Seeding Joy: I am a Death Doula and a Children’s TV Writer
On November 16, I spoke at the End Well 2023: It’s About Time Symposium. My talk was about my work as a Death Doula and a Children’s Television Writer and the intersection where these two meet. I am grateful. End Well created a safe space for incredibly dynamic people to come together and discuss ways to continue shifting the culture “around all things end-of-life.” Here is my talk:
I am a death doula and a children’s television writer and as strange as that may sound to you…it was strange to me, too. Writing was always the goal, but this other thing…this death doula thing popped up on me in one of those WOW moments we all get to experience from time to time.
I wrote my first story at 7. It was about a 7 year old boy who ran away from home because his mother wouldn’t stop smoking cigarettes. Kinda autobiographical, I’d say. It took me hours to write that story one night when I should have been sleeping, but I had to get it out. If there are any writers here, you know that feeling. That next morning, I read it, wondered if it was good, and left it on my bed and ran out the house to catch the bus. As a latchkey kid of the 80’s, you did not want to miss that bus and have to call your mom at work and ask for a ride.
When I got home, my mom and dad were in the living room, nearly in tears, reaching for the phone. I asked what happened and after a huge sigh of relief, they told me they thought I’d run away after reading my story. While they hugged me and calmed their nerves, the only thing running through my mind was…”damn, I must be that good.”
I honed those writing skills and now, thanks to everything my pens have written, I’ve gone from that apartment in Charlottesville to writing rooms, poet’s quarters, bookstores, and libraries around the world. In fact, I was frolicking through the streets of Amsterdam but living in South Africa when I learned I’d been accepted to the Sesame Street writer’s room and would be moving back to New York City. What a time. And yes…I can tell you how to get…how to get to sesame street.
My work up to this acceptance, though, had nothing to do with children, at least not directly. I was writing, producing, and directing socially conscious work that some called “heavy.” My first was Seeking Asylum and it was about Black folks leaving the US in the midst of American tyranny. The next was Outside the House, a documentary about mental health and why those who struggle most aren’t lining up in droves for the help they need. And the last was Set Yourself on Fire where I explored the global rape epidemic. Heavy? Yeah, sure. But I said they were more about how society is failing us and can be positively transformed.
So back to this acceptance. It was great, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse, and it was Sesame Street. But it was also an opportunity to step back and ask myself “How do I make better people?” I’ve long believed Frederick Douglass when he said “ It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” My first question when I reached Sesame Street was “how can I create content that will keep kids from becoming like the adults I was helping rebuild?” It was a hard but necessary question. Coming from work so dark it’d take me weeks to recover from an interview, I strolled the streets of Sesame wanting and needing my work to feel lighter. To spark a joy I hadn’t seen in a while. To spark curiosity and imagination in young minds.
I left Sesame Street and wrote for Blue’s Clues, Work It Out Wombats, Karma’s World, Two Whats!? And a Wow! and so many others that have encouraged kids to explore, learn, and find happiness. For any parents here. Any uncles, aunties, godmothers, grandpas, these titles may sound familiar. For me, there’s something special about being able to see these things happen in real time. I know as a children’s tv writer my work matters.
I am also a death doula. I mentioned this job, this thing I do, came to me in a WOW moment earlier. That moment of surprise. I suppose it shouldn’t have been such a surprise though. At 9, I was helping my family through their grief around my Aunt Greta Mae’s death from lung cancer. I remember my mother coming home from the hospital with updates. The final update was about my aunt telling her visitors that her mother came to visit her and told her she’d come back once the room they were preparing for her was ready. I didn’t know much about death at the time, but I somehow knew that Aunt Greta seeing her mother who had died years prior meant death was soon coming for her too.
In 1994, I was 12 and the AIDS epidemic had become the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25–44. Families, particularly my family, were still ignorant to the disease and my cousin Maine wanted to come home to Virginia to die. While most of the family refused to come around, me and my grandmother sat with Maine, ate with him, hugged him, listened to his stories. I told jokes, fetched him blankets, and sat in silence watching whatever stories my grandmother watched back then. I don’t remember when he died, but I remember the silence that stayed around my grandma’s house for a long time after.
The next year, responding to an ad on public access, I volunteered at the local hospice as the activities coordinator. Part of the job was arts and crafts, pretending to know how to crochet, and making toast with cinnamon and sugar and butter, but the largest part…the part that wasn’t written in the job description…was sitting with these patients in their room so they didn’t feel so alone. Then I did this over and over and over again over the years for friends and family and strangers nearing the end of their lives and for those who’d just lost someone. I simply didn’t want anyone to be alone.
I didn’t have the language for what it was I was doing. The sitting, the hugging, holding space, guiding through grief. It was simply who I was. Who I am. And each time, it was like finding breadcrumbs that were all about joy and making better humans. Happier humans.
So it was all intuitive. I did these things on my own because no one stopped me from figuring it out. My mom who even after thinking I’d run away, my grandma who was filled with so much compassion and love. They never stopped me just because I was young. They watered the seeds and gave me the space to grow. And one day, thinking the Daytona heat would kill me, I was having a conversation with a college mate about death and the people I sat with. She seemed best suited for the conversation being a hospice nurse and all, and she said “Oh, it sounds like you’re a death doula.” Oh! Okay! Wow!
As a death doula, I offer emotional support and guidance to individuals nearing the end of their life and to families navigating grief. For me, it’s about facilitating a peaceful and dignified transition. It’s about helping them all find closure.
These days, most of the work I’m doing in the death space is in Black communities, helping folks not only navigate the profound journey of life’s conclusion, but helping make sense of Black grief.
Black grief. A while back, on a flight from South Africa to Morocco, I sat next to a man who asked what made Black grief so different from the grief he, a white man, will experience when a loved one dies. I told him Black grief is different because it tends to be more communal. It’s also altogether too frequent and, many times, too soon. And though grief is as natural as it is necessary, Black people are never given enough time to grieve one person or thing entirely before it’s time to grieve another. And in these spaces where I’m sitting with and comforting those at the end of their life and helping those left behind through their mourning, I know my purpose and I try to show up with gentleness, kindness, and empathy. I come to say the names of those who’ve died, share their stories, dance, listen to song lyrics, feed, invite them to beautiful places, and say, “I’m sitting outside if you need me. I’m not going anywhere.”
I am a children’s television writer and I’m a death doula and it wasn’t until I was halfway through a podcast interview about my life’s work and my journey that I entered the intersection where these two things meet. The interviewer sincerely asked “these things are very different, but have you found a theme in your work? The truth is, I hadn’t. But in that brief pause after his question, it hit me and I told him, “all my work, the heavy documentaries, the writing for children, and the death doula work has all been about finding our way back to happiness and joy.
Deathbeds and writing rooms. In each job, I’m finding the things that bring joy to those who need, want, and deserve it. I’m creating a safe space where children and those at the end of their life can be vulnerable and fully themselves, and making that space big enough so they can continue to grow, because why should growth ever stop for those still living?
I look at the children I’m creating for and I look at those at the end of their life and I see these incredible sponges. For the children, I’m crafting content that combines entertainment and meaningful messages that’ll contribute positively to their formative years and I watch them soak it all up. Then I watch those seeds I’ve planted — seeds of empathy, kindness, and self-discovery — grow.
With those at the end of their life, it’s about crafting messages that help them release so much of what they’ve soaked up over the years. All the negativity, the fears, the things they cling to that serve as nothing but weights. When those things are released, the newly planted seeds of — again, empathy, kindness, and self-discovery — can grow. These messages tell them that as long as there is still breath there is room and time for growth.
It’s not about shutting out the world, you see. Being a death doula and a children’s content creator. Neither of these are about making the world seem nice and pretty for everyone. They’re about showing them what’s out there. About getting to the truth, because it’s in the truth that I’m able to prepare them, the children and those at the end of their life, for what may come.
In a world that often compartmentalizes experiences, I stand here as a testament to the idea that joy knows no boundaries — it’s present in the laughter of children and in the serenity of those transitioning.
I’ve discovered that the key to bringing joy lies in honoring and embracing every phase of existence; in celebrating life in its entirety. And all of this has been made more present for me because at 22, I was diagnosed with a condition that could kill me at any moment. Hopefully not right now. I stand here as a testament that, like joy, individual experience knows no boundaries. Being alive and being aware that we’re gonna die are the same. A death doula is a life doula.
In the end, it’s about being engaged in life at all stages. If we believe joy is a human right, then we hope we pay attention to everyone being able to access it.
Thank you.
To watch the full live stream of the End Well 2023: It’s About Time Symposium, click here.
