Bereavement Doulas
The Bereavement Doula
The main role of the bereavement doula is to be present for the families. By providing uninterrupted, calm, continuous presence, the doulas act as a witness to the experience. Doulas will remember the event, protect the memory, and be available weeks, months, and even years down the road to discuss it with the mother and her family.
Supporting families and enabling them to rebuild their networks
- Doulas will allow family members and visitors opportunities to express how they feel about this baby's death WITHOUT questioning the meaning of this loss for this family.
- Doulas will encourage families to bring up the subject of their loss with family and friends to facilitate communication.
- Doulas can help families clarify and clearly express their needs and expectations to extended family and friends. Resources to health care professionals can be provided.
- Doulas will make calls to family and friends if desired by family.
- Doulas will suggest, through professional guidelines, how the parents can express their needs to others in a non-threatening manner.
- Doulas can express their own feelings toward this family's experience, especially if the doula has been at the birth.
- Doulas will give parents the time and privacy to make their own decisions.
- Doulas will identify with the family the many ways to maintain or re-establish contact with others through resources provided by BIMC or by suggesting organizing a ritual or a family reunion, so that they may express their feelings to their community.
Offering spiritual support and maintaining families' beliefs in their strengths and capacities
- Doulas can emphasize the family's strengths and uniqueness, especially if the doula attended the birth.
- Doulas can help parents explore how family members have gone through crises before, what was helpful then, and what could be useful now.
- Doulas can ask about and listen to family members' religious and cultural beliefs about life and death and after-life. Doulas can ask about traditions within the family's religion and ask if there is a religious leader they would like to contact for support, including the information that many congregations have support groups that can be resourced. Doulas can suggest doing something tangible to convey the reality and importance of the family's loss to the community.
- The doula can begin the discussion around what a ritual or event, such as holding a memorial service, might look like.
- The doula can explore with the mother, partner and other family members which memories she would like to keep or create to perpetuate their baby's memory and give him or her a place in the family history. Suggestions might include a scrapbook of mementos, a journal, planting a tree, naming the baby or contributing to a fund in the baby's name.
- Doulas can listen to and support families as they explore their feelings about the alternative methods of body disposal, and/or their reluctance to make those choices.
Knowing and sharing information
and health care professionals. Support and validate their feelings.
- Listen as families share reactions they receive (i.e., avoidance, grief, uneasiness, sadness, etc.) from extended family, friends,
Doulas can reiterate the stages of grief to be expected as the reasons underlying reactions, such as a person's personal discomfort in dealing with the subject of death, past experiences, or inability to communicate support. Doulas can reinforce and/or translate in simple terms the legal procedures regarding body disposal and hospital policies and procedures. Doulas will refer parents for complete and unbiased information about having another pregnancy to their primary care providers. Using the hospital resource list, doulas can inform families of available resources in the community, such as bereaved parent group, clinical nurse specialists, psychologist, etc.
