When someone passes away back home, the people who love them surround them. Someone bathes the body with care, someone stays through the night, and someone knows the prayers, and when to say them. That knowledge did not come from a textbook. Instead, it came from the person who had done it before, who learned from the person before them. Different communities have different names for that role. Here in Canada, as a result, BIPOC families are turning to death doulas to fill it. In many BIPOC and Indigenous communities, accompanying the dying has always been a form of community care. In fact, it is as sacred as birth, as relational as any other threshold in human life. The word “death doula” is recent. The practice, however, is ancient.
What a Death Doula Does
A death doula is a trained non-medical person who supports dying people and their families. Their role is relational, not clinical. They do not replace doctors, nurses, or hospice teams. What they offer is what those teams rarely have time to provide. It is things like sustained, culturally attuned presence, and guidance through the administrative process of death and dying.
The work is wide-ranging. Before death, for example, a death doula might help someone create a legacy project: recording their stories, writing letters to loved ones, or organizing the documents and decisions that make dying easier to navigate. In addition, families receive support in understanding what to expect as death approaches. As a result, space opens for conversations about what a person wants their dying to look and feel like.
During the active dying process, a death doula offers presence: sitting with the dying person, supporting family members in the room, providing comfort measures, and holding the space so that what is happening can be what it needs to be rather than what a busy institution can manage.
After death, the work continues with the immediate aftermath: practical next steps, bereavement support, and the navigation of grief in the days and weeks that follow.
A 2025 scoping review in OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying found that the most reported skills of end-of-life doulas were emotional intelligence, active listening, compassionate communication, and non-judgmental presence. Effective doulas also stay flexible, collaborative, and present with families even after death.
Prendergast, Saltus and Depledge (2025). Mapping the Role of the End-Of-Life Doula: A Scoping Review and Logic Model Framing. SAGE Journals / OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying. doi: 10.1177/00302228251389332
The Name Might be New, But The Practice is Not
The formal term “death doula” entered mainstream language in the early 2000s. This was largely through the death positivity movement in North America and Europe. But the practice it names has existed in every culture for as long as people have been dying.
- Shxw’Ow’Hamel First Nation elder Mike Kelly has been helping people at the end of their lives since 1975. He describes his work as “comforting the loved one that’s lying there ready to go back into the spirit world and comforting the family who’s grieving and hurting.” When he learned the term “end-of-life doula,” he said: “The work that I do today, we learned how to do that a long time ago. But the name doula came in and I didn’t know what it was.”
- In many African and Caribbean traditions, dying is understood as a community event rather than a private or clinical one. Research published in BMC Palliative Care (De Souza et al., 2024) confirms that African and Caribbean cultures celebrate preparation for after-death processes. This has been found to result in early exposure to and opportunities for discussion of death across generations. Migration has complicated this because when families move to Western countries, the generational learning-by-watching of the dying process is disrupted, and traditions that once crossed oceans become harder to sustain.
- In many South Asian traditions, specific family members hold designated roles in the dying process. There is a role for the person who washes the body, who says the prayers, who stays through the night. Across many Indigenous communities on Turtle Island, community members understand death as entering the spirit world, a transition requiring specific ceremony, collective presence, and the guidance of those who know the way.
Sources: CBC News, May 2019; YES! Magazine, October 2019; BMC Palliative Care, July 2024 doi: 10.1186/s12904-024-01503-6
Western Death Doulas and Culturally Rooted Death Doulas
Black and Indigenous communities have raised concern that as death doula work becomes mainstream and formalized with training courses, regulatory agencies, and fees, it risks co-opting a practice that originated as a free community service, rooted in cultural tradition, performed by community members for other community members. The concern is familiar: hair styles, clothing, spiritual practices, and healing traditions from Black and Indigenous communities have repeatedly been taken up by mainstream culture, stripped of context, and marketed back at a profit.
The International Journal of Indigenous Health has noted that the term “end-of-life doula” is sometimes associated with a for-profit business, which is counterintuitive to traditional Indigenous practices, and has called for consideration of a name change in Indigenous community contexts.
The tension here is not that formalizing or professionalizing death doula work is inherently wrong. It means that BIPOC communities, and particularly Indigenous communities, deserve to be at the center of how this work is named, practiced, and compensated in their own communities. And it means that anyone seeking a death doula should look for practitioners who understand this history and hold it with care.
Sources: Bioethics Today, February 2022; International Journal of Indigenous Health, 2021 doi: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijih/article/view/33230
Why BIPOC Families Are Seeking Death Doulas
For BIPOC families navigating the Canadian healthcare system, the experience of dying in institutions often involves a specific kind of loss alongside the loss of the person: the loss of cultural practice, of community presence, of dying in the way that would have felt right.
BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities have experienced historical trauma and betrayal by the medical establishment. A culturally attuned death doula provides advocacy and awareness in end-of-life settings where those communities have historically been underserved or actively harmed.
Toronto-based death doula Carmen Galvan co-founded BIPOC Death and Grief Talk in 2021, after recognizing that the end-of-life needs of marginalized members of her community were not being met.
The First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia partnered with Douglas College in 2019 to offer formal end-of-life doula training to Indigenous community members, many of whom had already been doing this work for years. Of 86 participants from 47 Indigenous communities across BC, 72% identified as Indigenous. The program used a Two-Eyed Seeing approach, blending traditional and western end-of-life practices, and has since expanded to include Metis-specific training developed in consultation with Metis Nation BC elders.
These initiatives reflect something important: BIPOC communities are not discovering the death doula. They are reasserting their right to hold their own dying, on their own terms, with their own people.
Sources: Globe and Mail, November 2022; Global Doula Project, October 2025; International Journal of Indigenous Health, 2021; Douglas College End-of-Life Studies Program, 2024
What a Culturally Attuned Death Doula Holds
A death doula who practices from an anti-oppressive, culturally responsive framework brings something specific to BIPOC families navigating end of life.
Dying looks different across cultures, and a culturally attuned death doula does not impose a default template. Families may want the body at home, specific prayers at specific times, community members present in ways hospital visiting policies do not accommodate, or ceremony, ritual, specific foods, specific music. An anti-oppressive doula knows how to advocate for cultural practices to take place.
Advocacy within medical systems follows naturally from this. Communicating with palliative care teams, navigating institutional policies, ensuring that what matters to a family is not quietly overridden by institutional convenience: these are skills a culturally attuned death doula brings into the room alongside their relational presence.
Grief in BIPOC communities is often communal. The death of a family member involves a wide circle of people, extended family, community members, spiritual leaders, whose roles in the mourning process are significant. A death doula who understands this supports the entire community through the transition, not just the immediate family.
Finding a Death Doula
In Toronto, BIPOC death doulas are doing this work: sitting with dying people, supporting families through the process, and holding the cultural and spiritual dimensions of death that the formal healthcare system rarely can.
Healing in Colour’s Professionals Directory includes practitioners offering end-of-life doula support in Toronto and across Canada. Practitioners who have committed to anti-oppressive values and who understand that dying, like being born, is a threshold that deserves to be held by people who know why it matters.
Ready to find a death doula who holds your community’s way of dying? Browse end-of-life and wellness practitioners in the Healing in Colour Professionals Directory
What to look for:
- Cultural and spiritual knowledge. A death doula who understands the specific traditions your community holds around death does not require you to explain why those traditions matter before they can support them.
- Community-rooted practice. Look for practitioners who understand the tension between formalized death doula work and the communal traditions from which it emerged, and who hold that tension honestly.
- A willingness to work within your family’s framework. The right death doula adapts to you. Not the other way around.
Dying Is Not the End of the Story
A death doula, at their best, is someone who carries that knowledge forward: who knows that dying is not a medical failure to be managed but a threshold to be honored, and who stays present through it with the same care and intention that your community back home offers those who die.
You do not have to face this alone. And you do not have to face it without someone who already understands what it means.
We are here. Find an end-of-life doula
Additional Resources
Browse BIPOC doulas and wellness practitioners in Toronto
Related Reading
- What a Doula Is, Where the Practice Comes From, and Who It Is For
- The Types of Unrecognized Grief We Carry in Our Bodies
- What Is Intergenerational Trauma? And How It Shows Up in Immigrant Families
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve care that supports our healing and liberation.
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