In 2021, I attended end-of-life doula training through INELDA, the International End-of-Life Doula Association. I was still a graduate student in the MFA program at Florida International University at the time, and I found my training as a doula dovetailed perfectly into poetry workshops at FIU. My poetry was getting published, and readers were responding to my experimental work with hybrid elegies.

My chapbook Many Miles, which focuses on losing my brother to suicide, was published last year by Harbor Editions. More recently, two of my elegiac poems, “World Beast” and “Automotive Poetry,” were published in Rawhead Journal.

To me, death and grief are enmeshed in creative expression—and maybe this is something that all writers can relate to. How might I combine meditative end-of-life work with my work as a writer and editor?

On February 17, 2025, my mother was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. After the diagnosis, while I waited with my mother in a hospital room off the ER, Mama said, “Maybe your father was saying, ‘It’s time.’”

She said this because February 17 was the same day in 2012 that my father died. The year before, he’d been crushed under his four-wheeler in the mountains. He spent a year on life support.

During my mother’s chemo journey, all of her appointments were in Kissimmee, an hour and a half away. On the way to the infusion center one day, my 33-year-old pickup truck broke down in the middle of an intersection. The money spent on fuel and repairs going back and forth is staggering. My mother was my dependent for years, and this was the final journey—a rough ride for us both. Read about it in my essay, Stage Four, winner of last year’s riverSedge Prose Prize. 

My mother was an alcoholic. As a child, I cared for her when she was drinking. Our roles have always been reversed. There were many times, even in recent years, when she was verbally or physically abusive. I’ve long focused on my inner work, meditating daily, and one day—I can’t say when, exactly—I came to a place in which I no longer felt angry or resentful at my mother. I honor her as the talented, amazing person she was. A woman who struggled with trauma and didn’t know how to be a loving parent.

She said to me during her death journey, “I’m sorry I’m taking so much of your time.” And I said, “It’s okay, Mama. That’s why I’m here.”

That’s why I’m here.

I felt it in the core of my being—in my heart center—that by being there, loving her, and caring for her, I was fulfilling my purpose.

We agreed that I would be her death doula. That I would walk with her to the end. As her condition deteriorated, I took care of her day and night. She asked me to teach her to meditate, and we did that together. I spent hours meditating by her side. She taught me how to care for the garden she’d planted. She told me how to finish a sewing project we started together.

And then, after she died on June 14, 2026, I went to the crematory and read a poem to her, a poem I’d written, a poem called “Mama’s Garden.” After the reading, I helped push her body into the cremation chamber. I pressed the button and listened to the gentle hum of the machinery. I went home and I read to my mother’s spirit from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

When the grief counselor from hospice asked if I felt guilty, I said no. There’s no room for guilt. Not only had I completely forgiven my mother—I knew in my heart that she couldn’t be anything other than what she was—I had done everything in my power to make her comfortable and give her all the love she felt had been lacking in her childhood.

I don’t think she’s gone. Once, early in the morning, I swear I heard the door open. Heard her walk inside.

One night, I woke up at 3:33 to the clear, distinct sound of her calling my name from the other room. I got up, walked through the dark house and found nothing.

Again, I read the prayers aloud from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I prayed and meditated.

After my mother, the house feels different. Even my friends who visit remark upon it. My mother’s personality took up a lot of space. She craved validation, and I was her only support system.

Caring for my mother also brought to mind the many people in the world who have no support—who have no one to care for them.

When my cousin Gregg was dying in a hospice facility in 2016, I would go visit him and pass dark rooms where patients sat staring at empty spaces. I longed to be there for them. I had the same experience when my friend Sholom was dying in 2019.

Through my poetry and creative nonfiction, I aim to explore grief and death from a spiritual perspective. We’re never really alone, even when we feel like we are.

Next month, I’m starting another INELDA course called Pathways to Practice, in which I’ll explore how to continue my work as a death doula.

I hope you’ll follow along on the journey.

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