22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 2-8, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com ing on each doula’s strengths, offering help with things that go beyond the confines of what hospice workers and other professionals provide. (Hospice is a specialized form of medical care at the end of life, either in-patient or in a home setting, whereas doulas provide non-medical support, similar to how birth doulas—also non-medical practitioners—help with things like birth preparations and postpartum care.) “There are people who love—and are great at—helping someone organize their paperwork and their finances and their planning. And then there are people who want nothing to do with that but are very much into physical support and helping plan for the great transition,” Goulet says. Other doulas may specialize in grief support for families. “Doulas have a kind of spectrum of services, and so there’s so much room for people who want to be of service, to find their niche,” Goulet adds. Some doulas provide advice about advanced health care and end-of-life planning, as well as help clients review their life and have meaningful conversations with loved ones. Dr. John Hausdorff is an oncologist and director of Hospice of the Central Coast. “[Doulas] provide a kind of navigation in territory where there isn’t anybody doing navigating,” he says. Hospice wasn’t designed to help with the types of services doulas provide. Having a doula work with a hospice team would be ideal, he says, and he sees them as valuable guides in advance to help clients make the decision to transition from palliative care into hospice. In the final days, many doulas offer “vigil support” by creating a calm and serene atmosphere and incorporating elements that are important to their clients and their families, and by helping manage visitors, if necessary. “It is a focus on every sense that the person has,” Wheeler says. “So visually, what are they seeing? Can we shift their bed so they have a beautiful view? Can we move their special artwork and mementos within their field of vision? What are they hearing?...What are they touching?” It’s a way of giving clients some control over a process they have little to no control over, to respect their choices and to give them a final voice. Hahklotubbe—whose Choctaw last name means “one who listens before the death”—carved out a unique niche in providing death doula services. (Hahklotubbe resists the change to the term “end-of-life” that has been gaining traction in the field. “We need to take the word ‘death’ and change how people feel about it, rather than allow them to continue to not address the ‘D’ word. So I am a death doula and I will always be a death doula,” he says.) One example of the type of support he has provided to clients—he’s helped over 1,020 in their time of transition— comes in the story of a young man in Utah with an aggressive terminal illness that made travel complicated but the man wanted to see his two young children smiling and laughing at Disneyland one last time. The man’s hospice caregivers said it wasn’t possible and refused to help him. “I boldly told him to fire his hospice. ‘I have a hospice company that operates in your state that operates a remote office in Orange County,’” Hahklotubbe recalls telling the man. A plan was created to get him from the plane directly to the theme park. “Two weeks later I got a text stream of photographs of him and his kids at Disneyland,” he says. “It takes empathy, it takes creativity, it takes an interest in creating a quality of life to make those maneuvers, and it also takes being allergic to the word ‘no,’” he says. Hahklotubbe recalls another client, a woman who had always wanted to go to Hawaii but never did. He and his team brought in buckets of sand from Carmel Beach, figured out how to warm it up, and lined the bed she was in with the sand. (He admits he learned the hard way that warming beach sand in the oven also warms up the tiny bits of kelp. The house didn’t smell great afterward. “I learned along the way, don’t ever do that.”) They looped 24 hours of uninterrupted scenery from Hawaii on a big-screen TV, set up an oscillating fan blowing warm air and played Hawaiian music. “The husband was just in shock, first of all, and then in tears,” Hahklotubbe says. “‘You just gave her the best exit that she could possibly have,’” he recalls the man saying. “So that’s my niche. I go out of my way.” I t’s unlikely that anyone starts out life thinking they’ll be a death doula. For Wheeler, it was a deep desire to do something more to help others that led her to the career. “I had a prior career in finance, and then I took a significant amount of time off to be a mom. And then as I was approaching my 60th birthday, I thought, ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’” she recalls asking herself. Wheeler had been a volunteer with the American Red Cross and Meals on Wheels of the Monterey Peninsula, “and I kept thinking, ‘I can do more,’” she says. She became a hospice volunteer with the Central Coast Visiting Nurses Association. “I felt I desired meaning at this point in my life, and that would provide me with significant meaning,” she says. It was through her hospice volunteering that she heard about end-oflife doula training. She chose to receive training through INELDA, one of the oldest and more established organizations which has been training doulas for over 10 years. Located in New Jersey, INELDA offers in-person and virtual courses. Wheeler chose virtual training, with 10 to 12 hours of pre-course work, 24 hours of live classwork and three to four hours of postwork, in 2023. She started her own company, Compassionate Hearts End of Life Doulas and launched a website, compassionateheartsdoulas.com, with resources for people who want to learn more about end-of-life care. Soon people were finding her website and contacting her for help. She also gains clients through word of mouth. Over the past year she’s assisted over 20 people as they’ve died, both as a volunteer and through her private practice. In her practice, she charges on a sliding scale, depending on their ability to pay. (The range of what doulas charge ranges from approximately $75 an hour to as high as $400 an hour.) “People will often reach out to me as soon as they receive a terminal diagnosis,” she says. The help might be intermittent, sometimes briefly or up to a year or more, providing emotional support and planning assistance. Hahklotubbe originally started out as a gerontologist, a professional who studies aging and its social, cultural, psychological and social aspects. From there he built care facilities specifically for seniors with dementia, “but more specifically, the folks who had problematic behaviors that no other communities would undertake,” he says. Being in that business, he experienced a lot of patients dying, and noticed “a gap between where hospice ended and where the client really needed some assistance in the exiting process,” Hahklotubbe says. “And when I say client, I mean the whole family system. It’s the client who’s passing but it’s also the living that go through the more difficult part of the process, which is the grieving process.” His first “client” in 1998 was a Linda Anne Goulet at her home in Monterey. Goulet was a hospice volunteer who then chose to train as an end-of-life doula. She also co-leads grief workshops locally. “IT SETS THE STAGE FOR A MORE PEACEFUL PASSING.” DANIEL DREIFUSS
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