From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death this morning everybody.
And a special welcome to Helen Gretchen Jones, our guest today.
How are you Helen?
I'm good.
Thank you for having me.
I'm sorry, I call you Gretchen, not Helen.
You've got too many names.
I do.
I go by Gretchen, but my first name is Helen.
There's a lot of Helens in my family.
Okay, Gretchen it is.
I like it.
Sounds kind of German.
Is that where it's from?
It is.
Good.
Well, just a heads up for our listeners before we get to know you a little bit.
I think this is going to be really interesting for people, but we are deviating a little
bit from what we normally do.
Gretchen has not had a near-death experience, but has a lot of shared-death experiences
that we're going to talk about today.
I think we can learn an awful lot from them too.
And that's why when Gretchen reached out I thought, yeah, it'd be fun to have you on
the show.
So, before we jump into those, who's Gretchen?
Tell us a little bit about you.
Well, I live in Austin, Texas with my husband and two children.
They are 19 and 13, so I'm in the teenage years with my kids.
We have a family ranch where I have llamas and goats, and I spend a lot of my time out
there with them in nature.
That's pretty much it.
I work as a death doula, and so I'm going to share some of that today.
I love that.
Do you happen to have alpacas too?
No alpacas, but I do look at them.
I'm thinking I would like to get alpacas to run with my llamas.
I love alpacas.
You've got to do some alpacas.
They're so cute.
They have the cutest little faces.
The llamas work as guard llamas, so they could also guard the alpacas if they're out there.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Austin has great barbecue too, doesn't it?
Some of the best in the country, for sure.
I need to get there just for that reason alone.
You'll need to spend a week.
I love trying out barbecue everywhere I travel.
All right.
Let's jump into this.
First of all, how does someone get into being a death doula, and what the heck is it?
A death doula is someone who helps people to transition holistically to help the patient
and their families find peace and closure before they actually transition.
That just makes a ton of sense to me.
It does.
I think a lot of people do it naturally when they sit along bedside with their loved ones,
and they tell them it's okay to go, tell them any kind of regrets that they might have,
and they have that closure naturally.
I think that for some patients and some families, that's a little bit harder.
They're afraid to be vulnerable, or there's a lot of fear or anxiety around death.
That's where a death doula can step in and assist in that way.
In this country and culture, at least, I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the world,
we don't really even like to talk about it.
If somebody's dying, we don't know how to deal with it, we avoid talking about it.
It's going to just happen.
The idea is you and the people that do what you do make it a better experience, both for
the person passing and for the loved ones left here.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
I would love, and shows like yours are, normalizing talking about death and removing some of
the stigma and fear that we all fear in the Western culture when we even talk about death.
It's such a taboo subject.
Death comes for everyone, obviously.
It comes for the sick and the healthy, the old and the young.
It doesn't discriminate.
If we could all just remember, and when we're sitting with people who are dying, that it's
okay to talk about it, that it isn't something that we have to avoid all the time.
That just builds the mystery around it.
It builds the fear around it, that fear of the unknown, and it makes it something really
uncomfortable.
The more we talk about it, the more comfortable it becomes to discuss it.
The more we start to recognize what we want for our own death, assuming we are given the
choice of a longer death versus a quick death.
We actually start to live our lives with more open hearts.
We start to think, well, if I were to go tomorrow, I don't want to go with this fight happening
between me and my loved one with things unsaid, with unfinished business.
We start to live more in the moment, more presently.
We start to live with open, vulnerable hearts, which lifts that fear.
Nobody has to guess where people are with their connections to each other.
When that happens, it makes for a smoother transition.
If we can start that now, maybe in the next few generations, this will be something that's
no longer a big fear.
In addition to that, from experiences that you've had, we can learn a lot about the afterlife.
That's pretty much what this show is about.
We have people that are witnesses that have actually been there and come back so they
can talk about it.
Another way to witness it is with what you do with people that are in that stage telling
you what's going on and what's happening.
That's what I would love to get into today.
Can you start off with just, I don't know, give me an example or two of somebody that
was real special that you've worked with and what kind of experience they had and what
kind you had?
Sure.
First of all, people who experience near-death experiences, those NDE-ers, they are some
of our greatest teachers.
The more that we can hear from them and the more that we can take the lessons from their
experiences with us, the more we can have an easier rest of our physical lives.
I love that this show represents so many teachers.
My experience, like you mentioned earlier, I have not had an NDE, but I do have the SDE's,
the shared-death experiences.
It's really hard for me to pick which one to choose from.
I've had so many, but I think that's also why I gravitate towards being a death doula
is because this is one of the special gifts that I get to experience at many of my patients'
bedside.
One of them, though, would be someone I'll call Sister Bernadette, and she was a Catholic
nun, and she had a very strict set of religious beliefs.
Some of that got challenged towards the end when she started experiencing loved ones at
her bedside.
She was a nurse in a hospital for most of her work, so she had a lot of support system
in the hospital.
As she was dying, I was one of her volunteers, and I would go sit with her.
I guess in the Catholic faith, you are not supposed to commune with the dead.
I explained to her that I thought she was communing with the dead all the time when
she was talking to saints and Jesus and God and Mother Mary, and she corrected me.
She goes, no, I pray to them.
I don't commune with them.
So when her friend who had already passed away, Sister Mary Catherine, was showing up at her
bedside, she was really worried about communing with the dead.
Yeah, so here's Sister Mary Catherine, also a Catholic person in her physical life, and
here they were having conversations.
So she was worried to even confess that to a priest who she was fearful of that, of
judgment, because she had been communing with the dead.
And this was something that we kind of navigated towards her end of life.
It didn't make her question the structure of her religion that she really, really enjoyed,
but it did make her question some of the small things like why is it wrong for me to commune
with Sister Mary Catherine?
Sister Mary Catherine was making her feel comforted and loved, and it made her feel
a little more peaceful.
And it also, she had this knowing that, well, my time is close to Sister Mary Catherine's
here, and that made her feel a little bit like she wasn't alone.
So having people see angels and beings of light and even deceased loved ones at their
bedside, especially when they're still communicating with people in our physical reality with lucidity,
is I think very, very telling that it doesn't end with our physical life.
Some of the shared death experiences, I might have, that was just one of talking about how
we see them at our bedside.
Can we talk more about that before you move on to another one?
Who else did she see?
And just so that she's not getting in trouble, I won't use the word commune.
How about communicate with?
Sure, sure.
That was her word, of course.
So Sister Mary Catherine was very special because Sister, I mean, I'm sorry, Sister
Bernadette was very special because while she was seeing Sister Mary Catherine, that
was the one she was most worried about.
Seeing the angelics, like what she described as very, very tall, protective beings of light
that would be like in the corner of her hospital room, that she didn't feel scared from.
She felt like everything was okay when they were near, but she wasn't holding conversations
with them per se.
She was really holding conversations with Sister Mary Catherine, and that was what was
really bothering her, even though she didn't want to stop having those conversations.
The angelic beings in the corners of her hospital room really made her feel protected, and she
was able to, it just made her feel like she was a good person, that in her faith and angels
are good positive signs, and so that she was okay with.
So how long before death was this?
Like the day of, the week of?
The week of.
The week of, okay.
The week of.
I had another patient though who was seeing his deceased wife for a year before he transitioned.
Wow.
Was he sick?
Was he sort of on the downhill slide that whole year?
He was on hospice for five years, and I was his volunteer for four.
So he was always on a downhill slide.
He just kept pulling through.
He was awesome.
How vivid were these things?
Let's talk, let's shift over to this guy now.
If you're allowed to use his name, tell me his name, and if not, make one up.
I call him Mr. Arjuna.
Okay.
So he's sick, he's on hospice.
What kind of conversations or visitations was he having with his wife?
What was going on?
Okay.
So he is pretty special.
He's one of my favorite patients, and he had many, many experiences that were almost
like I can't even explain how he would have these experiences, but they're fantastic.
So his wife was showing up for about a year before he transitioned.
He was Hindu, and so that went against his religious belief because by then his wife
had died 30 years before him, and she should have already, according to his faith, been
reincarnated.
So and he wanted her to be, he wanted her to be happy and reincarnated.
So when she started showing up the year of his death, it was distressing at first because
it went against his faith.
And so we kind of worked through that.
We talked about the illusions of death, and we talked about what if certain rules of his
religion were metaphorical, and we kind of negotiated through his faith in order for him
to feel comfortable with his wife being at his bedside.
And she was there almost every single day for a year, which was unheard of by any of
my other experiences.
What was she doing?
Just hanging out or giving him advice or saying, Hey, come on with me.
What was going on?
No, she wasn't saying, come on with me.
In fact, when I would ask Mr. Arjuna about the messages his wife was sharing, he said
that she just comes in and just sits with him.
So he's not lonely.
She's not even sharing.
Now the words he was getting from people were other beings of light.
So he was also seeing beings of light, but that became more in the last four months of
his life or so.
So while the wife had been there just offering comfort with her presence, these beings of
light were showing up.
And he told me that they hid themselves from the staff of the nursing home because they
weren't ready to see them and they were only there for him.
And they would tell him things like that there was nothing to fear.
And I remember him telling me that he was telling them, I'm going to be going home.
I'm going to work on becoming mobile again.
And they would tell him, you are coming home.
And at first he took that as back to his house.
But after a couple of months, he started realizing that home meant somewhere else and that he
started becoming more and more okay with that.
In one experience, he was telling me that these beings of light, one specific female
being of light that he perceived as female, made him feel so safe and so filled with love
that he was ready to go.
And he wanted to go with her.
And she was telling him, not quite yet.
I guess that they were there to sort of, he had so much fear around dying and was really
caught up in his faith and the contradictions that he was experiencing around his faith
that I think part of them being there was to gradually allow him to process this information
so that the process would be less distressing for him.
That's just my own thought on that.
That makes sense.
Now there's some skeptics out there that are going to hear some of this and say, oh, well,
they were probably on some sort of medication or whatever, chemical reactions through the
death process or something like that.
What makes you personally believe that these were real versus just hallucinations?
So that's where the shared death experiences come in.
So my experiences would be validated based on what they were saying.
So one time I walked into a room as he was getting closer to his final days and I could
see standing in the corner a being and sometimes I do see being.
So it wasn't like a big surprise, but I was like, oh, we're getting close.
It was just sort of like, okay, that was a reminder for me.
And when I sat beside him, he started describing the being and it was the same being that I
was seeing.
So I don't want to tell him like, oh, I'm seeing a being in the corner like nothing
like that.
I don't want to lead the conversation in any way, but I journal all of these experiences.
So for me, it was like a little science experiment.
Here I am seeing a being.
Whenever he decided to share that he was also seeing the being and he described what the
being was looking like, I was just like, wow, that's my validation.
I'm actually seeing the same thing.
That is cool.
It is cool.
That is really cool.
So we've had a hospice nurse on this show and she told me a lot of some of the things you
have, but she didn't see any of the beings that the patients were seeing.
Has this happened to you more than once?
Absolutely.
It's oftentimes though, I'll sit in the car before going in to see my patient and I'll
do a little meditation and I kind of center myself and I pray and I'll just say, okay,
you know, highest and greatest good and I want to be aware, teach me something here, you
know, whatever it is that I'm setting my intentions for.
So I do center myself before going in and I find that on the days that I do that with
a little more, you know, time and a little more processing it through before I go in,
I have stronger experiences.
So that's part of it with me.
If I'm just going in because I promised I'd be there at three and I'm grabbing a cup of
coffee and I'm running in, it's difficult for me to have those experiences.
But when I take a little time and calm myself, those experiences unfold naturally.
Okay.
The next question, I'm sure there's no simple answer to, but what advice can you give to
loved ones of someone who is very close to transitioning?
I like your word so that maybe they can have that kind of experience too.
Very similar to what I do.
I would say first the belief that it is possible really helps in having that experience.
And then I would say, quieting your mind a little bit and being open to whatever comes
through and not dismissing it.
Sometimes the energy can be so subtle that it's easy to dismiss or, you know, you brush
it off as, oh, it might have been this or oh, it might have been that.
Just like, that's what skeptics do.
And that's what's so great.
I'm very skeptical myself.
I need it to be hardcore for me to really believe it.
Over time though, the more you practice reflecting inward and going inward and centering yourself
and practicing being open to that, the more you start to realize those subtle things aren't
something as easily dismissed anymore, your discernment strengthens.
So if I met a family member who was about to lose a loved one, I would suggest a little
bit of meditation or a little bit of going inward and just reflecting and being open
and asking for such an experience.
That's where I would start.
And I have had other people come to me and say that they had a, oh, I experienced this
and I would be like, yes, that was the start of a shared death experience.
So with some of my patients who I'm having a shared death experience with, I'm actually
watching them be met by another loved one in spirit and watching them and going for a
short way into that experience with them.
But I can only go so far before they like shut me out.
So.
Well, yeah, you may not be able to come back.
So that's right.
That's wise.
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Now back to our guest.
Give me a specific example about one of those.
Okay, well, I will share that with almost all of them.
And that's my experience so far that can change, of course, there is a welcome party of some
sort.
There is a gathering of loved ones.
These can range from small little picnics to big elaborate, you know, ballroom parties
or little cottages.
It's always different.
It seems one of them.
I was sitting with a, let me see which one I want to pick.
Well, let's pick one close to me, my grandmother.
I was sitting with my grandmother, also Helen.
She was transitioning a little slower than we would have liked.
But I could see a, this was an unusual one, a delivery room.
And I thought this was sort of interesting because oftentimes whenever I have these shared
death experiences, I am aware that I'm sitting in the physical space with that person.
It's then sort of like an overlay comes in and I'm in two worlds at once.
And just to touch on that for a second, it would be as if I asked you to close your eyes
and imagine the beach.
And I asked you to feel the sand beneath your toes, feel the waves lapping up on your feet,
hear the sound of the seagull crying.
And at the same time, you're aware of sitting in that big comfy chair that you're in.
You're in two worlds at once.
So sometimes that other world feels almost like a memory or an imagination, but it's
like overlay on top of your, your own physical reality.
So that's how I, I interpret it when these shared death experiences happen.
So while I'm sitting bedside with my grandmother, I am suddenly aware that the room that we
are in sort of overlays or transforms into a hospital delivery room, which was my grandfather
sitting outside the delivery room.
He was dressed in a tire from like the 1960s.
That's before my time.
And yet I knew it was him.
He looked so young and healthy.
And I'd never seen him look that way before, but I knew it was him.
And he was waiting outside a delivery room, which is, I guess appropriate for the time
in which they lived.
I guess dads weren't in the room.
He walked down the hallway and opened up another door where I saw so many people gathered in
this bright white room holding gifts, holding celebratory items like balloons and flowers.
And he told them it's time.
I guess he walked, they all waited in with like, I could just feel the anticipation, the
excitement.
And when I heard it's time, I opened my eyes and looked at my grandmother and she had moved
into the actively dying phase.
I got up from where I was in my physical room, which was a guest room of my cousin's house.
And I went and gathered everybody and said it's time only because my grandfather said,
so who's already in the spirit world?
But I knew he was going to be the person coming to collect her.
So we all got around her.
We all told her sweet things, told her it was okay to go.
And as I closed my eyes again, and as the room turned back into a hospital room, my grandmother
was reuniting with my grandfather and heading down the hallway to that waiting party.
Now, while I can't prove it because I don't have a near death experience where my grandmother
can come back and say, yes, that happened.
The fact that I'm sharing in that experience is just another layer of validation to support
these near death experiences that you air on your podcast here.
The unusual thing about some of these is while I may have expected my grandfather to be the
one who ushers in my grandmother, when my grandfather transitioned, the two people that
I saw coming for him were not the people I would have expected.
So that was another little bit of support.
I would have expected when my grandfather died that the children he had lost, my uncles
who I was close to maybe would be coming to greet him.
But instead it was his father whom I never met, never met him in my life, and a great
uncle who I met maybe twice as a little, little girl.
But it's those kinds of things that kind of validate that, that I'm not creating it.
If I were creating it and making it up, I would choose his sons, the uncles I was close
to, of course they're going to be coming to get him.
But no, that was not the case.
So it's small little details like that, that when I recognize, you know, this is something
that can be supported as not being created.
These are people I don't know that are coming to meet my loved ones.
Yeah.
So did you recognize that?
What was that?
Your great grandfather?
How did you know who he was?
I don't, that's what's so crazy.
I knew it was him.
Like, it's not that he looked like his physical self, in fact, he looked like a being of light
actually.
And yet I had this deep inner knowing that it was him.
I could not be there when my grandfather transitioned physically.
So I had set up a little kind of vigil in a quiet room in my house in Texas while he
was in Arizona.
My mother was there with him and my sister and his father.
So they didn't know that I was having this experience, right?
But I imagined my grandfather being my great grandfather, I guess, reaching down to help
my grandfather out of his body.
And they were both military men.
And so it felt really formal, sort of like, you know, like a salute sort of thing happening
and an embrace of love sort of happened.
It was all this kind of moment of recognizing the military aspect.
My mother tells me later that my grandfather was saying as he was dying and still in his
body, physical body, was saying, yes, sir, yes, sir, sort of how you would, how he would
talk to his father, very, very respectful and very military style.
So that was happening physically while I was in Texas imagining this other world where
the military aspect was being honored.
And so was the respect as his father came to get him.
So I've had some other people also share with me that they were in some place far away and
had a shared death experience.
I can think of a couple that said that grandfather or whoever it was came to them at the foot
of their bed and, you know, kind of a wave or something like that.
And they didn't even know that person had passed on yet.
And then they got a phone call an hour later or whatever.
So can you talk about that?
You don't have to be in the same room to have a shared death experience.
Actually, you reminded me of another one.
So no, when I was, when my grandfather was dying, he was in, you know, Arizona, Bullhead
City, and I was in Austin, Texas.
And so time and space did not seem to matter in that moment.
I was still heart connected to that person.
And it's been my experience that other loved ones can have these experiences and you don't
have to be right at their bedside to have them.
My other grandfather transitioned years ago and my son was only four and my husband traveled
a lot.
And so I was always home alone and I would set the alarm and I would hear every noise
when my husband was gone in the house.
And I would let my son sleep in our bed with us and it was me downstairs.
Well, I'm turning off all the lights.
He's, it was late.
It was after he was almost midnight.
And I just had set the alarm and my son says, mom, there's a man in our room.
Well, I panic because I'm thinking I just set the alarm with a, with, you know, someone
in the house.
And I was just like, where, where's the man?
You know, and he's like standing over there by the windows.
He's wearing a gray suit and he described what he looked like.
And then he kind of curled up next to me and he took my hand and he laid it on my heart
with his hand on top and he said, but don't worry, mama, everything's going to be all
right.
And I was just like, oh, okay.
Well, there was no man in the room.
I didn't know what my son was experiencing.
We know we shut off the light and we go to bed.
I get a call the next morning from my dad who said your grandfather passed away last night
just after midnight.
And I was like, really?
That's crazy.
Ty just had this amazing experience last night where he was describing someone who looked
like grand bob and my dad kind of choked up on the phone and he didn't answer right away.
I thought maybe he had a disconnection.
We'd hung up on each other.
And he's like, last night before grand bob died, I went in and visited him and I took
his hand and placed it on his heart and I put my hand on top and I said, don't worry,
daddy, everything's going to be all right.
So my son did the exact same thing to me that my dad did to his transitioning father.
That's a beautiful example of that.
That is, and so much that we don't understand, but I love hearing about it.
Okay.
Something slightly a little change on our topic here.
Again, that I've heard from hospice nurses and I'd like to see if you have experienced
this.
This is less of a spiritual, more of a physical thing.
And that is something that's referred to as the surge or I've heard some other terms for
it where some people who are sick enough, old enough, whatever, that maybe they've been
unconscious or can't even move out of bed or anything for a long time.
All of a sudden they're awake, they're alert and family members are going, they're getting
better.
But then, but then they transition a few hours later.
Have you witnessed that as well?
Many, many times.
And sitting with the family, you're right.
They always are like, they're getting better.
This is, I think we're on the upswing, things are going to get better.
They'll be around for the holidays, things like that.
And while you want that hope for them, they may not transition hours later, but sometimes
even up to two days later.
And you're just like, wow, they ate something.
They haven't been eating anything and they drank something and you're, you, they're like,
oh, if we could just get them more food for more energy.
I now, I didn't use to, but now I will sit with the family and say this is an expected
part.
It means it's close now.
It means we are within 48 hours usually of the actual transition and they have it, they
take it kind of hard because they hadn't seen their family member quite alive like that
in so long.
So you popped their bubble, but I do.
But it's part of your job to be honest and to let them know what's going on.
So it totally makes sense that you would do that.
Well I try to encourage them to say what they need to say while their loved one has these
moments of lucidity.
Right.
This is an opportunity for closure.
This is going to be temporary.
So take advantage of this time.
Absolutely.
And it's a gift that you get to have this time because not everyone has that surge,
but many of them do.
Okay.
Before I get on to another topic, do you have any other specific examples, maybe one or
two more that you'd like to talk to us about?
Whether you witnessed the being in the room or not, it doesn't matter, but.
I have one patient who I will call Mrs. Wilma.
And Mrs. Wilma, this is sort of interesting and I think that it's important to kind of
talk about so it eases fears around death a little bit.
I have other examples too, but I'll start with Mrs. Wilma.
Mrs. Wilma showed up outside her body before she took her last breath.
Often times we think that we have to be there for that last breath.
That's when the soul leaves the body.
But it's been my experience and I'm still working it out and journaling these experiences
as they happen and I'm finding out more information on it.
It's a work in progress, you know, doing my little experiments, but Mrs. Wilma had about
an hour left before she took her last breath.
And during that time she had stepped out of her body and presented herself as like a child
of maybe 10 or 12 years old.
And she had, or she took the opportunity to interact with me and share some teachings
from her life and some greater wisdom that she wanted to share.
But I'm thinking, why is Mrs. Wilma, she's struggling to take those final breaths.
When we look at a body doing that, we think that there are loved one is suffering.
They're struggling to breathe.
There's this real hard, raspy breath that's happening and it can be kind of scary and
unsettling to watch.
But kind of like a car that we jump into a vehicle and we, like our bodies, we drive
it around for a little while.
We can take it really fast or we can take it really slow.
We can take it in for maintenance or we can run it into the ground, however we want to
use our vehicle.
But when it starts to kind of putter out, we don't have to stay in until it stops.
We can actually hop out of our vehicle before it comes to a full stop and watch it coast.
And I think that's what a lot of our loved ones are doing.
They don't go far.
They're actually kind of right there.
And it almost feels otherworldly when they're standing there, but they're not suffering.
The physical body is going through the process of shutting down.
That's natural.
It's the earthly physical body.
But who they are, their soul or their spirit, the part that their consciousness is standing
just outside that physical body and they're not suffering the way we perceive it to be
much of the time.
So yes, while I have seen, for example, Mrs. Wilma struggling to breathe, she wasn't struggling
and I could see her and she was interacting with me and she was teaching me things before
she fully was someone came and got her from the other side.
I think it's important to remember that when you're sitting with a loved one and you're
thinking, oh my gosh, it was horrible.
Look at what they're going through.
Maybe turn inward and reflect and realize that they're probably not suffering the way we
are perceiving because they're right there with us.
That's good to hear.
You mentioned journaling.
You've put all this stuff into a book, right?
Yes.
What's it called?
Go ahead, shameless plug time.
Shameless plug.
It's called healing whispers from spirit guides, bridging the gap between life and the
afterlife with the death doula's wisdom.
That's a long title, by the way.
Well, healing whispers from spirit guides and the rest is like the subtitle.
We'll have that in the show notes.
People can find it.
They can find you in your website too.
There.
Yes.
I'll answer any questions or if anyone has interest in becoming a death doula themselves.
I've been journaling for almost 10 years the experiences at the bedside of patients
and I selected my favorite stories and incorporated them into the book and the lessons I've learned
from them.
Is there some kind of death doula school?
How do you learn how to do this?
There are death doula schools, but first I want to say I did get certified as a death
doula.
This is not something that's covered by insurance.
There aren't any set parameters like I'm going to be an English major.
Here are the things you have to do as an English major.
There are no set parameters to be a death doula.
The certification programs that are out there are helpful.
They supply you with a lot of resources and tools so that you can more gracefully work
with people who are dying.
I think some people and most people actually have that sort of in them innately the ability
to sit with a person and have reverence for what they're going through and to just be
a listening ear for the family as they grieve and to not try to fix anything and to just
be present with them.
That's really what it comes down to.
I incorporate my own experiences that I'm having with spirit and if the family is open
to that, then I share those experiences as a way of jump-starting the healing process
through their grief.
But it is not necessary.
You don't have to have spiritual experiences to be a death doula.
But being present and sitting with your loved one or even the stranger, I think anyone can
do it.
I think a lot of people who have fear around death, it's a really quick way to get over
your fear around death.
Could the fear be replaced with this is a beautiful experience?
Absolutely.
It has been for me.
You must have to learn about a lot of different religions.
Actually, I have a master's in world religions.
There you go.
I knew it.
It worked out for me.
Okay.
I did not know that ahead of time.
I just totally lucked out on that one.
Yes.
Well, and you know what?
You don't have to know a lot about because if you've got an iPhone, you've got anything
you want to know about any religion right at your fingertips.
You don't have to unless you're wanting to discuss philosophy or religious beliefs with
your patient.
And sometimes they do.
You really just have to listen and be respectful of what their beliefs are.
Some of my longer term patients though do say, well, what do you believe?
And I'm like, well, do you really want to know?
And then we'll get into a little bit of a heated debate.
And let me tell you that people who are dying are some of the best people to debate with.
They're so into it.
And they're also open to other ideas because as their time draws near, suddenly they start
to be open to what else, you know, was their belief wrong?
That's a little bit of fear around death.
They start to question that.
So let's remove that.
If this is not too personal, let me ask you, how have these experiences affected your
belief?
Like did you believe in God before?
Do you now?
Et cetera.
I always believed in a higher power of some sort.
You know, I think studying world religions, you start to question, well, which one's
right?
That's part of the reason why I went into studying it.
Which one's right?
The oldest one's got to be the right one.
You know, when you realize, when you start reading more and more into it, you start to
really question, well, just everything about religion, quite frankly.
But I've always believed in a higher power, but I've always had connection to spirit.
I've always had spiritual experiences for as long as I can remember.
So that was never something I questioned.
Call it God, call it source, call it spirit, call it all that is.
It doesn't really matter.
Those are vocabulary words.
In the second we try to put a word to God, we limit it.
So yes, I believe in God.
I believe in a higher power.
I believe in something else outside what we can see with the physical rods and cones of
our eyes.
Most people that have had a near-death experience tell me they have no fear of death whatsoever
now.
How about you?
I do not fear death.
No.
In fact, I talk to spirit or God all the time and I'll say, all right, guys, this is what
I want for when I go.
You know, I'm making requests early.
But I guess the little bit of fear that I have around the dying process is how my loved
ones might, the grief they're going to feel.
And I would like to spend some time alleviating their grief and fears around my death.
But me, myself, I'm okay with it.
Okay.
Last thing.
There's somebody listening today who has a loved one that is going to be transitioning
soon.
Can you give them just some kind of a message of hope?
A message of hope may be a little bit of direction, in fact.
Absolutely.
For anyone who has a loved one about to transition, I would suggest finding closure while you
still can to expedite your own grief and healing process by saying, I love you by offering
forgiveness if you need to, by expressing yourself kindly with what you need to say,
even if it's a hard topic.
I would suggest turning inward, finding silence at home or right before bed or wherever you
can find that silence and set the intention or pray to meet with that loved one as they
transition or after they transition.
I would ask them or God or source for a sign that your experience can be validated in some
way.
I would be open to the universe for whatever comes through, and I would also journal it
and write it down.
I think that that is one of the things that's so important because having one experience
that is spiritually transformative means there are more coming down the pipe.
You definitely want to journal all those that you can and start with this one.
That's what I would say.
Gretchen Jones, thank you so much for being with me today.
I look at you and what I see is empathy.
You are oozing with empathy and that is a great character trait to have.
Thank you.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.