Lifestyle
Death doula says life is more meaningful if you 'get real' about the end
In Alua Arthur’s 2023 TED Talk, she said her ideal death would happen at sunset.
Yeofi Andoh/HarperCollins
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Yeofi Andoh/HarperCollins
In Alua Arthur’s 2023 TED Talk, she said her ideal death would happen at sunset.
Yeofi Andoh/HarperCollins
As a death doula, Alua Arthur helps people to plan for the end of life and, when the time comes, to let go. She says that while we’re conditioned to fear death, thinking and talking about it is instrumental to creating meaningful lives.
“When I’m thinking about my death, I’m thinking about my life very clearly: … What I value, who I care about, how I’m spending my time,” Arthur says. “And all these things allow us to reach the end of our lives gracefully, so that we can die without the fear and the concerns and the worries that many people carry.”
Before becoming a death doula, Arthur worked as attorney — a job she hated. Unhappy and depressed, she took a trip to Cuba where she met a fellow traveler who had terminal uterine cancer. Talking to the woman about death, Arthur realized she needed to make a change.
“Up until then, I was just kind of waiting for my life to write itself without taking any action to make it so,” she says. “Thinking about my mortality, about my death, really created action.”
Arthur went on to found Going with Grace, an organization that supports people as they plan for the end of their lives. She says a big part of her work is helping people deal with regret as they reconcile the lives they lived with the lives they might have wanted.
“When folks are grappling with the choices that they’ve made, my role is to be there with them,” she says. “Sometimes the greatest gift that we can offer is grace. … Part of the reason why I named the business ‘Going with Grace’ is because of the grace that needs to be present at the end of life, for people to be able to let go of it.”
Arthur’s new book is Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.
Interview highlights
On the death of her brother in law, Peter, in 2013
It was the first time I was really faced with this reality that the people that we love might not be here for much longer. It felt really isolating. I knew intellectually that there were a lot of other people that were ill and getting close to … the end of their lives, but it felt like we were the only ones that felt like we were on this little cancer planet by ourselves, where somebody we loved will soon be dying. And there wasn’t some one person that I could turn to to say, “Help! Just help. I’m lost here,” or “Today’s really hard,” or “How do we navigate this?” Or “What do we do with all these medications?” “Where can we find smaller sized hospital gowns that will arrive, like in the next days?” (Because he was losing weight so rapidly) We just needed some help and I mean, practically, but also just somebody to be there to listen, to rely upon, somebody that I could lean on as other people were leaning on me. …
Many people have already served as death doulas for somebody in their family, and most of us will at some point. Which is why I think it’s so important that we all have a functional death literacy, because we live in community. We die in community. At some point, a member of that community is going to need the support. So many of us are going to do it and already have. That’s how I learned how to do it is through Peter. I took courses afterwards, but that was the initial spark, the initial practical application of the work itself.
On facing grief
The thing about grief is whether or not you want to face it, it’s going to find its way through. Either we don’t acknowledge it emotionally, and it manifests itself in work, or our relationships, or addiction or some other traumatic event, or it shows up in our bodies as illness. But grief is present. Grief lives in the body and it must be accessed at some point. It will force its way. I think that since we push so many of our sad or difficult emotions away, we don’t allow space for grief because it is difficult. But I don’t yet know anybody who has died from grieving. It’s hard, and yet there is always another day, provided we choose the next day.
On the importance of talking to your medical proxy
The first thing I encourage people to do is to think about the person who will make the decisions for them in the event that they can’t. That is a health care proxy or a medical power of attorney, or just somebody whose job it is to make your decisions. Somebody who would make decisions the way that you would. Not the way that they would, not the things that they want for you, but rather what you would want for yourself. And to begin communicating those desires to your health care proxy, because the communication of that desire is going to open up a beautiful, rich conversation about what you want with your life, how you want your life to eventually end, if that is the way that it’s going, and then get you started on the path toward planning for it.
On how not talking about death openly leads to fear and anxiety
I think a lot of the old way of thinking is largely responsible for the death phobia that we currently experience in today’s culture and society … where we pretend it’s not happening, where bodies are whisked away to funeral homes just moments after the death has occurred. We don’t take time with the body. We don’t take time to talk about death. We pretend it’s not happening until it’s too late. That death phobia has caused a real crisis, I think, in this country and in the West overall, where we are living out of relationship with nature and with our mortality, which is ultimately a detriment to us as a culture, but also to us as individuals.
On helping people who are at their worst
People are most human when they are dying. They are at their fullest. That means their best and their worst. I think as people are approaching the end, they are grieving as well. They are grieving their own death. They are grieving all the things that they’re going to leave. I think we often forget that when somebody in our lives is dying, we are losing them, but they are losing everything and everyone and leaving the only place that they’ve known consciously. And so that brings about a lot of emotion, and some of it is anger and frustration. And sometimes disease causes personality changes. Sometimes there is some vitriol and sometimes it’s just really not pretty. … If we can be present for their experience, which often is rooted in fear, then I think it allows us to not take it so personally and to give them some grace for what it is that they are experiencing.
On advice for caregivers
Give yourself plenty of grace. You, I’m sure, are doing amazing because this is really, really hard. … I wish somebody had said that to me at various points. … Next, I’d also encourage that people try to take a minute to check in with their bodies and take care of their bodies’ needs. Make sure that you’re eating to the best that you can … find pockets of rest where you can. To the extent that you can, speak your needs and let somebody else support you in it. If you have a need, no matter how small it might be, speak it and open the space for somebody to support you in it. And I’d also say reach out for some support if you can, not only to a friend … but there are plenty of doulas that are willing to support their community members at a free or reduced cost, maybe even a sliding scale. Reach out. There are plenty of resources that are available, but most importantly, if you hear nothing else, please just give yourself some grace for the process. It’s tough.
On advice for the moment you sit with a loved one during their death
Do your best to stay present. Do your best to stay in your body. It can be so confronting that the desire, the urge to disassociate or to distract is huge. And yet, if there’s somebody that you loved and cared for, if you could hold thoughts of love and care and honor and gratitude for their lives, that’s a really beautiful way to be during that time. And also, as always, give yourself plenty of grace for however it is that you’re approaching it. If there is somebody in the room that is having a bigger emotional reaction, ask for their consent before touching or interrupting it or being with it in any way. And not everybody who is crying wants the tears to stop, or needs a tissue to plug them up, or wants a hug. Maybe they want to stay present in their bodies without the imposition as well. … It’s utterly profound. Getting to witness the doorway to existence is a gift and a privilege and a huge honor. And so hopefully we can continue to treat it as such.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Tom Layward, the narrator and main character of Ben Markovits’ new novel, The Rest of Our Lives, introduces himself in a curious way: On the very first page of the book, he talks, matter-of-factly, about the affair his wife, Amy, had 12 years ago, when their two kids were young.
Amy, who’s Jewish, got involved at a local synagogue in Westchester; Tom, who was raised Catholic and is clearly not a joiner, remained on the sidelines. At the synagogue, Amy met Zach Zirsky, who Tom describes as “the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at a bar mitzvah, so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain.”
After the affair came out, Tom and Amy decided to stay together for the kids: a boy named Michael and his younger sister, Miriam. But, Tom tells us “I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college you can leave, too.” The deal, Tom says, “helped me get through the first few months … [when] we had to pretend that everything was fine.”
Twelve years have since passed and the marriage has settled back into a state of OK-ness. Miriam, now 18, is starting college in Pittsburgh and because Amy is having a tough time with Miriam’s departure, Tom alone drives her to campus.
And, once Tom drops Miriam off, he just keeps driving, westward; without explanation to us or to himself; as though he’s a passenger in a driverless car that has decided to carry him across “the mighty Allegheny” and keep on going.
The three-page scene where Tom passively melds into the trans-continental traffic flow constitutes a master class on how to write about a character who is opaque to himself. “[Y]ou don’t feel anything about anything,” Amy says early on to Tom — an accusation that’s pretty much echoed by Tom’s old college girlfriend, Jill, whom he spontaneously drops in on at her home in Las Vegas, after being out of touch for roughly 30 years.
But, if Tom is distanced from his own feelings (and vague about the “issue” he had “with a couple of students” that forced him to take a leave from teaching in law school), he’s a sharp diagnostician of other people’s behavior. What fuels this road trip is Tom’s voice — by turns, wry, mournful and, oh-so-casually, astute.
There’s a strain of Richard Ford and John Updike in Tom’s tone, which I mean as a high compliment. Take, for instance, how Tom chats to us readers about a married couple who are old friends of his and Amy’s:
[Chrissie] was maybe one of those women who derives secret energy from the troubles of her friends. Her husband, Dick, was a perfectly good guy, about six-two, fat and healthy. He worked for an online tech platform. I really don’t know what he did.
So might most of us be summed up for posterity.
As Tom racks up miles, taking detours to visit other folks out of his past, like his semi-estranged brother, his meandering road trip accrues in suspense. There’s something else he’s subconsciously speeding away from here besides his marriage. Tom tells us at the outset that he’s suffering from symptoms his doctors ascribe to long COVID: dizziness and morning face swelling so severe that daughter Miriam jokingly calls him “Puff Daddy.” Shortly after he reaches the Pacific, Tom also lands in the hospital. “Getting out of the hospital,” Tom dryly comments, “is like escaping a casino, they don’t make it easy for you.”
The canon of road trip stories in American literature is vast, even more so if you count other modes of transportation besides cars — like, say, rafts. But, the most memorable road trips, like The Rest of Our Lives, notice the easy-to-miss signposts — marking life forks in the road and looming mortality — that make the journey itself everything.
The water bubbles up hot from the earth and sunlight filters down through the branches of mighty oaks.
But before you can soak in Santa Barbara County’s highly popular Montecito Hot Springs, you’ll need to hike a little over a mile uphill, threading your way among boulders, oaks and a meandering creek. And before the hike, there are two other crucial steps: getting to the trailhead and knowing what to expect.
The trail to Montecito Hot Springs.
These rustic spring pools are about 95 miles northwest of L.A. City Hall, just upslope from well-to-do Montecito, whose residents include Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Though the trail and hot springs are part of Los Padres National Forest, the trailhead is in a residential neighborhood of gated mansions. Beyond the trailhead parking area (which has room for eight or nine cars), the neighborhood includes very little curbside parking. After visitation surged during the pandemic, some neighbors were accused by county officials of placing boulders to obstruct public parking. Parking options were reduced further when county officials added parking restrictions earlier this year.
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Bottom line: Unless you can arrive on a weekday between 8 and 10 a.m., you’re probably better off taking a rideshare service to get there. Whenever you arrive, you’re likely to have company. And you might want to wait until the landscape dries out a bit from the rains of recent weeks.
As Los Padres National Forest spokesman Andrew Madsen warned, “the foothills of Santa Barbara are especially fragile and hiking is especially precarious in the aftermath of heavy rains.”
All that said, the hike is rewarding and free. From the Hot Springs Canyon trailhead at East Mountain Drive and Riven Rock Road, it’s a 2.5-mile out-and-back trail to the hot springs, with about 800 feet of altitude gain on the way.
Arriving at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, I got the last parking spot at the trailhead, stepped past the signs forbidding parking before 8 a.m. or after sunset, then stepped past another sign warning that “this is a challenging and rugged hike.” Also, there are no bathrooms or trash cans on the trail or at the springs.
“It’s important that people know what’s going on up there before they show up,” said Madsen. “It’s not all that glamorous.”
Even though it’s only 1.2 or 1.3 miles to the hot springs, plan on about an hour of uphill hiking. Once you’re above the residential lots, you’ll see pipes along the way, carrying water down the hill, along with occasional trailside poison oak. As you near the pools, you’ll pick up the scent of sulfur and notice the water turning a strange bluish hue. Then the trail jumps across the creek — which I initially missed.
But there was a silver lining. That detour gave me a chance to admire the stone ruins of a hotel that was built next to the springs in 1870s. After a fire, it became a private club. Then it burned in the Coyote fire of 1964, which blackened more than 65,000 acres, destroyed more than 90 homes and killed a firefighter. The hot springs and surrounding land have been part of Los Padres National Forest since 2013.
Hikers look west from the ruins near Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
On a clear day with the sun in the right place, you can stand among the overgrown ruins, look west and see the ocean, a few old oil platforms and the long, low silhouette of Santa Cruz Island. This is what the native Chumash would have seen (minus the oil platforms) through the many years they used the springs before European immigrants arrived.
Pleasant as that view was, I was ready to soak, as were the two couples who got momentarily lost with me. (We were all Montecito Hot Springs rookies.) Once we’d retraced our steps to the creek and crossed it, the trail took us quickly past a hand-lettered CLOTHING OPTIONAL sign to a series of spring-fed pools of varying temperatures.
A dozen people were already lazing in and around the uppermost pools (one woman topless, one man bottomless), but several pools remained empty. I took one that was about 2 feet deep and perhaps 90 degrees. In one pool near me sat Ryan Binter, 30, and Kyra Rubinstein, 26, both from Wichita, Kan.
Hikers Ryan Binter and Kyra Rubinstein, visiting from Wichita, Kan., soak at Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
“She found this,” said Binter, praising Rubinstein’s internet search savvy.
At the next pool were Emanuel Leon, 20, of Carpinteria, Calif., and Evelyn Torres, 19, of Santa Barbara. The last time they’d tried this hike, they’d strayed off-track and missed the hot springs, so this time, they were savoring the scene.
“Revenge!” said Leon, settling in.
The soaking was so mellow, quiet and unhurried that I was surprised to learn that the pools were not erected legally. As Madsen of the Los Padres National Forest explained later by phone, they were “created by the trail gnomes” — hikers arranging rocks themselves to adjust water flow and temperature, with no government entities involved.
Legal or not, they made a nice reward after the hike uphill. The downhill hike out was easier and quicker, of course, but still tricky because of the rocks and twisting trail.
On your way out of Montecito, especially if it’s your first time, take a good look at the adobe-style grandeur of the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church building, which looks like it was smuggled into California from Santa Fe. For food and drink, head to Coast Village Road (the community’s main drag) or the Montecito Village Shopping Center on East Valley Road. Those shops and restaurants may not match the wonder and comfort of a natural bath in the woods, but for civilization, they’re not bad.
The French government confirmed this week that it has granted citizenship to George and Amal Clooney — pictured on a London red carpet in October — and their 7-year-old twins.
Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
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Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
One of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars is now officially a French citizen.
A French government bulletin published last weekend confirms that the country has granted citizenship to George Clooney, along with his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and their 7-year-old twins.
The Clooneys — who hail from Lexington, Ky. and Beirut, Lebanon, respectively — bought an 18th-century estate in Provence, France in 2021. In an Esquire interview this October, the Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker described the French “farm” as their primary residence, a decision he said was made with their kids in mind.
“I was worried about raising our kids in LA, in the culture of Hollywood,” Clooney said. “I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France — they kind of don’t give a s*** about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”
In another interview on his recent Jay Kelly press tour, Clooney mentioned that his wife and kids speak perfect French, joking that they use it to insult him to his face while he still struggles to learn the language.
This week, after a French official raised questions of fairness, France’s Foreign Ministry explained that the Clooneys were eligible under a law that permits citizenship for foreign nationals who contribute to the country’s international influence and cultural outreach, The Associated Press reports.
The French government specifically cited the actor’s clout as a global movie star and the lawyer’s work with academic institutions and international organizations in France.
“They maintain strong personal, professional and family ties with our country,” the ministry added, per the AP. “Like many French citizens, we are delighted to welcome Georges and Amal Clooney into the national community.”
They aren’t the only ones celebrating. President Trump, who has a history of trading barbs with Clooney, welcomed the news by taking another dig at the actor.
In a New Year’s Eve Truth Social post, Trump called the couple “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time” and slammed Clooney for throwing his support behind then-Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.
“Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies,” wrote Trump, who himself has made cameos in several films over the years. “He wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy who complained, constantly, about common sense in politics. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Clooney responded the next day via a statement shared with outlets including Deadline and Variety.
“I totally agree with the current president,” Clooney said, before referencing the midterm elections later this year. “We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.”
Clooney and Trump — once friendly — have long criticized each other
Clooney, a longtime activist and Democratic Party donor, has remained active in U.S. politics despite his overseas move.
In July 2024, he rocked the political establishment by publishing a New York Times op-ed urging then-President Joe Biden — for whom he had prominently fundraised just weeks prior — to drop his reelection bid to make way for another Democrat with better chances of taking the White House. A growing chorus of calls led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race by the end of that month.
In a December interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Clooney said his decision to speak out on that and other issues generally comes down to “when I feel like no one else is gonna do it.”
“You’ll lose all of your clout if you fight every fight,” he added. “You have to pick the ones that you know well, that you’re well informed on, and that you have some say and you hope that that has at least some effect.”
Clooney has been a vocal critic of Trump throughout both of his terms, most recently on the topic of press freedoms during the actor’s Broadway portrayal of the late journalist Edward R. Murrow last spring.
And Trump has been similarly outspoken in his dislike of Clooney, including in an insult-laden Truth Social post — calling him a “fake movie actor” — after the publication of his New York Times op-ed.
In December, just days before this latest dust-up, Clooney shared in a Variety interview that he and Trump had been on good terms during the president’s reality television days. He said Trump used to call him often and once tried to help him get into a hospital to see a back surgeon.
“He’s a big goofball. Well, he was,” Clooney added. “That all changed.”
In the same Variety interview, Clooney — the son of longtime television anchor Nick Clooney — slammed CBS and ABC for abandoning their journalistic duty by paying to settle lawsuits with the Trump administration. He expressed concern about the current media landscape, particularly the direction of CBS News under its controversial new editor in chief, Bari Weiss.
Weiss responded by inviting Clooney to visit the CBS Broadcast Center to learn more about their work, in a written statement published in the New York Post on Tuesday. It began with “Bonjour, Mr. Clooney,” in a nod to the actor’s new milestone.
Clooney told NPR last month that he will continue to stand up for what he believes in, even if it means people who disagree with him decide not to see his movies.
“I don’t give up my right to freedom of speech because I have a Screen Actors Guild card,” he added. “The minute that I’m asked to just straight-up lie, then I’ve lost.”
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