Death doula Shelby Kirillin chats with client Kim McGaughey. (Photo by Julianne Tripp)
The Angel of Death is surprisingly upbeat.
“I know death is sad, but what’s wrong with dying?” Shelby Kirillin says, green eyes alight. “It’s OK. We’re all going to do it.”
Kirillin is a death doula — someone who guides the dying, and their families, through the end of life.
“You have written so many amazing chapters,” she tells her clients. “Write your last chapter. Put an exclamation point at the end! Make it end in a crescendo. So many people, I feel like, choose death because it’s just better than the hell that they’re living.”
In 18 years as an ICU nurse specializing in neuroscience, Kirillin witnessed too many bad deaths. She heard frantic families ask for every procedure possible in order to prolong life, instead of easing their loved one’s passing. She saw doctors who advocated continuing medical intervention, even when it was obvious that nothing more could be done.
Then in 2012, Kirillin, along with four Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center colleagues, helped care for a fellow nurse who was dying of cancer. Their assistance allowed their friend to die at home, peacefully. And Kirillin found her new calling.
Kirillin began an apprenticeship with a death midwife in Canada and is completing her certification by the International End of Life Doula Association. Last year, she began practicing in Richmond. Insurance doesn’t cover her services; her fees are based on the time and level of support a client requires.
She’s not a hospice nurse, who manages patients’ medications and physical needs. She doesn’t give medical advice, nor is she a grief counselor. Rather, she is an “end-of-life transition coach,” as one client dubbed her, who guides people through the emotional and spiritual experience of death.
“You have written so many amazing chapters,” she tells her clients. “Write your last chapter. Put an exclamation point at the end! Make it end in a crescendo. So many people, I feel like, choose death because it’s just better than the hell that they’re living.”
“I can’t take away the fact that you have to kneel in a mountain of sorrow,” she says, paraphrasing end-of-life guru BJ Miller. “That can’t be avoided. But what I can do — I’m very much like a birthing doula — I hold the space.”
Family members may be mute in their grief, or mired in doubt, or consumed by guilt. Kirillin helps them to act, to labor along with their loved one. “It’s a beautiful day,” she may say. “Let’s open these windows.” Or, “You want to lay next to your mom? Here, let me move her. Lay next to your mom. Hold her. It’s okay.”
Mary Bolling “Mary Bo” Gassman found out she had cancer just seven weeks before she died. Her husband, Ken Gassman, couldn’t accept it. “I’m an alpha male, OK? And I’ve always been the family patriarch,” Gassman says. He made an executive decision: “We’re going to beat this cancer.”
As a result, Gassman and his oldest daughter, Elizabeth Gassman Chéron, didn’t agree on how best to manage Mary Bo’s symptoms. Chéron wanted to relieve her mother’s suffering; to her father, administering morphine meant bowing to the fact that his beloved wife was dying.
Kirillin became the ambassador, mediating between father and daughter. She encouraged Gassman to stay focused on the goal: not curing the incurable, but giving his wife a reason to wake up the next day, and the day after that. When Chéron admitted, “I just don’t know what to do,” Kirillin told her to trust herself. “You’re doing great,” she said.
On a cool October afternoon, Kirillin said it was time to open the windows. The breeze carried in the sweet scent of wildflowers, Gassman remembers. “A minute or two later, it was gone.” It was 4:32 p.m., and Mary Bo had passed away. “I think Shelby knew how she was going to ride out of there,” he says.
While Kirillin serves the family and friends of those soon to depart, she is chiefly concerned with the desires of the dying. Long before the curtain closes, she says, everyone should clearly state what living means to him or her. Kirillin’s own advance medical directive says, “If I can’t go to a baseball game, follow it, enjoy it and, the next day, remember it, I don’t want to survive.” It’s funny. But it’s true.
When dying becomes a possibility, she speaks with her clients about how they envision their last days. Most people say they want to die at home, for instance, but a hospital may offer more comfort for a patient who’s short of breath.
Kirillin helps people articulate what they want their death to look like, sound like and even smell like. Silence or songs? Coffee or lavender?
“When we die, we lose control,” says her current client, Kim McGaughey. “You don’t have any control over what’s happening, how you’re going to die. But I’ve got a lot of control over the beauty, and how special it is, and how I create this experience.”
At first, McGaughey didn’t want a death doula. After an eight-year battle with cancer, she had just been told she might have weeks to live, instead of months. She was feeling overwhelmed and didn’t want to complicate her dying. Then she met Kirillin and changed her mind.
“I might as well figure out how to do it, so that I enjoy it,” McGaughey says. “I know that sounds weird.”
Kirillin answered McGaughey’s questions about what death feels like. She gathered healing circles of friends and helped McGaughey write her own funeral service. McGaughey has asked her friends to write down memories of times they’ve spent together, and she wants these stories read aloud as she is dying. Everything is prepared.
“I want people to understand that death gets beautiful,” Kirillin says. “Death is amazing.” And sometimes, she says, it feels just like birth.
For more information on death doula services, visit Kirillin’s website, Peaceful Passings.
