Social worker uses death doula training on the job
When Tanisha Bowman was a child, she told her mother she wanted to work at a funeral home because she would “get to sit with the sad people.”
She doesn’t know how that idea entered her young mind, but her past self might be satisfied in knowing that Bowman now does a lot of sitting with sad people, but in a different environment.
“A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a room for hours listening to this family tell me stories about their loved one. ... What I can do is leverage my palliative social work conditions, in the hospital and community and do the same work,” Bowman said. “I am really comfortable literally sitting in the sadness, and sitting there where someone is dying.”
Bowman is a palliative care social worker at Butler Memorial Hospital, but also has death doula training, which she can call upon when meeting with patients and their families in the department.
Palliative care is specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness. A death doula, according to Bowman, is a person who stays with people who are on the brink of death to help them process their emotions, along with any loved ones present with them.
Bowman said that while she trained and is certified as a death doula, being a social worker in palliative care gives her more freedom to work with patients in a hospital, for several reasons.
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