The Spirit Vessel Professionals Perspectives in Deathcare series aims to help bring awareness, acceptance, and normalization to death and the grieving process. Throughout this series, we interview professionals of all types in the deathcare and emotional wellness space including hospice nurses, grief counselors and coaches, death doulas, funeral directors, life insurance agents, celebrants, alternative disposition advocates, and social workers just to name a few.
In this interview we speak with Cait Maddan, who is a death doula, a passionate death educator, and a supporter of her large, digital community with death resources needed both individually and collectively, in these rapidly changing times.
Cait’s own experience with two life changing deaths in two months, is what propelled her curiosity into the unique and vast space of grief, death anxiety, dying, the afterlife, metaphysical curiosities, and so on. The pandemic forced the closure of her in-person business and her full attention turned to the virtual space, knowing that’s where many folks go to access support + education.
Cait’s journey has led her into different avenues of death work from sitting at the bedside of those actively dying, to cleaning out homes after a death, to haircuts for those on hospice, to educating hospice groups on what death doulas are, to guiding folks on living will creation, to building a digital presence for death workers; truly, the space is vast.
Currently, Cait offers free education via Instagram and Tik Tok and connecting through Lives. She is co-creator and curator for Death Led Life, a new monthly guided-death-meditation membership.
In this conversation we discuss:
- How Cait was led to deathcare after two significant deaths in her life within two months of one another.
- How she served her grandfather as a doula during his decline and death.
- The journey of curiosity around death that she embarked on after her grandfather’s passing.
- Her experiences as a hospice volunteer.
- How she discovered her death doula training course and received her certification.
- What grief and death anxiety are and how they surface from within us.
- The role of death workers as ‘space holders’.
- What ceremony and ritual look like with her clients as times shift and people tend to be less religious, and more creative in their end-of-life wishes.
- Ways in which Cait is able to care for herself as she serves her clients and community.
- Her newest project, Death Led Life, a monthly membership site for folks to explore death safely through multiple modalities.
- What she’s most excited about for where the industry is headed.
LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION HERE
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