, you know.

Maria Christodoulou 17:35

I felt exactly the same way in that moment, especially. I was quite young, I was maybe 20, and it was a young man. And I grew up in the height of the apartheid era in South Africa, and he was a young coloured man, and it felt so wrong on so many levels to be looking at his naked body and finding it beautiful. But the beauty extended beyond his literal physicality to the presence, the stillness. There was something really evocative about this dead body.

Memory, Hospice, And Denial

Chloe Hope 18:06

Yeah, there's something very commanding about being with a dead body. You know, I think the times when I've washed a dead body, it's very difficult to describe actually what seems to fall on the moment. I suppose it's sort of like a quality of quiet that is incomparable to any other that I've experienced. But it does feel like an extraordinary, extraordinary privilege. And I think also I was writing about this the other day. I was thinking about... I have this sort of... And again, I feel the need to sort of preface it as strange and it probably isn't, but I have a real love of bones, of human bones, and there's something about being around human bones and especially very old bones. I don't suppose you've ever been to Winchester, have you? Here? There's a cathedral in Winchester in England. It's an extraordinary building. It's a thousand years old, so it's seen an awful lot of history. Anyway, there are coffins in there that are sort of on these high-up wooden rafters, and they contain the bones of various kings and queens from like the 600s and 700s and what have. And there's something about being around bones that old. They don't have to be that old. But there's something about that that makes me feel very aware of where I am in time, and I find it very grounding and surprisingly soothing. Just to know that many, many people have done this whole life thing before me. I'm just another, and at some point I'll be bones, and dropping into the truth of that makes me feel very aware of how alive I am currently. So yeah, I wonder if there's a bit of overlap there with being in the presence of a more newly dead person.

Maria Christodoulou 20:32

Tell me more about that moment of deciding end- of- life doula. This is it, this is what I'm going to do.

Chloe Hope 20:40

I think I'd been trying to figure out how I was going to allow my deep interest in death to be more a part of my life. And I didn't know if that was going to be through art or through writing. I knew it needed to be more of a piece that wasn't just internal. It wasn't just me thinking about it, wasn't just me and me.

Maria Christodoulou 21:10

And when you say your deep interest in death, the phrase my deep interest in death, was that a preoccupation? Was that almost like an academic curiosity? Was that a wishing for, longing for? How would you frame it?

Chloe Hope 21:26

It was all of the above at different times? So I think in my teens, death was very much a thing that my relationship with it was such that it felt like death was always saying to me, "Look, if things get too much, I'm here." And so in that respect, it felt very comforting because things often felt like they were far, far too much. And I was caught up in a belief that I just didn't know how to do life in the way that other people did. There was definitely also a young part of me that felt like I had a parent somewhere that I could potentially join. And so in that respect, there was some longing.

Maria Christodoulou 22:17

Was your father not in the picture?

Chloe Hope 22:20

No, he wasn't. He left, I think when mum was ill, and we've not really had much to do with each other.

Maria Christodoulou 22:27

So you essentially lost two parents at the same age?

Chloe Hope 22:31

Yeah, and also I have two older brothers from my mother's first marriage, and they went to go and live with their father when she died. So it was kind of everyone. Again, I think things could have been quite different had everyone had a bit of a different relationship to death, you know. But I remember hearing about something called a threshold choir. Have you heard of those before? So threshold choirs are groups of around four people who go and sing really beautiful kind of four-part harmony music to people in hospice who are dying. And I remember hearing that and having a real full-body physical response to it and just thinking, I mean, that like, why would anyone be doing anything other than that? It's so beautiful. And so that, you know, when we have these big, big, big responses to things, it's always good information. And so that was sort of I can't sing to save my life, so it wouldn't have been fair. But that was noted. And then yeah, so when I learned that being a death doula was a thing, I think you know how we have all these various inner parts. I think probably about a hundred of them all went yes simultaneously.

Maria Christodoulou 23:59

I feel like I could ask so many different questions. What was it like to have your first... what does one call them? Patient, client, person to care for.

Chloe Hope 24:10

Yeah, client. For me it was really, really, really nerve-wracking.

Maria Christodoulou 24:15

I'm sure.

Chloe Hope 24:16

Just massively, massively so. The weight of the responsibility just felt huge. I so, so deeply wanted to do a good job, you know, to like to get it right. And so the first meeting was really, really, really intense. And then of course, as with anything over time, you ease into it and you become more yourself, and then you start to notice little things, and it's so much... For me anyway, it's so much about making micro adjustments constantly, and more than anything, it's about listening, but fierce listening, not to the point where it feels too intense for the person on the receiving end, but just never stopping listening, even when nothing is being said, just constantly taking in information and then making little micro adjustments. I think that and just ensuring that I, as the doula, am in a state of being in myself where I'm easy, quote unquote, to open up to, where I am a nervous system that can be regulated with. My aim is always to be someone who when I'm there, the person will settle, even if it's just a little bit, it'll be like, okay, your face, body settle kind of thing. That's an aim. I think something that I realised early on, and I don't know how this is with being a doctor or even a therapist or whatever, but I think personally I realised early on, like, oh, I'm not gonna be able to do this with anyone and not love them. And then it's like, okay, so what does like what does that mean? Like, is that okay? Is that crossing some boundary? What do I do with that? Like, guess I better keep the fact that I love them to myself, you know, all the... all the stuff.

Maria Christodoulou 26:31

All the conditioning.

Chloe Hope 26:34

But yeah, I realised that early on and relatively quickly let it go because I was just like, either I do this and I allow myself to love these people, or I don't do this. Like, there's not gonna be a way of me doing this without that.

Maria Christodoulou 26:54

So, what's it like to be with people in that deep intimacy, to love them, and then lose them?

How We Talk To Children About Death

Chloe Hope 27:03

It's interesting because I think maybe my second client passed, and and for a minute..., she said, probably a couple of weeks, I was worried that I had maybe somehow organised my life in such a way where I was deliberately going to live out my worst fear over and over. Because, you know, from a fairly young age, I had a deep fear of the person I was closest to and loved the most suddenly disappearing. And what I think has happened is that I've actually come to relate to death and dying in a way where I don't have that fear anymore because I have a relationship with death and dying that means when I've said everything that I need to say to the people I love most, like that's done. So if anyone is hit by a car tomorrow, God forbid, I've said everything I need to say to them. There's that, and then also I've come to understand that when you have a deep loving relationship with someone and they die, the relationship doesn't end. It changes significantly, but it doesn't end, and so that makes a difference too. And I think in terms of my clients and with the people I work with, it's such an honour to spend time with someone for whom time is so precious that even if I was going to be absolutely devastated every time I lost a client, I'd still do it. I wonder how in the medical profession the love piece, I mean, I appreciate that's not going to have been in your training, but I wonder how...

Maria Christodoulou 29:20

Definitely not.

Chloe Hope 29:20

I wonder how it is just as a... as a human. Like how's that navigated?

Medicine’s Avoidance And First Dead Bodies

Maria Christodoulou 29:26

It's complex. I think we don't often acknowledge that love is part of the equation. I think it also depends on the setting because in very busy hospitals or in ICUs or in emergency care units, often there isn't even time to form a deeper, more close relationship with somebody. But certainly in the work that I've done over the years and in my early days in integrative medical practice, I would develop relationships with people over time. And I had set up this integrative practice with the idea that I was going to do holistic medicine, but naively thinking that was all about wellness and that wellness somehow didn't include death and dying. I hadn't thought about that consciously, of course. But very early on in my practice, I think maybe six or eight weeks in, I got a patient who had a recurrence of her breast cancer and was very clear that she was not going to do any conventional treatment, but she'd heard that I had a more open, more holistic approach, and she was keen to work with me and wanted to know whether I was willing to embark on a journey with her and that we would explore together. And I remember being very cool, calm and collected in our initial meeting and saying that yes, I would do this and I would be happy to explore with her, and then going home and freaking out and ordering a pile of books from Amazon about death and dying and integrative cancer care and all of these things, and walked an incredibly long journey with her over a couple of years. She went into remission twice in that time, and towards the end of her life, she became a Buddhist and she asked me if I would go with her to the ceremony where she was going to take refuge. That was a really, really beautiful service. What I remember after that is that she and a friend got together, and the friend was a craniosacral therapist who did some craniosacral therapy, and there was this really interesting paradox of how both of us could see that life was seeping away out of this body. But when you put your hands on her sacrum, the life force was bounding. There was this pulsating life force. And so that I think gave me enormous comfort that there was something about her life force that was still vital and alive, even as I could see the life seeping out of her body. And I remember feeling enormous grief after she passed, but also really grappling with. So on the one hand, there's this profound experience of aliveness that I celebrate, like I could sense her life force is palpable and it doesn't feel like thats died. And then there's this enormous grief at the loss and the reality that this person is gone. And yeah, I think certainly back in those days, I probably just buried that somewhere inside my own being, not quite sure what to do with it. And there have been others over the years. Grief has a way, I think I've said before, I feel like grief has been a companion throughout my life. And I've danced around the death subject when I was first invited to work with cancer patients. I said no. And then they found me in my practice, and then I burnt myself out in that practice because I still held on to this idea that somehow death was a failure, and that as a doctor, my role was to prevent death. And so really grappling with that through therapy and in my own burnout experience and a lot of reading and finding ways to make meaning of it. And like you, I've come to realise how enlivening it is to work with people who are dying and how when death is close, as in when you're confronted with your own mortality, if you're willing to engage with it consciously, things that matter become crystal clear. And then, you know, I say all of that to you. I have that intellectual understanding, but I do every day. I live my life as though I'm gonna live forever. And uh, you know, it's this paradox. So the love piece, who is it that said that grief is the price we pay for love? What's the alternative?

Chloe Hope 35:20

Not loving.

Maria Christodoulou 35:22

I don't know if that's even possible.

Chloe Hope 35:24

Exactly. There is no alternative. I'm interested about what you were saying with that death as being a failure piece. I'm sure it isn't something that was explicitly taught to you, but of course it's something that I imagine a lot of folks in the medical profession learn by osmosis. And I assume that that being in the room means that surrender isn't something that can be brought in or touched upon, or you know, it's funny how sometimes the word surrender is seems like this awful, awful word. Why on earth would you surrender? But also there's just such a beauty to surrender, to yield to something bigger than yourself. And so yeah, I wonder, are there times when you're grappling with knowing that maybe surrender is something that should be in the room here, but I can't bring it in?

Maria Christodoulou 36:29

Sometimes, absolutely. I mean, to be fair, I've been out of the clinical space, as in working in hospitals and taking on either acute or chronic care of really ill people. So I'm speaking partly from memory, but also from numerous conversations with colleagues. And I think, you know, you said people absorb that idea by osmosis. And I think if we go back to the roots of Western medicine, it's all about mechanistic notions of the body as machine. Machine has parts that we need to fix. And our whole approach is focused on understanding pathology and disease so that we can fix it, so that we can master it, so that we can overcome it. So, where does death fit into that? How do we acknowledge the cycles of birth and death that are an inevitable part of our wholeness and of life? But even in our medical model, trying to understand all the factors that cause disease and/or our preoccupation with post-mortems to make sense of disease. And if we are exploring death in terms of someone dying in the hospital, it's often to understand why they died so that we can prevent ourselves from making the same mistake in the future, you know. At the same time, I'm quite encouraged by how palliative care and palliative medicine is growing. Certainly in the last five to ten years, there's been a real movement in that direction, and more and more doctors recognising the need to deepen their understanding of palliative medicine. And I think the COVID pandemic also brought that a lot closer. You know, doctors really found themselves in a place where there was often nothing we could offer in terms of our tools. And so that emergent understanding that our tools include our presence and our capacity to be with and to witness is a part of that process. I'm trying to remember what your original question was.

Chloe Hope 38:33

I was just curious about the surrender piece and whether...

Maria Christodoulou 38:36

And death is failure.

Chloe Hope 38:38

Yeah.

Maria Christodoulou 38:39

I won't lie. To this day, there's a part of me that has to catch that idea that if someone is dying, something could have been done to prevent it. Unless they're really old and they've lived a long, full life, and you know, there's an equanimity about the dying process. But especially if it's somebody young, or if there's a challenging diagnosis or a diagnosis where when we look back, there were symptoms very early on that were perhaps missed or ignored or not investigated, and there was a progression. And the idea that somehow we could have intervened, we could have prevented this is still really present in my own thinking. I had the opportunity two years ago to be with my aunt when she died.

Chloe Hope 39:28

Uh-huh.

Maria Christodoulou 39:28

And what I remember the most about that moment was the feeling of enormous privilege. Because, like many people who are dying, she waited for her children to not be around to die, and myself and the carer were with her. And I remember my own enormous peace around her dying and the gift of being present when she died. So there is something in that experience that is helpful. And then also the rituals around my father's death. I'm curious about what role ritual plays in your life and in your work. But I wasn't there when my father died. But they lived in a small village in a rural part of Cyprus where some of those old rituals and traditions are still prevalent. And so when he died, he was in his own home in his own bed. My brother, who is also a doctor, was there and had the presence to do this mindfully and with care. And my mother slept in the bed next to him through the night. And then the next morning, her friends came and helped her bathe his body and dress him. And the men from the village helped place the body in the coffin and carried the coffin down to the cemetery, which is within walking distance of their home. And yeah, there was just something about the intimacy of that and the community family aspect of that that was really, really comforting. But I also remember coming back to South Africa, and I spoke about this in my podcast conversation last month with a young doctor who lost her father recently. The insanity of coming back into a world where nothing stands still and everything is expected to go on as normal when this momentous thing has happened in your own life.

Chloe Hope 41:40

It's quite the thing, isn't it?

Maria Christodoulou 41:42

Yeah. How do you navigate that with the families you work with or the people you work with?

Beauty And Presence With The Dying

Chloe Hope 41:48

It's so individual, person to person. And so I tend to just respond to what they are comfortable with and are asking for and seem to need. And you know, I'll float various ideas early on and just track enthusiasm or lack thereof, and then just yeah, respond to what feels good to them. But I had a friend whose father was dying in hospital, and it happened sort of fairly quickly. And so he was in a hospital rather than hospice and wasn't going to be able to leave. And obviously they called me and I encouraged them to just take over the room as though it were home. And they did, they took it very seriously. There wasn't an inch of wall that wasn't covered in either photograph or art from home. And they brought in futons and slept on the floor, and you never would have known it was a hospital room to walk in there. And he said that a lot of the doctors and nurses that were there were constantly popping in, really just to soak up the atmosphere of the room. And I think that that speaks to when someone is dying, and when we think about our own deaths, and obviously we don't know how present we'll be able to be to our own deaths, but it can be an enormous gift to offer someone a glimpse at a dying process that is beautiful and loving and joyful and all the things. Fully appreciate that it isn't available to everyone, but it's an extraordinary thing to witness and a beautiful thing to be able to offer other people. But in terms of the rituals, you know, and mentioning your father and just how... I can only guess at how much the way that his death and dying was handled affected the grieving processes of everyone that was involved because of the community aspect of it, how hands-on it was, and how obviously any experience with death and dying that we have will feed into our own personal relationship with death and how we relate to our own personal mortality. This is something I think about a lot in terms of doctors who will have significant exposure to it, but perhaps just, you know, briefly. I wonder how that plays into one's personal relationship, one's one-on-one relationship with their mortality, whether it makes it something further away or yeah.

Maria Christodoulou 44:52

I'm sure it's an individual thing. I think it probably depends on the person and the circumstances. How has being an end-of-life doula changed your relationship with death?

Chloe Hope 45:03

I mean, massively, but my relationship with death went through lots of different iterations before even started. But then in doing the work, it's become just a whole other thing. And I really feel as though... there's a brilliant chap called Stephen Jenkinson. He wrote the book called Die Wise. It's a gorgeous book. And he talks about death as being the midwife for one's love of life, and that sums it up perfectly for me. My constantly unfolding relationship with death. You know, life used to be, as I said, something that I just felt like I didn't really know how to do and probably could never really get the hang of, and was very overwhelming, and all the things, and so I wasn't really able to fully land in it, let alone fall in love with it. But my relationship to death since beginning this work, it has seen me land here in this life properly. And I think when we, and I don't know if this is true, but it's been true for me, but I think maybe that when we actually land here, like fully, fully land here, I go, oh my god, this is it. Like this is it, this is life, it's happening now, and it's not gonna last. When I really manage to drop into the extraordinary truth of that, I have no alternative but to love it madly for all its for all its weirdness and all the stuff.

Maria Christodoulou 46:53

Well, I was gonna say, so what does it mean to love life madly?

Chloe Hope 46:58

To me, it means on a day-to-day basis, certainly not a moment-to-moment basis, because I'm a human being and I'm distracted by all of the things and deeply upset by all of the things, but on a day-to-day basis, being bowled over by the fact that we exist, that this exists, that everything is connected, that it's grown out of we don't even really know what, it's an extraordinarily beautiful mystery that we're caught up in. And I deeply appreciate being a part of it. So I think appreciating being caught up in this, whatever this is, and it gives me the opportunity to love people and to interact with animals, and it's extraordinary.

Maria Christodoulou 47:55

Since you've mentioned animals, let's talk about death and birds. How did that connection take shape for you and in terms of your writing?

Chloe Hope 48:06

So I've been doing doula work for a little while, and then I discovered a wildlife center and saw that they took volunteers. And in the same way that I had that sort of inner knowing that I needed to be doing something to do with death, I had exactly the same feeling around needing to be involved with animals. And so when I saw that, I immediately asked if I could come and volunteer. Having no idea what I would be doing, I asked if I could do the earliest early morning shift, just because then it meant I could avoid the traffic. And I didn't know that that meant that I would be just working with baby birds.

Maria Christodoulou 48:58

Baby birds.

Choosing The Work And First Clients

Chloe Hope 48:59

Baby birds, yeah. So orphaned birds, sometimes hatchlings, sometimes fledglings, but all very, very young birds. And I think this was in May when I first started doing that. And the season generally starts the end of April. And I went and I learned how to take care of these tiny beings. A lot of it is essentially feeding little birds that are kind of the size of grapes from a little artist's paintbrush. That's how we feed them. And when they're hatchlings, they need feeding every twenty minutes. So it's non-stop so that you're just on this conveyor belt. You just run yourself into the ground feeding these tiny birds, and there's so many of them in peak baby bird season, so it's intense. But it did a similar thing to what death did to me in terms of being bowled over by the miraculous nature of these tiny beings, and also holding a robin in the palm of my hand and being the one that was keeping it alive. Again, it just brought me into life in a much deeper way than I had been in it before. Yeah, and so I quickly developed a deep, deep love of birds and appreciation of them and just the amount that we can learn from them and their ways of being. I think also it was interesting because when I was younger, I had, let's say, a complex relationship with my body. I've always had a complex relationship with my body for various reasons. I have some connective tissue stuff going on, so there's pain. And when I was younger, I wasn't very comfortable being in my body. So I sort of detached from it a lot. And there was something about being with the birds, not at all dissimilar to being with someone who's dying. They fully demand that you are there, you're not 60% there or 70% there, and a little bit in the morning, or what you need to do later in the day, you are 100% there. And that I was using my body to feed and sustain and to keep these tiny beings alive. I suddenly started to like my body and to feel comfortable in it and appreciate it.

Maria Christodoulou 51:40

Interesting.

Chloe Hope 51:42

So it kind of opened that door as well, interestingly.

Maria Christodoulou 51:45

I'm struck by the paradox of, on the one hand, holding these tiny little fragile birds and coaxing them to live and nourishing them so they can live, and then sitting next to the bedside of somebody who's dying and the same sort of coaxing, nourishing for them to die. How do you hold those paradoxes or that paradox in your hands?

Chloe Hope 52:13

The two are enormously similar. They're more similar than they are different. Especially when you have a hatchling blackbird that has no feathers, it's skin and bone. You can see everything inside of it through its skin, right? And sometimes when people are dying, it looks a little bit like that too. There's so much crossover, and the presence piece is practically identical, and the love piece is also exactly the same. If anything with the babies, it's a little bit more difficult because when they don't make it, it feels I guess I'm not going to compare it to being a doctor, of course, but...

Maria Christodoulou 53:00

That was the first thought that I had. Say more.

Chloe Hope 53:03

Well, you know, that thing of what could I have done differently, and how easy it is to get stuck in that loop. And of course, with any piece of work as a doula, you reflect on the experience, but you know how it's going to end. So, in terms of holding them both, I think I wrote about it once and I was thinking how you've got sort of one hand tending to the beginning of life and one hand tending to the end of life, and it leaves you in this position, your heart's just totally exposed. And that is a very raw way to live, but it's also how I want to live. Because I think I spent so much of my younger life in defensive mode that when I began the death work, it started to disarmour me because I had to. You can't walk into a room where someone's dying wearing armour, it's pointless. And then with the birds as well, I think that that was it. Just the armour was completely off. And it's soft and it's vulnerable and it's terrifying. And I feel sometimes as though all of life is just streaming through my skin. That is how I want to live. I feel like I've got some making up to do in terms of living, in terms of being here, if that makes sense.

Maria Christodoulou 54:34

When did the writing start?

Chloe Hope 54:36

Yeah, so the writing started... So there was the doula work, and then I began with the birds. And then a little while after that, a very dear friend of mine took his own life. And he'd been struggling for years. But we were very close. And it shouldn't have come as a shock, but it still did. And I almost didn't really know what to do with the... It really felt like a tidal wave, tidal waves of this like devastation just kept hitting me one after the other. And as soon as I managed to stand up again, another would come and just knock me, you know. I had been reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time, and I began this practice, which was taken from the book, this practice that I did for 49 days after he died, where I would sit and meditate and get quiet, and then I would say his name three times, and then I would read aloud to him. And I started that just because I so needed something to be doing, because I was just being knocked... like just knocked around. And it was a really, really interesting experience. It wasn't how I expected it to be. I think I expected it to be something that was just for me, and it was an anchor. I expected it to be an anchor that might be able to keep me a little bit sane in what was a stormy time. The first time I did it, I read for about 15 minutes, and I closed the book, and I'd never experienced anything like this before, and it can almost feel a little bit tricky to talk about. But I closed the book and immediately heard, felt, don't stop. And it wasn't me. It wasn't me having that thought. It felt very external. It felt like it was something external that had landed in me to the point where I was genuinely quite shocked by it. And so I opened the book and I carried on reading. And then over the course of the next 10 days or so, this ritual felt so co-creative. It felt so much like something that he and I were doing together. Who knows? Who knows? I don't know. I know it kept me sane, and I know that it felt very real and very beautiful, and like he and I were working together in some way. And then after about 10 days or so, it felt like something that I was just doing to honour him and his time here and my love for him and our friendship. And that was interesting because I think, you know, I had the layer of the death stuff, and then the birds had come into my life, and so I was feeling significantly more at home in the world and at home in my body. And then that happened, and I think it just sort of cracked me open in yet another way, and I became significantly more aware of and comfortable with the fact that I know absolutely nothing. Like just, I know nothing, I have no idea what's going on.

Maria Christodoulou 58:11

I can totally relate to that. And the older I get, the less I know. Yeah, despite the books and the training and the courses and the reading and the...

Chloe Hope 58:19

Yeah, all of the things. Even the more that I learn, the clearer it comes that that in the grand scheme of things, I have no idea what's going on, nor will I ever. And I'm so grateful for that, because it forces me into a state of humility, which I think given what we're caught up in, by which I suppose I mean the universe, humility seems like quite a good stance to take, really. So those three things coalesced, and I felt the need to express some of it. Express, I suppose, really my gratitude, in the hopes that there might be somebody else out there that heard something I would float out, and they would think, oh yeah, no, me too. And no, that's not something that is part of day-to-day conversation at all, but me too. And it has happened with more than one person, and it's been really very beautiful. So thanks for reading it.

Loving Clients And Living With Loss

Maria Christodoulou 59:32

Thank you for writing it. You might recall it was one of my clients who first shared one of your blogs with me, and she'd been profoundly touched by it, and we talked about what was in the blog in one of our sessions together, and it piqued my curiosity. And I went to have a look, and then we spoke about your next blog the next time we saw each other, and then she gifted me with a subscription to your Substack, and yeah, there's always something evocative in it, something challenging, but there's also always something that invites me to a deeper intimacy with my own experience and a new way of seeing something that I've maybe looked at through a particular lens all my life and now get to look at through a different lens. And you write beautifully, you really have a way with words, you're very articulate.

Chloe Hope 1:00:19

Thank you. It means a lot to hear that. And I think it's funny. I started, when did I start writing this? Must be like two and a half years ago now. I started writing Death and Birds. And I remember the first, well, I mean, the first post that I ever posted went to David, my other half, but one person. But nonetheless, it felt momentous and terrifying that it was going to be on the internet and anyone could look at it and just terrifying, you know, the thought of exposure. It's terrifying. And I remember six months in, and there were a lot more people reading it then. And every time I would send something out, it felt terrifying and a lot to my nervous system. I remember thinking, okay, probably in like a year, a year in, this will be easier. No. Two years in will be... no. Every time, it's absolutely terrifying. And I think it's just that thing of I wouldn't know how to write anything without really threading a part of myself into it, most literally. And so it does feel like quite a vulnerable thing, but I just don't think it could work otherwise for me. And in terms of the challenging stuff, so often I'm like, oh my god, is this too much? Is this too much for people? Is this gonna be the one? Is this gonna be the one where everyone goes, nope, too much, we're done. And so far, so far, people are like, Yeah, I've thought that way too. And I'm just like, oh thank god, thank god.

Maria Christodoulou 1:02:00

What makes you keep going? I mean, you've spoken about the vulnerability of it, you've spoken about how terrifying it is, and that a year down the line it's still terrifying, and yet you still do it.

Chloe Hope 1:02:10

Yeah, it's partly habit now, I suppose. I like the challenge of it. It's fortnightly because there's no way I could do it weekly. I literally need some days to recover from it. I like the challenge of it. Because literally for the last 18 months, I have thought I don't have anything else to say. And then somehow there is something, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. So there's the challenge of it, and there's also, you know, to be honest, I don't really think of myself as being religious. I'm not tied to any religion. I was sort of forced to go to church when I was younger at school, and so obviously rejected it because of that. I love reading sacred texts of all sorts, and in a weird way, or maybe not, and I don't need to preface it with that word, but they are each a prayer, to be honest. Everyone in some way.

Maria Christodoulou 1:03:12

That's beautiful.

Chloe Hope 1:03:14

And I guess that's why it means so much when people find it and say, Yeah, yes, me too. I feel the same. It's like a sort of, it feels like having a little congregation.

Maria Christodoulou 1:03:25

You're stirring something in me because writing is something I have a long-term love-hate relationship with. But yeah, the idea of writing as a prayer, something sacred, is something I will take with me. So thank you for that.

Chloe Hope 1:04:46

Yeah, so welcome.

Maria Christodoulou 1:05:19

When I was preparing for our conversation, I read some of what you'd written and what another blogger had written about you. I think she did a series of eight questions with Chloe Hope. And one of the things you said in there, and I wrote it down because I so resonated with it, was that your natural state involves feeling a lot, thinking a lot, but sharing very little. And it really speaks to me because I think it's why I love coaching. I do share, but always in response to what someone else has shared, and by listening very deeply to what they bring to the table and then thinking about how what I know and what I've experienced can add value there. And it feels like writing is asking for something else. It feels like generating something from the inside. And it's still in response to something else. But if it's going to be authentic, if it's going to be writing that has meaning, if it's going to be writing that touches others in that feeling space, it's got to come from somewhere deep within. But yeah, we shall see. I have some intentions for this year. I think the first step is to create a more regular writing practice.

Chloe Hope 1:06:34

Yeah. Yeah, the discipline aspect, my God. Oof. I don't think I'm ever going to be one of those writers that finds it easy. I just don't think that's gonna be a thing that ever happens for me. I think it will constantly be a wrangling, a big dramatic wrangling.

Maria Christodoulou 1:06:56

Yes. And you know, perhaps that's also something to do with what you write about and how you write and the fact that you do weave a thread of yourself into the mix. So much of what we're bombarded with, certainly in the online space is, and increasingly, is AI generated, but is about ideas and concepts and the authenticity and the humanity is often kind of quite absent. So when you are writing from that inner space, you're putting yourself out there into a space that doesn't always feel very safe, is my personal experience. When you shared earlier about those moments in life where something comes over in you and you just know you have to do this, there's no getting away from that. And you can dance around it for a while and you can try and avoid it, but it's not going anywhere. I think that there is also something of that, certainly for me, in this idea of writing, but more importantly in the sense of showing up authentically.

Chloe Hope 1:07:58

Yes, which I think is becoming more and more important by the day.

Maria Christodoulou 1:08:05

I want to quickly go to my list of questions that I've prepared and see if there's anything that I must ask you. Yeah, perhaps something that's quite relevant in terms of some of the things we've talked about. In your work and in Death and Birds, you explore death as a teacher. I mean, that's not necessarily the word that you use, but as teacher and as a part of the cycles of life. How can we, I'm gonna say we, but how do you help people reframe death and move away from the anxiety and the avoidance that is so pervasive in the world that we live in?

Rituals, Family Deaths, And Community

Chloe Hope 1:08:45

So, in terms of how I do it with an individual, it will very much depend on the individual and their worldview. Where in life they feel most expansive or connected. Nature is a pretty good bet. I think the vast majority of people do feel that in nature, whether they can label it as something. Yeah, so nature is generally a good way in, and of course, in nature we see there's no railing against death. Death isn't a failure, nor is it offensive. And so I have a course that I made called The Deep End, and the arc of that is very similar to my own personal journey, and so it starts with talking about how we got here. Like looking around and saying, Oh wow, okay, we really have got a strange relationship to death. Why, what happened? And so looking into history, particularly the last couple of hundred years, you know, the Industrial Revolution changed the way of life enormously, and death became something that happened in hospitals rather than in the home and behind closed doors, and so it wasn't something that.. You know, I've met people in their 50s who have never seen a dead body. And it used to be that, you know, in your childhood you would have been around someone dying and around dead bodies, and so naturally when something is hidden and happens away from and behind, it becomes something that we will naturally somewhere think of as bad or wrong or not okay, because if it was okay, it would be integrated. And so, you know, then we look a little bit at the psychology of that and where death sits in the shadow, like personal and collective, and what would a world look like that had a terrible relationship with death? Well, it would look exactly like this one, where the anti-aging industry is worth however many billions of dollars.

Maria Christodoulou 1:11:29

Well, we even have biohackers determined that they might actually overcome death.

Chloe Hope 1:11:34

Oh, I mean, not to mention the tech bros who are absolutely convinced that immortality is within their grasp. I think I briefly wrote about it once a long time ago, because I'd read an article about this chap who I think there was a maybe a 90-minute window where he ate food, and the rest of the time he was sort of under a red light or taking supplements, and he wouldn't sleep in the same bed as anyone else because it disrupted his sleep and because his plan was yeah, to not die. And I was just thinking, what a strange way to spend eternity. Yeah, pass, thanks. So all of that, all of this strangeness, and even addiction, shopping, scrolling, all the things, anything to not think about the fact that we are mortal. And then we look at death at all scales. So how death is happening inside of us constantly, all the way up to the death of stars, and it's a fractal shape, death. It winds through everything as it should. And then it also looks at animism and the left and right hemispheres and how a culture with better access to its right hemisphere might relate to death in terms of understanding that it is so much a part of everything and so necessary and so natural. And then obviously to speak about animism, you'd sort of speak about colonialism and why it is something that's so quickly dismissed. And then it also looks at thin places and the quietening that can happen within a person through various means, whether it's meditation or prayer or being with a being that you love or being in nature, and what we can come to know in those places, in terms of the information that exists within us already, but we tend not to be quiet enough to be able to hear it. And then it speaks about what to do with all of this information and what legacy means and the wake that we are leaving behind us as we move through the waters of life, really. And so that is something that I will take people through. I appreciate there's a quite a long-winded way of speaking to it, but I think it's quite important that there are sort of layers that are built on, you know, and looking at it from a very personal me sense, and then also a very like the cosmic me.

Maria Christodoulou 1:14:32

With that understanding of death and with the work that you've done as a death doula, like what do you see as some of the gaps in how doctors, modern medicine, our healthcare system, and I guess you could speak for the NHS, but there are parallels to be drawn in most Western cultures. What do you see as the most significant gap in how we approach death in the context of our healthcare model?

Chloe Hope 1:14:58

I mean, I feel as though I should preface by saying that I feel like I'm massively underqualified to give a decent answer to that, to be honest.

Maria Christodoulou 1:15:06

I'm asking for the answer that comes from your experience.

Chloe Hope 1:15:09

Yeah, I see. So the first thing that came to mind when you said it was I worry that the human experience of dying is undervalued for so many reasons, not least because it's been labelled as a failure, and so it has a label, so I'm not going to look any deeper than that. But if we take that label off and look at the human experience of dying, not as a failure, not as a mistake, but as something that is as natural and as sacred as birth, I worry that it is one, not acknowledged in the ways that it should be, and two that there are interventions that are made which have a lot more to do with the comfort of the people present than the comfort of the person who's dying. I don't know what the experience of dying is like, I can only guess. I've seen plenty of it, but I have no idea what is actually going on for that person, and I appreciate that it can sometimes look quite scary, and so there is a natural want to stop that.

Maria Christodoulou 1:16:34

Yeah, make it look nice, palatable.

Chloe Hope 1:16:38

Yes, and also I completely understand that if someone appears to be having a very difficult time, it's very normal, whether you are a loved one or a doctor, to want to ease what looks like suffering. Totally, totally respect that. Again, I don't know, I have no idea, but and I wonder is it possible that what is happening needs to happen?

Maria Christodoulou 1:17:07

Great question.

Chloe Hope 1:17:09

That's one of the reasons why I love what I do, because it's... I mean, being able to be with someone when they are in that place, and being able to be really with them, not just in the room, but really with them in a way where they know that yes, this is their journey, this is their thing, but for as long as I can, I'm gonna be in it with you. And so, yeah, I think also makes me very grateful for all of the very difficult experiences that I've had. If that makes sense.

Maria Christodoulou 1:17:51

Yeah. You wrote something in your most recent blog that you've just reminded me about, and you said that to engage with someone whose time it is to die with the intention of fixing the problem of their dying is a subtle violence which our culture encourages. And it's one which we can guard ourselves against by learning to distinguish between what needs intervention and what needs witnessing. And sometimes the subtlety of that distinction can be really challenging.

Surrender Versus Fixing In Healthcare

Chloe Hope 1:18:20

Absolutely. And I think I mentioned in that post as well how important getting out of our own way is. There's no way you're going to be able to tell which when you've got a storm of inner voices, and it's not like I'm suggesting all doctors should spend more time meditating and quieting their minds so they can tune in to, you know, not for a second. And getting still and getting quiet, it's just so important. How has your relationship with death changed over the course of your career?

Maria Christodoulou 1:19:03

I would say that today there's a deeper surrender, and I say it cautiously because that might be different an hour from now or tomorrow. I think partly getting older, so I'm going to be 60 this year, partly getting older and watching the changes in my own body and becoming more aware of the evidence that my body too is moving towards death, has been quite confronting. I find it really hard to live in an environment and in a culture where anti-aging is considered the norm, and there's so much emphasis on youth and vitality and staying young and Botox and fillers and plastic surgery. Every time I try and have a conversation with someone about how it's time to let the gray hairs grow out, and then I'm met with this resistance, and I'm not ready to negate or ignore that resistance. A thing of like, don't do that, you'll look so old. And there's a part of me that deeply wants to embrace being old because intellectually I believe that getting old is a privilege. And I will admit to a somewhat at times morbid fascination with death, but also being terrified of it.

Chloe Hope 1:20:20

Is it morbid?

Maria Christodoulou 1:20:22

Good question. Good question. I think at times it is, and it goes back to what I asked you earlier about was your preoccupation or interest in death almost like suicidal ideation, or was it an academic curiosity? There have been times in my life where it has been a little bit of all of those options that I offered you. But there is something about the shift that has happened from I must, as a doctor, find a way to avoid death at all costs, to a deepening surrender, to actually, as a doctor, all I can do is be present and witness and stay with what is and meet the person where they're at, because I might have ideas about pain medication or not, or what this should look like or not, but their longing might be quite different and to not impose my romanticism about death onto them. And I find myself grappling with the body knows how to die, intervening versus witnessing, being an agent of all of those things. So the relationship to death is an ongoing exploration, I think. Is there anything I haven't asked you about, Chloe, that you'd like to share?

Chloe Hope 1:21:48

There's nothing that I can think of, no, I don't think so. I'm glad we kind of got to speak to... I know we didn't really go into it, but I'm glad we kind of got to speak a little bit too... Because it can feel really difficult to talk to that piece about who are we intervening for here with the powerful, powerful, powerful end-of-life drugs, you know. I just don't know if this is right. I know I would, and of course it's not about my preference for a moment, but I know that my preference would be being with them whilst they're in the bigness of their experience. Yeah, I think about that a lot. But also, I have had the privilege of being able to sit in a five-day-long ceremony with the Santo Daime, who are a... So the church of the Santo Daime in the Amazon, Yawanawá tribe. Their sacrament is a very, very powerful hallucinogenic. I feel like I learned a lot about death and dying then. And I feel like my ability to be with the most difficult parts of death and dying is tenfold since that experience. I'm very, very grateful for it. But it really cemented my concern around how death is treated here and how potentially important the bigness of it is when the bigness of it happens and how we don't let it. You know, there's that saying, isn't there, don't let me die in America because they won't let me. You know, it's that control thing, that colonial mechanistic control thing. And I wonder sometimes if there's an aspect of and whether it's conscious or not, but an aspect of anger at death and almost sort of wanting revenge against death, and so not allowing death to play out in the way that death would without human intervention. I don't know. I must have said I don't know about 50 times.

Maria Christodoulou 1:24:00

But that's the reality of this conversation, right?

Chloe Hope 1:24:05

It is the reality, yeah.

Maria Christodoulou 1:24:07

I've often wondered about people's increasing frustration and disillusionment with the medical system and also relationship to death, and how it's so easy to be angry at doctors for somehow failing to keep us alive at all costs. It's easier than acknowledging that we might be at the mercy of, and this because of religion, some capricious God, you know. And if we want to hedge our bets, we can't be angry at God, but we can be angry at the doctor who is the emissary or the intermediary in this life and death process.

Chloe Hope 1:24:48

Yeah, interesting.

Maria Christodoulou 1:24:50

I'm very grateful to you for saying yes to the conversation. Because if you go to the root of the word doctor, which comes from the Latin docere or docere, it's to teach. And the deeper, broader meaning is to teach and to inspire to create. And so there's something about the doctor as having the role of sharing something that might inspire someone to create something for themselves. And so many of my guests have been doctors, mostly because my longing and my wish was to humanise the profession more, to get doctors to share their personal stories in a way that might help people see the profession differently and see that we too grapple with existential stuff, that we too have health issues and relationship issues and all of those things. And in the last couple of months, it started feeling like, okay, but I don't only want to talk to doctors. And so when I had, in fact, my client suggested, why don't... you should interview her, the client who shared your blog.

Chloe Hope 1:26:17

Bless her.

Maria Christodoulou 1:26:19

And it was like, yes, I should, of course, absolutely. And then when I was preparing this morning, I thought, okay, so how do I frame it? Because you're not a doctor. And then it was like in my own mind, this like, what do you mean? So who is a doctor? What is a doctor? And so I feel like you brought in this very vital, very alive, and very essential piece of the puzzle to the conversations.

Chloe Hope 1:26:46

Very grateful to have been asked, very intimidated. But very grateful. I'm really grateful for your brilliant questions and also just for your presence and how easy you are to talk to.

Maria Christodoulou 1:27:02

Thank you.

Chloe Hope 1:27:03

This morning I was like, oh God, what if I'm 15 minutes in and I hate it and it's just stressful? So very, very grateful that it wasn't like that at all.

Maria Christodoulou 1:27:16

So is there a parting message you'd like to give, or maybe something you'd like to share with someone who is perhaps right now confronting their own mortality? Something you might want to say.

Death As Midwife To Loving Life

Chloe Hope 1:27:30

I mean, I think to anyone that's confronting their own mortality, I would say I love you and well done, and me too, which I appreciate doesn't seem like enough, but...

Maria Christodoulou 1:27:49

Just the notion that that isn't enough is perhaps something we need to question.

Chloe Hope 1:27:54

Right. It's what makes us human, this piece. It connects all of us so so deeply. And so anyone who attempts to deepen their relationship with mortality, I'm deeply grateful for it.

Maria Christodoulou 1:28:08

Likewise. Thank you. And on a more practical level, for anyone who might want to engage with you or engage with your work and or your online course, which you described briefly, where do they find you?

Chloe Hope 1:28:22

So my website is liminalcompanion.com. And then all of my writing lives at deathandbirds.com.

Maria Christodoulou 1:28:34

And you're on Substack.

Chloe Hope 1:28:36

Yes.

Maria Christodoulou 1:28:36

Thank you for this really rich and meaningful exploration.

Chloe Hope 1:28:41

Thank you so much.

Maria Christodoulou 1:28:43

And for the amazing work that you do in the world.

Chloe Hope 1:28:46

Yeah, likewise.

Maria Christodoulou 1:28:49

I'm Dr. Maria Christodoulou, and you've been listening to the Awakening Doctor Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please share it with your friends, follow Awakening Doctor on Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify, and go to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate, and give us a good review. Thank you so much for listening.