Getting Real About the End

Author and death doula Alua Arthur shows us how to grapple with the experience all humans share

By Ren Brabenec | April 19, 2025

A recent fad is going viral on TikTok: Short, humorous videos racking up millions of views depict millennials buying plots of vacant land and zoning them for cemetery use.

Why the quirky new business trend? Predictions vary, but according to the Census Bureau, U.S. deaths per year are about to skyrocket. As the Baby Boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964) reach their twilight, projections suggest annual deaths could surpass 3.6 million by 2037. That’s about 510,000 more deaths than today’s annual rate.

Some of this is already being felt. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023 saw 3.09 million deaths, up from 2.85 million in 2019. And it’s not just that more people are dying because the country has a larger population than it did a generation ago. According to the United Nations World Population Prospects report, U.S. deaths as a share of the population were downtrending from 1950 to 2010. But in the past 15 years, they’ve spiked.

To help make sense of a part of life that all humans face, New York Times bestselling author Alua Arthur, the nation’s leading death doula, will take the stage for a National Writers Series conversation at City Opera House on Thursday, May 1, at 7pm.

The topic of the evening? Arthur’s book, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End, plus a discussion of how people can rethink their relationship with death.

What Is a Death Doula?

“I provide non-medical support for someone who is either facing an imminent death or who is simply in recognition of their own mortality,” Arthur says, describing her career role.

The daughter of Ghanaian political refugees speaks in a kind voice, and we can instantly tell she is as accustomed to joyful laughter as she is to guiding someone through their last moments on this earth.

“I was struggling with clinical depression and coping by traveling the world,” Arthur says of her own journey. “While backpacking across Cuba, I sat down on a bus next to a woman my age. She revealed to me she’d just been diagnosed with uterine cancer, and our cheerful, frankly delightful conversation led me to reconsider my own relationship with death.”

When Arthur got back stateside, she immediately began caring for her brother-in-law, who was also dying of cancer. A few months later, Arthur enrolled in a training program to become a death doula. “I wanted to help people reframe how they approach death,” she said. “I wanted to be there for them, in the end.”

Arthur’s view is that most people tend to focus on preserving life and avoiding death rather than finding a way to get real about death’s inevitability. Western society as a whole tends to lean into the medical side of end-of-life care while skimping on—or entirely avoiding—the spiritual, psychological, and emotional aspects of everyone’s final chapter.

According to Arthur, a death doula’s role is to provide end-of-life care in practical but also deeply significant ways. Death doulas help the dying tidy up their affairs, but they also comfort, coach, provide emotional support, help individuals look back on their lives, and guide them in looking forward.

“The pandemic came, and all of a sudden everyone was paying a lot of attention to death,” Arthur says. “It was the most unforeseen of dichotomies, because while everyone was sheltering in place, I was busier than I’d ever been. We were all watching the death tallies with morbid curiosity, and I was fielding calls from people across the country who wanted to get real about the end.”

Arthur’s services were more needed than ever before, and she began to detect commonalities in her clients’ experiences.

“I realized their stories needed to be told, because while I was learning so much about death and how to reshape my own relationship with it, I realized so many others needed to learn the same lessons I was learning as a result of hearing my clients’ stories.”

The Death Embrace

Arthur coined the term “Death Embrace.” A regular feature in her book, the death embrace is a technique she teaches people to use in reprogramming their perspective of death.

“Your deathbed holds all the answers about your life, because at the baseline, death is not something anyone can avoid,” Arthur says. “It’ll happen to people we care about, to our pets, and, eventually, to ourselves. Rather than deny it or pretend it will never happen, we can train ourselves to be open and honest with it, to be proactive about the end, and to make it our own, rather than letting it leave us spending our last moments in fear.”

In addition to her work with the dying, Arthur provides death doula services to those who are experiencing the death of a loved one. She shared some of the advice she gives her clients:

Give yourself lots of grace, take it easy on yourself, and don’t let yourself feel guilty about their passing. Rather than focusing on how they died, spend more time thinking about how they lived.

Be honest with yourself and others. Someone’s death is your opportunity to speak openly. Be honest about how you feel rather than dancing around the truth.

Ask for the support that YOU want. If someone is trying to help you in a way that you don’t want or that doesn’t feel right, tell them.

Immortalize your loved one in the way that you want to immortalize them. You can’t control that they’re gone. You can control how you remember them.

Going with Grace

“Getting real about the end is about not fitting into society’s boxes when it comes to how we approach death,” Arthur says of the book. “Most of us will serve as a death doula at some point, and my hope is that people who read the book will feel more seen in their own struggle. Everyone experiences death. The study of it couldn’t be more important, and I like to think the book provides a compelling, alternative view.”

Arthur’s book is only the beginning because, in addition to her role as an author and death doula, she’s also launched Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization and retreat. Going with Grace exists to support people as they answer the question, in Arthur’s words, “What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?”

More information about Arthur’s organization can be found at goingwithgrace.com.

About the Event

An Evening with Alua Arthur takes place on Thursday, May 1, at 7pm at the City Opera House in Traverse City and via livestream. Tickets range from $32.50-$42.50 (plus fees) and come with a copy of Briefly Perfectly Human. In-person tickets can be purchased through the City Opera House, and livestream tickets can be found through the links on the National Writers Series website. For more information, visit nationalwritersseries.org.