A guide to the door of the underworld

Whereas a birth doula helps women bring new life into the world, a death doula like Debbie Charbonneau helps the dying in their passage to the afterlife. As Jennifer Green reports, this self-described shaman helped an elderly woman and her family find a measure of peace.

By Jennifer Green, The Ottawa Citizen January 9, 2011 3:28 PM

‘In order to live well, you have to die well,’ says Debbie Charbonneau , the only practitioner of her kind in Ottawa. She advises the dying — as well as their family members — on finding better ways to cope with the negative emotions and stigma associated with death.

Photograph by: Julie Oliver, The Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — At 84, Sheila Wright was sick, bereft, and tired of life. She’d lost her brother and husband, and she could no longer ski, skate, or play tennis; a heartbreaker for a woman who had won a mixed open doubles tournament just four years earlier.

After a heart valve replacement, doctors scheduled her for aggressive physiotherapy, but when she wasn’t enthusiastic about it, they decided she was clinically depressed. One went so far as to suggest shock therapy. Her son,Martin Wright said: “The whole family was struggling. We couldn’t find anything that could help. Everybody was trying to cheer her up, but she was very sick. Nobody was letting her die.”

Then the 49-year-old Ottawa businessman saw an advertisement in Tone magazine for Debbie Charbonneau, Ottawa’s only death doula. Now, a year after his mother’s death, Wright says: “Debbie was exactly what we needed.”

Just as birth doulas help families welcome babies into the world, Charbonneau helps people depart. She believes death need not be terrifying, yet North American society has a tremendous fear of old age and death, making it all more traumatic than it has to be. “When someone knows they are dying, there is this extraordinary event available to everybody, not just the person. I’m not saying it’s easy, or smooth all the time. I’m saying the potential is there to have this loving experience, and a lot of people shut that down.”

When Wright turned to Charbonneau, his mother was in a deep turmoil that no medication was able to ease. “For lack of a better word, Debbie dealt with Sheila’s interior life,” he says. “Sheila was locked in some battle, maybe about forgiveness — normal family stuff, anger at her mother. She had this terrible fear. It all softened, not magically, but she let go of a lot, and let nature take its course. (Debbie) did a treatment every week and mom gave in more.”

Charbonneau stresses that she is not a medical practitioner, a counsellor or a social worker. “I leave that to the experts, and they are very well trained.” She describes herself as a shaman, a job description that draws either enthusiasm or skeptical snickering. “My skills are end of life. (People are) either drawn to it or run away from it, because it’s death. It’s so loaded.”

Hospices and funeral homes, even some members of her family, have been leery about her practice. But Martin Wright found, as a client, “There isn’t any part of this that a person would think of as spooky or off-base. They were rituals that brought peace and have meaning. All of (Charbonneau’s) suggestions were extremely grounded. They made a lot of sense in many different levels.

“We all have an interior life,” says Wright. “Some people put energy into it and some don’t.”

Charbonneau lives in a small Barrhaven home with her daughter and husband, and has a regular job in hospital administration. She charges roughly $60 an hour for doula services and has had about eight clients so far. Not all her clients are terminally ill; many have had a relative die or be close to death and they want help coming to terms with it. She began as a herbalist, then trained for several years with a Celtic shaman to learn how to tune into people’s innermost lives. Sometimes it’s simply talking, but other times Charbonneau goes into a trance or meditative state and connects with the person at the level of the unconscious. Much of her work with Sheila was done while the elderly woman was asleep. Charbonneau sees life and death as complementary rather than opposing forces, and she believes the right attitudes begin long before the end is near.

“In order to live well, you have to know how to die well. How do you react to change? Do you let go of things? Do you hang on to things, hold grudges? If you have a big baggage of things that you have not let go of during your life, that is going to be very difficult to deal with — it gets overwhelming. All these things a person needs to release before they can die peacefully, or well.”

Traditional churches or faith groups often tend to the sick with Charbonneau. “My aim is to look at their own beliefs, abide by them, then we work with that. It’s not about me imposing my will on them.”

Sheila was a lifelong Catholic and attended the now defunct Saint Brigid’s parish on St. Patrick Street. As she grew more ill, priests administered the sacrament of the sick, formerly known as the last rites, several times. A few weeks into her work with Charbonneau, Sheila suffered another heart episode. On the way to hospital in the ambulance, paramedics revived her.

“She was caught — not dead yet, not wanting to be revived,” said Wright. She spent the next several hours in a nightmarish situation, on an emergency department stretcher, waiting for a room. “It was awful … like a bad dream. There was a man there who was abusive to the nurses ... the atmosphere was bizarre.”

Wright stayed with his mother, and called his older sisters Celia and Genevieve to come from their homes in New Zealand and British Columbia respectively.

Over the next few days, many people came to Sheila’s bedside, all trying to reassure her by saying, “It’s OK to go.” Still, said Wright, “Sheila was clearly having a hard time leaving. Debbie advised us, ‘Don’t tell her it’s OK to go. She hears that as a rejection and it doesn’t suit her personality. She feels she is being pushed out.’”

Charbonneau also told them not to touch Sheila, because it kept bringing her back into her body. “We weren’t to tell her to go. We were to tell her we loved her, we were to comfort her and let her feel loved.”

As the time slipped by, Sheila’s breathing was becoming a rasp. To Wright, it sounded like she was gasping for air. “I prayed to understand it better, and instantly, I understood that it was like labour. It wasn’t suffering for no reason, it was the soul trying to leave the body.”

Sheila Wright died at 6 a.m. Saturday morning, Sept. 26, 2009. Her two daughters washed the body from the feet to the head, an age-old ritual that they found very moving.

A year after his mother’s death, Martin Wright reflected recently: “Death is seen as the ultimate flop. It’s hard to die.”

“But I learned more in that time ... I have huge gratitude for it. I learned that most of the things we think are important in our lives — it’s an illusion, the whole thing. I learned it’s OK to die.”

If the process with Charbonneau sounds a little offbeat, he doesn’t care. “Believe in it or don’t believe in it — it brought her a lot of peace when nothing else did.”