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she fields three to four calls a month. “We’re seeing a huge
flurry of interest,” she says.
That’s no surprise as the U.S. death toll from COVID-19
surpasses 900,000. Over the past 22 months, “the aware-
ness of death was in all of our faces,” says Suzanne O’Brien,
whose group, Doulagivers, trained more than 1,000 people
in 2021, up from roughly 380 in 2019. At the height of the
pandemic in New York City, temporary morgues, including
refrigerated trucks, appeared near overwhelmed hospitals.
On the internet, pleas for funeral assistance flooded in from
thousands of families who’d lost loved ones to the virus.
“Whether we wanted to look away or not, we really
couldn’t,” O’Brien says. That has forced many Americans to
reckon with their own mortality in new ways.
For one, more young people are writing living wills, ac-
cording to several estate planners and national surveys. In
2020, a Gallup poll found the percentage of Americans who
said they have a will increased only to 45% from 40% in 2005.
But for the first time, according to a Caring.com survey,
people ages 18 to 34 were more likely in 2021 to have a will
than those ages 35 to 54. The younger
generation was the most likely to cite
COVID-19 as a major reason to plan
for death.
“For the first time in a generation,
everyone is experiencing the possibil-
ity that death may touch their lives—
not someday, but now,” says Ann
Burns, president of the American Col-
lege of Trust and Estate Counsel.
The Sept. 11 attacks prompted a
similar uptick in end-of-life planning
after Americans saw nearly 3,000 peo-
ple die in one day, according to Bill Kir-
chick, a Boston-based estate attorney.
The pandemic was a far greater shock
to the system. “To some people,” Kir-
chick says, “it was a wake-up call.”
For many others, it was a call to
action. After Tracy Yost, who lives in
Danbury, Conn., was furloughed from
her job as a fitness manager at a retire-
ment community in 2020, she says
she’d call 100 of the residents twice
a week to check in. It didn’t take long
to hear how “wildly isolated” they
sounded. At the time, Yost’s friends
were saying their final goodbyes to
their dying parents through video calls.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my God. We
have lost our way,’” says Yost, 52, who
became a death doula largely because
she feared the pandemic would create
a new generation of people traumatized
by death. “We already live in a society
that doesn’t talk about dying,” Yost
says, adding that the taboo nature of
death may be reflected in the majority
of Americans who don’t have their ad-
vanced health care directives in order.
Without the pandemic, Yost says she
likely never would have become a doula.On a September day in Chattanooga,
Tenn., Sara Web, 38, meets with a young woman in her 20s.
The woman is lost, scared, and confused as her mother nears
the end of her decade-long battle with cancer. Web gently
draws information from the daughter as they talk about what
her mother has meant to her at every stage of life. The way
she cared for her daughter when she was ill; the way they
decorated the house at Christmas; the beautiful moments
the younger woman will always carry with her.
One recurring happy moment stands out—the mother
and daughter’s shared love of The Wizard of Oz. The dying
woman has been sleeping more and more, but when Web
puts on the movie, she smiles and stays mostly awake for
the film. The mother and daughter absorb their final mo-
ments together on the couch as Web watches over them.