52 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
Soon after, as the mother loses conscious-
ness and enters the final stages of dying, her
daughter quietly sings “Over the Rainbow.”
Before the pandemic, Web’s job descrip-
tion looked vastly different. As a former
animal- enrichment coordinator, she spent
her workdays coming up with creative ways
to entertain the creatures at the Tennessee Aquarium—a
job she lovingly compares to that of a cruise-ship director.
She’s filled kiddie pools with colorful plastic balls for the
mongooses to dive in and out of. She’s made giant turkeys
out of construction paper and paper bags, filling them with
fruits and vegetables for the lemurs. She’s fed alligators in
front of live audiences.
When she was laid off in October 2020, Web says, she
faced low prospects of finding another comparable zoo or
aquarium job, so she pursued a career that’s been at the back
of her mind since her grandmother died of pancreatic can-
cer more than 17 years ago. Web became a death doula, in
hopes that fewer people would spend their final moments
surrounded by panicked loved ones the way her 82-year-old
grandmother had in 2004. At age 21, it was the first time Web
had experienced such a major loss. The diagnosis rocked the
rest of the family.
“I was very lost in that experience,” says Web, who was
more than 1,000 miles away when her grandmother died.
“No one else seemed to know what to do.”
Web wishes she and her family could have
better understood the disease, the dying pro-
cess, and how much time they realistically had
left, so they could’ve better comforted their
matriarch. “I promised, no matter what, I
would never let that happen again,” Web says.
Before she was laid off at the aquarium,
Web kept two reminders of the finality of life on her office
desk: a computer background image of the universe and a
papier-mâché skull. “My motto was, the universe is big and
life is short,” she says.Besides a whole lot of compassion, not much is required
to become a death doula. During a recent day’s work with
a woman who had stopped treatments for breast cancer,
Yost helped her jot down stories to share with her children
about her childhood visits to her family in Italy. When she
noticed how animated the woman had become, Yost pulled
up Google maps so they could virtually walk through the
same mountain village where her grandparents lived. The
woman cried as the memories came flooding back.
“The gift of time is what makes doula work so special and
meaningful,” says Angela Shook, president of the National
End-of-Life Doula Alliance.
Because doulas do not administer or prescribe medica-
tion, the industry is unregulated and does not require a li-
cense. Most prospective doulas take training courses that