Alua Arthur is an entrepreneur, death doula, and New York Times bestselling author, who recently published her book, 'Briefly Perfectly Human.' Alua shares her life story from fleeing Ghana as a child to finding her calling after an unexpected conversation on a bus. In this episode, Alua discusses the transformative nature of starting conversations about mortality, the universal wisdom found in the process of dying, and the need for cultural and racial awareness in end-of-life care.
Alua also talks about the importance of setting boundaries, the many emotions of grief, and the importance of humor and compassion in dealing with loss.
Alua’s book, “Briefly Perfectly Human” is available for purchase: https://www.aluaarthur.com/. You can learn more about her work by following her on social media @alualoveslife.
This podcast is produced by Larj Media.
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sarah Cavanaugh , and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode, we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page. My guest today is Alua Arthur.
She's a death doula who is a pioneer in the death care field, and her first book, Briefly Perfectly Human, Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End, just came out in April of this year. Alua came to the U. S. when she was a small child because her family fled Ghana in the 1980s. And then found her calling as a death doula after a very unexpected conversation with a stranger.
It changed her plans. It changed her life, really. As a death doula, Alua has walked many people home. And she [00:01:00] shares some great insights about living and dying that are relevant to wherever you are in this journey. She's full of wisdom, unapologetically herself, and gives us all permission to live into the messiness of life as human beings.
It's such a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Peaceful Exit.
Thank you very much for having me.
I just would love to start talking about your book. Beautiful, beautiful book. I love your stories. I love the detail. You have this curiosity that I can completely resonate with about the world and the creative spark that you had as you were traveling the world and, you know, looking and seeking for that thing that rose.
And it's so rare for that to be death. And when you met Jessica on the bus and you asked her about what she wanted at the end of her life, it was really beautiful.
Alua: It felt [00:02:00] beautiful. You know, it's really easy to see in retrospect how perfect, it all was. At the time, it was like a rich, deep conversation.
It felt like somebody had poured honey on my insides, you know, I just felt like, wow, yeah, so just sticky and sweet and warm. And in retrospect, I see that it was perhaps the most important conversation I've ever had. Uh, not only did it open up this work that I do now, but it also opened up my perspective on using mortality to instruct how we live.
Even though I'd gone to liberal arts school and spent time tossing around big subjects, I'd minored in philosophy and spent time in psychology and sociology, it was the very, very first time that I had a real honest conversation about death. The rest had been theoretical. Thinking with the big philosophers about why this and why that, and how do we do this, and what is [00:03:00] the meaning of life, but never, what about my life?
What about my life? How is my life impacted by the fact that I'll die one day? Um, and so it was, I think, the most important conversation I've had in my life.
Sarah: Do you keep up with Jessica? Are you still in touch?
Alua: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I had a party for my book's birth in April, and she is now in Scotland. I'm studying at the University of Glasgow and she came for the party.
Oh, fantastic. Yeah, she stayed here in my house, we drank margaritas and it was spectacular, it was wonderful.
Sarah: Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. I love how you fully embrace the messiness in the world and how being human and imperfect is just completely fine. What do you want to
come
of your book?
Alua: I think my biggest hope is that it inspires people, like individuals, humans, into their lives.
It inspires them into their deaths. It inspires them to embrace their messy [00:04:00] ride. That it inspires them to be with their mortality in a way that's useful for them. I hope that it makes individuals, humans, feel seen. I hope that encourages them to tell their
stories.
Sarah: I really believe the more we can talk about this, the more we can language our mortality, the more we're able to have peace in our own lives and also peace in the world.
I do some global peace work and this fear of death is causing all sorts of violence around the world.
Alua: 100%. I was thinking recently about, uh, 9 11 and how the rampant Islamophobia that was present then was directly related to our fear of death. I mean, so blatantly, and yet it was couched in so many other things, but at the root it's like, no, you're afraid that they, ushering them strongly, they are going to kill us.
And so we must get them. It makes me so sad. It breaks my heart. [00:05:00] I think that if we would address our fear of death, if we would address our deep existential fear, our deep existential concern that we are powerless and helpless, it would allow us to be with our fellow humans in a way that can be holding, that can be rich.
helpful
Sarah: instead of tearing each other down. Yeah, I've been really thinking about peaceful exit in terms of not only our own individual peaceful exits, but the peaceful exit we have from all of the violence and how we come together and what it means really. And I think what you're doing is much, much, much bigger than just walking people through their physical body death.
Because the messages that you write about in your book are really universal and so needed and, you know, I was feeling a lot of gratitude this morning and my meditation practice for the message that you have raised up for all of [00:06:00] us, the term death doula was really not in the vernacular. as much as it is now, and it is rising, and I just, I'm really grateful for that.
Alua: Thank you. Although I don't think that's me. I see it popping up everywhere. I think that something happened where we all just kind of, the stars kind of aligned around the world, around, well, I think mostly in the United States, that people started opening up to the idea, and I'm talking, and other people are talking, and it's like, oh, this sounds good.
This feels good. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. It's like a universal conspiracy.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Or the algorithm. I don't know. It feels like an algorithm. Like somehow I have like all of these grief threads in my social media, but it's pretty cool. It is cool. And you and I started this conversation before COVID, but I feel like also COVID just kind of was in everyone's living room.
Alua: Majorly. I mean, fear of death is, I think, the thing that had us all in our apartments, in our homes, not touching anybody, not going outside, not looking at anybody. We were scared to die. We were scared to kill other people.
Sarah: Yeah.
Alua: Bottom line.
Sarah: I want to talk a [00:07:00] little bit about meaning making. I've had many guests here talk about meaning making at the end of life, but collectively I think we have a narrow meaning of that word, narrow version of meaning.
And you really expanded that definition. What was it that was the insight for you in that your purpose is not necessarily singular? Because I think that our popular culture is all about finding your purpose.
Alua: Yeah. Purpose, to me, is a much larger bag than the meaning. So I think that the meaning is the stories that we tell about the things that we're doing and why we're doing them and the purpose is the big picture like bucket that holds it all.
And a singular purpose would mean that my life has been narrowed down to the major story within the meaning. Whereas if I allow myself to have a wider purpose, then I can have many, many, many, many, many different meanings, right? Like the meaning of exercising every day, maybe to keep trim, not really, but for me, joy and like my body and being in awe of what it can [00:08:00] do and better sleep and mental acuity and all those things.
And so the purpose, big picture, would be to enjoy my time in my body. That, to me, feels like a worthwhile purpose for being alive, briefly, and not just making money and being a cog in the machine. You know? Yeah, I love that. Like, what if we allowed ourselves the freedom to, divorce ourselves from a big purpose that we must have while we're alive.
I see people beat themselves up all the time because they haven't found the thing that makes them tick. I'm like that thing that makes you tick is also the trillions of functions that are happening in your body at this moment that allow you to breathe and think through what your purpose could be.
Like it's so dynamic, it's massive when we really spend time with it and we are so reductive about it.
Sarah: It's kind of a miracle that you and I are in these bodies talking to each other right now at this moment. Statistically speaking, it's probably quite a miracle that we would even be on this [00:09:00] planet at this time right now.
You know, it's just, it's a marvel that we're even alive.
Alua: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a marvel that I am bringing in oxygen, turning it into something in my lungs. My diaphragm is pushing out. Pushing that air back out, I'm making sounds through these two little dangly things, two little things in the back of my throat.
It's just a series of sounds. And those sounds somehow are conveying something to you when you're nodding and you're listening and you seem to understand these series of sounds. That is a miracle. Like, just at its baseline. You know, we can break that down so much further to really get into the rapture of this miracle of being alive.
I'm stunned by it when I pause to think about it. And then there's also plenty of times where I'm in line at CVS and the cashier's taking too long and I'm angry. And I forget about what a miracle it is to be living. You know what I mean? Road rage? Every once in a while? Sure. I'm not in awe of the miracle of life then.
Sarah: How [00:10:00] often do you find with people you're, you're, you're walking with, you're walking them home? How often do you find that they're stuck with this idea of a singular purpose and that they didn't quite get there?
Alua: Not as much as I would have thought. Not as much as I would have thought. I think that as folks get closer to the end, they sink deeper into the miracle and they seep deeper into this, this wild existence that we have because they're about to leave it.
And I think at that point there's a decent amount of reconciliation made with the lives as they live them as opposed to the ones that they wanted to live on. It's work that we all must do at some point. And yet it becomes urgent when we are on the deathbed. And I think that urgency perhaps drives the train a little faster toward being okay with what it is that we did, even if it wasn't the thing that we thought that we were supposed to do.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.
Alua: Yeah. I had a client who was a [00:11:00] musician. He'd made music most of his life. I think he was a CPA. And as a child, he'd wanted to be a rock star. And as he was dying, he was recounting the times where he would play his guitar for his children and they would clap and he'd hear them sometimes singing his songs and he said, I was a rock star to them.
That warmed my heart. It was a reframe that was supportive to him and his dying. That's sweet. That's available for us all the time if we're open to it.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, you model some beautiful ways of being with dying and being in relation to death. So I appreciate how you spell out what happens to the physical body sort of early in the book, but also in the epilogue when you talk about your own body.
And this is part of accompanying.
Alua: I think that many of us perhaps don't have enough information about what happens to [00:12:00] bodies as they die. I think we're used to seeing them on TV where the dying person looks exactly like they did the rest of the series, but just now we're supposed to understand they're dying because there's machines and they're in a hospital bed or room, but they look the same as they always did.
They look exactly
Sarah: the same, yeah.
Alua: But that's not what dying looks like, and I think the more education we can do about what the process is like, perhaps folks will fear it a little bit less, maybe make less negative meaning about what they experienced or what they saw and the people that they loved.
Because there's a decent amount of trauma about how people die that I think more education could help combat.
Sarah: I do love that more people know about this resurgence of energy before you die, because that catches a lot of people off guard. That people become lucid before they die and are able to communicate sometimes.
Alua: I was surprised by it.
Sarah: Yeah.
Alua: And when my brother in law was dying, I thought it was a miracle that we'd been hoping [00:13:00] for. You know, he was making a turnaround. He was going to be okay. Never mind the fact that he was like 60 pounds lighter than he had been and he had no hair. He could barely make words anymore because there were tumors on his vocal cords when the eyeball wasn't working.
It was like, girl, come on. This is, it's not. Going the other way, you know, but it was enough for me to hang on to that hope that can be so difficult, so damaging sometimes at the end of life. It was what I needed. That death rally was my last, like, maybe he's going to be okay. Maybe he's going to live. And he didn't.
Yeah. It's the longest chapter in your book. It's also the most painful one to write. I wrote also of depression, as you know, and my difficult moments there, but the chapter on my brother in law's death is still the one that I'm, I feel emotional talking about it now. It's been 10 and a half years since he died, and yet every time I put myself back there, that emotion comes up [00:14:00] again.
And it reminds me constantly that, you know, we just learn to live with grief and we keep learning how to integrate and navigate loss.
Sarah: You write about being Black, you have a whole chapter in it, and you say, I'm Black as fuck, I want that acknowledged when it's my time to go. And how would you want that seen?
And what does that look like?
Alua: Uh, first of all, it's just funny to hear you say I'm black as fuck, by the way. Um, that tickles me significantly.
I am black as fuck. I. It's, it's one of the ways in which I identify in the world. If somebody can't see me, even when they do, I'm Black. Like, it's a way that I move in the world. It's a way that I've learned how to move in America because of this racist system that we live in. And there are elements of who I am now that are because I am Black.
It's also a great source of pride for me. Like, I love being Black, despite [00:15:00] what the rest of the world might tell me about the amount of melanin I carry in my body. I think it's a tremendous thing. To me, being Black is like something to celebrate and to herald. And I don't want that to fall by the wayside.
I don't want that to be a secondary thing as I'm dying. I want my Blackness to be acknowledged. There have been many, many folks in the death care industry who have said very blatantly to me that they don't think race matters when talking about how we die. And I think to say that is to not only erase a core part of our identity, but also to overlook the fact that.
There is a different set of power dynamics at play that impact how we live and ultimately impact how we die, what we die of, how we die, the care that we receive while we're dying, and all those things are absolutely important and valid and necessary for us to consider. I would love it if those of us that are in death care spent some time looking at where our bias and our privilege lies.
to [00:16:00] acknowledge the perspective from which we're coming so that we can honor the life of the person in front of us for all the intersections of their identities, not just the ones that we see, not the ones that we understand, but who they say that they are as well. It's still surprising to me when I show up in spaces and there's the audience is all white and I am the only black person and I'm on the stage.
It's always shocking. So confusing. Who are we supporting here? What are we about here?
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Do you think that's changing?
Alua: I want to say yes. I'll say this, that I am so grateful that the students in the Going With Grace End of Life training course or doula training program are quite varied, that there are all types of identities present in the room. And that leads me to believe that as those students head out into the industry, into the death care world, that the shift is happening [00:17:00] there as well.
But there's also a number of other death care organizations that are just all white. And so I think, I'm not sure if it's changing.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, I really care about this issue. I work with a woman who's Lakota and Their lifespan is so much shorter and they're facing death all the time. And she actually lost 14 or 15 family members during COVID.
And I had people say to me that COVID was just the flu. And so it's almost like there's two different worlds here. And. One of the things I love about this conversation is that it feels like it could bridge
that.
Alua: I think death care is a thing that could potentially bridge all of it. Because in order for us to acknowledge and honor the life as it's dying, you know, just to be there present with them for who exactly they were.
across all their intersections. If I can do that while they're dying, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to honor their life while they're [00:18:00] living. And if I can honor their life while they're living, then how do we still have systems in place that devalue and dehumanize? It's not possible. The only way to continue to drop bombs on folks, to not provide adequate housing for folks or, um, medical benefits is if we do not honor their unique and valued You
know what I mean?
Sarah: Absolutely. I think this conversation's the way in. It's the bridge. Talk about grief for a minute. How do you metabolize your grief and your loss in your life?
Alua: I've spent a lot of time grieving and perhaps Being aware of my grief because of the work, because I'm grieving death so often that it allows me to see when I'm grieving other things that are not a death of a human, but maybe a death of an identity or a death of an idea.
Or a shift in perspective that is difficult or [00:19:00] painful or a new way to be in the world. And that means that, you know, I keep sharpening the grief skill. I, it, it keeps changing on me. I think I like kind of get how I grieve and then I start grieving some other way. And I'm like, Oh, well, look at this.
Surprise. Hello, you. New grief. Um, but I like to think that I keep sharpening the skill. And allow it to be what it is when it will be there and do with me what it will. I think I meet myself when I'm grieving. Yeah, truly.
Sarah: What's the role of humor in your grief?
Alua: Well, I laugh at a lot of things, maybe sometimes inappropriately, because sometimes I just think things are ridiculous and that's funny.
Or sometimes I'll be able to witness myself in the experience and I think that's funny. And humor, to me, in grieving is really potent. It's very powerful. And those two things can coexist. I mean, I'm sure, you know, people often think grief just looks like [00:20:00] sadness and sorrow, but it's also promiscuity and anger and irreverence and laughter and all those things are present in grief.
Like, grief is so rich. It's like such a textured fabric that we put on and I guess keep on throughout our lives. It's just how life is.
Sarah: I appreciate how you talk about setting boundaries around when you're caring for someone who is dying, the tendency for this radical empathy can lead to burnout, how you show up. How do you think about how you show up now?
Alua: Well, I've recently found myself trying to empathize with somebody and I found it was not working because I don't have the same set of trauma as [00:21:00] this person I was trying to empathize with.
So the way that I see the world and the way that it would make sense to me to be, it's not the way that she is being. And it's very confusing, very confusing. And it calls me back into compassion, which is, I don't get it, but she is struggling through something that I do not understand. I can't understand.
And yet this is how it's showing up. And I'm going to accept it as such and continue to love her exactly where she is, you know, I keep practicing. Because we must. We must. Compassion is the healing force. Compassion allows us to allow our fellow humans to be human and be on their own ride. Empathy requires me to try to understand where you are, and I would love it if we tried to understand, but sometimes we just can't.
And that's okay. That's okay. As long as we can stay compassionate, as long as we can give them grace, I think it's okay that we don't always understand. I'm still practicing all the time.
Sarah: How hard [00:22:00] is it for you, or at least at first, to be in the room with a dying person?
Alua: Not. I think it's like the sweetest place to be.
I get giddy to be around them, and to offer some comfort, and to just have somebody know that somebody cares. I get giddy about that. Yeah. I also take a lot of deep breaths, you know. Uh, try to ground myself before going in, and also the reminder that I don't know what it is that I'm going to meet when I walk into the room.
And so to calm and center myself for whatever it is that I may meet once I enter.
Sarah: Yeah. I actually really appreciated the story about the racist and how you needed to set boundaries for yourself. That taking care of yourself in this work is so important. Necessary.
Alua: It's something I also learned when my brother in law was dying because I was just [00:23:00] Wrung out at the end of it.
There was nothing left. There was nothing left. It may have been grief, but I also couldn't figure out like how to wear clothes anymore. You know, I just was done. And gratefully I had a really supportive and loving partner at the time who said come and let me take care of you for a while. And at first I thought I didn't need it.
I thought I'm fine. But I wasn't fine. I have now since allowed myself to be a delicate flower and let people take care of me, because it's actually much easier when you just surrender to the support.
Sarah: I also really appreciate the idea, you know, of being in your body versus your mind telling you, well, you just took two weeks off.
You should be fine, right? Jump back into work. And actually you're getting ill because your body's not quite ready to be there.
Alua: Yeah.
Sarah: I do. Really. I appreciate that. I think part of this culture about being sort of a, just heads walking around, we're just all in our heads and we're all thinking all the time and we don't drop into what our body [00:24:00] needs.
And we're also so based on disease and not on health. And I just appreciate this movement that's really calling out what it is that our bodies need in all shapes and sizes.
Alua: The body to me is so wondrous, you know?
Sarah: Yeah.
Alua: It's my most intimate companion. Like, we do life. And I must listen to it. And it will tell me when I can't anymore.
Yeah. I read someplace not that long ago that maybe for the first half of your life you pick your habits and for the second half of your life your habits pick you. And I've been noticing as I get older that I need to be more consistent about when I go to sleep and the temperature in the room. I'm choosing new habits because of what my body needs.
Because I can't do it the way that I used to anymore, and that's okay, but I gotta listen to the [00:25:00] body. Life isn't much fun when I'm not, when I'm living completely out of alignment with it. Speaking of the physical body,
Sarah: you make this point in your book that most people are afraid of the pain versus afraid of the actual dying.
Alua: Yeah. I've been noticing that. It happens almost every time that we go through a death meditation with somebody, and if they've come to me because they have a lot of anxiety around dying, they say they have like a huge fear of death that follows them everywhere, and it's difficult for them to work through, and they've been with a therapist, and they've been on medications, and they're dealing with their anxiety, and yet they want to go directly into it.
almost always they come out saying, Oh, it's not the death itself. It's not being dead. It's the process of dying that I'm afraid of. And I can understand, you know, we're conditioned to fear pain and it doesn't feel good. It does not feel good, but also it's a [00:26:00] part of what it's like to be human. And gratefully, we have medicine through hospice where we don't have to have a lot of physical pain when we're dying.
And once that education happens, or once people are able to identify the root cause of their fear, it gets, I think, a little bit easier to deal with.
Sarah: Yeah. I want our listeners to understand what a death meditation is, because It's often really transformational
for people.
Alua: The death meditations that we offer are based on the nine contemplations of death that were written by Atisha, who's an 11th century Buddhist scholar, and they are like the noble truths around dying.
We start by offering up some information, things to contemplate on all the nine contemplations of dying, and then journey with the participant through the body shutting itself down gradually, and then the experience of that, and then ultimately [00:27:00] Imagining to the best as we can with our mind's eye, the stillness of our bodies, and then just being present with what it is that happened during that time, and then we come back and we discuss.
Easy peasy. Sound like fun? No? Sounds like a good time to me. That's why you're in this work. Yeah, I guess. I swear.
Sarah: Touché. So you mentioned you have your own culture around death rituals. What are the rituals you have as a death doula?
Alua: They depend largely on the person that I'm serving. And what I'm trying to do often when creating rituals for somebody is looking at, well, what our intention is, like, why are we doing this?
What is this about? What they valued, what it is that they're trying to create. Acknowledging what was and moving us into what will be by using some of the elements like fire, earth, water, air, to ground us in the body. Because in the body, in this experience, I am here right now, [00:28:00] not where I was, but rather where I am right now, which allows us to make the little bridge.
And sometimes that bridge is somebody may be deep in the experience of grieving their old life, their healthy life, into like a sick body. That's a transition point. Um, sometimes the transition into dying, sometimes the transition from maiden to mother, that's one that I've done quite a few times because there's tremendous grief in that as well that people do not acknowledge.
Even though many think of it as a joyous experience, birthing a child, there is something else that has to be put down. in order for that to exist. And it is a tremendous thing that mothers do. You know, who you have to become in order to care for young ones. My partner's children are with us for a couple of weeks this summer.
And wow, I am learning a lot. It's a new, like, orientation toward the world, and also with myself, that I'm exhausted all the time. And it's only two [00:29:00] weeks! And There is another part of me, but also certainly when people choose the journey into motherhood, something in them has to be put down so that they can take this tremendous task on, not without its joy, but still with a loss.
Mm hmm. It's a death.
Sarah: Well, I so appreciate you have this ritual around becoming a mother and acknowledging that. So would you expand the definition of death doula?
Alua: Absolutely. I think the death doula support any dying person in their journey. The technical definition that I use is a death doula is a non medical support person, holistic support person who supports the dying person and their circle of support through the journey.
And dying person means anybody who has some awareness that dying is occurring. And the dying may be of the maiden. You know, of the single person into the married [00:30:00] person of the person who worked a corporate job into an entrepreneur, because there's a death that happens there too, that nine to five and expecting that paycheck gone, and you got to figure it out on your own.
There's so many different transitions that we undertake. And I think that ritual help us really ground that we are in transition. And that was, I think, a particularly key helpful to support people in creating some context around that. Yeah, yeah. You said something earlier that I thought was really interesting.
I think you said languaging mortality or the language of our mortality. What do you mean by that?
Sarah: I've always been interested in language and literature. I've worked with a lot of poets and filmmakers and creatives, and there's something that is special about authors and creatives and curious people that can create a language around our mortality so that we can all talk about it.
You say this in your book as well, that [00:31:00] even though you are sitting with a dying, you don't know what it's like to die. You've never done it. Right. And so something that we don't know about that's completely unknown and causes fear in most people, what is the language that we can choose? And those beautiful questions we can ask so that we can all have this conversation.
Alua: There are so many questions. And I think so many of them are born out of our ability to be present and to listen with our entire bodies and to honor the humanhood of the person in front of us to make space for whatever it is that they need to unburden themselves with. One of the things I love so much about this work is it does create space for all parts of the human to come forward because the whole human is dying.
And so we've got to make space for all of it to be present too as it dies. And in that space, the questions arise naturally. Sometimes I'm always fascinated when the person I'm supporting is asking the questions because I don't have the [00:32:00] answers. And yet, there is value in the question asking itself. Yeah, that to me is very powerful.
Thank you for putting language to that.
Sarah: Well, I love the fact that you like questions. There was at some point, and I may not find it right in this moment, but you said something about Christianity is the lack of questioning. Here it is. The complete lack of questioning in school, and then you experience the same frustration and the lack of questioning in the Christian church.
Yeah.
Alua: Yeah. I still don't understand. So if we're just Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel, where do the rest of us come from? I don't know. And it's a beautiful story, you know, it's really, it's beautiful. And there's a lot of elements of it that I want more answers and nobody can give them to me. Are there beautiful questions?
There are beautiful questions I've been asked. One of them, I'm pretty sure I wrote about this one, was, how will I know when I'm gone? [00:33:00] Wow, that's stunning. As my brother in law was dying, my niece asked me if her dad was going back to the place that he came from. What kid? Whoa! Yes? No? I don't know. It's a beautiful question.
My favorite questions, though, are generally the ones that start with Y, because they allow space. for any answer, and sometimes none at all. Like, the Y leads to a wow all the time. I love a Y.
Sarah: Well, there's a question I ask every one of my guests, and it's, what does a peaceful exit mean to you?
Alua: Yeah, if I could whittle it down, it [00:34:00] would mean that I have lived out the edges of my life, and not, you know, hustle, hustle, do, do, go, go, go, get, get, get. But rather, been present. for the experience of awe, and I've allowed myself wonder, and I've allowed myself to be seen.
I've allowed myself to be loved. I've also given love. I've been generous. I've done as much bureaucratic stuff as I can to make sure that the people that who love me aren't left with a big ol mess and stuck trying to figure out what to do with all my fidget toys, um, but rather have me to plan for them.
Um, I think ultimately a peaceful exit would mean that I lived and I loved my life and that I gracefully let it go.
Sarah: Thank you for all that you're doing. Raising this awareness, uh, that there are many deaths in our lives [00:35:00] and many losses and that we need to language them and we need to keep on talking.
Yeah. Thank you. Been a pleasure. Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh . You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit. net. And you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at A Peaceful Exit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
This episode was produced by the amazing team at Larj Media. You can find them at larjmedia. com. The Peaceful Exit team includes my producer, Katy Klein, and editor, Corine Kuehlthau. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Tina Nole is our senior producer, and Syd Gladu provides additional production and social media support.
Special thanks to Ricardo [00:36:00] Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.
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