Sairey Luterman Grief Support

02/25/2026

You can also find me on Substack now, link below…..

Mortal Support – Dispatches from a Death Doula on Loss, Death and Transformation

We don’t talk about death, or dying, very much. For those of us who work with dying, we learn to check our comfort with death around most people. I have spent time over the years trying to advance public conversation and awareness around death, and it’s a heavy lift. It is true that death and is an organic process and most of the processes are baked right in to our biology. It is also true that dying can be hard work – for the dying person and the loved ones standing bedside. Complicated messaging is a tough sell, and death already has a big image problem.

In the first part of my career I mostly supported bereaved folks. I identified more with the idea of being a person mourning a loss more than what it might be like to be a dying. As the years have passed, my work has shifted to directly supporting folks who are dying, and I have a much more fulsome grasp of what that process looks like from both sides.

For the dying person, I believe there are pieces that really can only be done alone, but loving support sure helps. internal processes – some organic, and some in which I believe the person must more actively participate. There is labor involved. It is possible to die having not tied up this loose ends but it can make the exit more complicated. One needn’t be a death doula to understand what it’s like to love someone out who couldn’t wrap up their loose ends and how hard that kind of dying can be.

I hope these words can serve as some kind of fortification for those times we find ourselves, willingly or not, accompanying someone to the end of their life. We can be comforting, and close by, but we cannot supplant the process. Sometimes we won’t even be welcome to do that.

My Dad is dying, and for him, it seems quite hard. I think there are regrets he cannot articulate, and the end of his life has taken him by surprise. He has created so many internal walls to his own feeling that they are almost inaccessible to him. I have empathy for his process, but am relegated to the far outside, as I have always been. He has a beautiful caregiver to care for him. She asks nothing and is able to comfort him in as much as he will allow it. She is warm and professional.

I am the person on the outside of my Dad’s death, as I have been a person on the outside of his life. His dying is not the vessel I would work and craft with one of my clients, nor for myself. It seems lonely and unanchored by ritual, acknowledgement, and companionship. Whatever connection I have longed for in my life with him has never happened, and I have accepted it is extremely unlikely it will happen now.

My father’s dying is disorienting to me and hard to accept (not his impending death, the process of his dying). I don’t believe he has understood me any better than I have him. The toast he gave at my wedding was about how I cry a lot and it was a relief that I would be my husband’s problem now. My work as a death doula and my comfort around death are a puzzle. Visiting him and discussing the weather and the stock market when he’s getting ready to go on the journey of a lifetime hollow me out inside. It’s not clear to me why I go visit exactly, only that I do occasionally.

I am deeply grateful, however, to the folks I have been privileged to work with who have helped me to develop this sacred calling, who see the value in my work, and have been openly appreciative of what my skill set and compassionate nature bring to the table. I cannot think of work that I am better suited to, or that I could love or find more meaningful. (I did previously have a beautiful career in publishing, but death work feels essential in a different way)

I am proud to be a death doula, and my craving to be understood by my Dad, or honestly, by anyone, is mercifully subsiding as I age. It is enough that I love it, that I am welcomed and useful to the right people (the people who find me), and that I have found a powerful way to contribute to the greater conversation unfolding in the universe that we don’t really understand anyway.

Mortal Support – Dispatches from a Death Doula on Loss, Death and Transformation We don’t talk about death, or dying, very much. For those of us who work with dying, we learn to check our comfort with death around most people. I have spent time over the years trying to advance public conversatio...

11/26/2025

The holidays are a grief specialty. The most wonderful time of year often feels grim and haunted for many of us. Those halycon holiday memories of childhood holidays have long receded into the distance and we are left trying to survive/re-invent/refocus ourselves during what can feel like a two month march through the past.

My own family is deeply imperfect. My Mom died three years ago and it hasn’t been a straightforward sorrow. My Dad is now quite frail, and whether or not he can acknowledge the truth of where his journey his on this earth, I see it clearly. My parents are products of the generation that produced them, hence they each have their own share of unnamed and unprocessed trauma. They each retreated into ways of functioning in their own lives to avoid confronting their own pain, and instead simply passed it on.

Regret has stalked each of them at the end of their lives. There are exquisite qualities to my parents too - charismatic, brilliant, artistic & creative. From a distance, they are quite dazzling indeed. As their child, they have been my greatest teachers and the source toward which I have needed to direct my greatest healing and growth. They are, and were, messy messy humans. I love each of them in my own way, and mourn what wasn’t and what will never be.

I choose to focus my own holiday energy on the future generations, my own children and niecesand nephews. Family that truly understands, and chosen family that has carried me this year and all my difficult times. I am grateful for the blessings that have been heaped upon me in my life. I wake almost stunned by the gifts that are lavished upon me by being alive. Gratitude does increase blessings. I work to let the grief ride in the back seat to what’s happening up front, where I am driving.

I see at 56 years old that it’s virtually impossible not to have grief as a major guest at the holidays. It’s somehow part of the texture of it all, those that went before, that loved us, and left behind what good they were able to, or not. I wish each of you blessings in abundance, that your grief guest feels like a manageable one, and if not, that you are surrounded by the love and support to just get through these days. There’s no perfect way to ‘do’ the holidays and some folks, I know, simply work to survive them. Whoever you are in this blessed mess, I see you. I know it’s messy and complicated. Just keep stepping through.

11/06/2025

One of my favorite songs by The Rolling Stones has always been ‘Gimme Shelter.’ If you listen to the song at about the three minute mark you can hear the back up singers voice crack, twice in fact, on the words ‘shot’ and ‘murder.’ Her name was Merry Clayton. She did a fair amount of back up singing for the Stones because of her incredible voice.

She was summoned in the middle of the night to the studio, her hair still in curlers. She was exhausted. The Stones kept her voice cracking in the recording because they liked it. She miscarried later that night. You listen to loss whenever you listen to that song. Loss is an inescapable component to our fully expressed humanity. It is at your own peril that you don’t lift your head to the truth.

10/08/2025

From ‘Mortal Support - Dispatches from a Death Doula on Loss, Death and Transformation….

Statistically, close to one hundred percent of people will name suffering as what they’d most like to avoid at the end of their lives. The most effective way to change that is to educate yourself as to what the end of life most often ‘looks like.’ It’s a grim truth but many Americans do suffer quite a bit at the end of their lives, because they are too afraid to learn and understand.

I am here to address what it looks like to be dying - at the end of one’s life, of ‘natural’ causes. In the absence of a strong cultural image beyond being tucked into bed, mostly sleeping, perhaps on pain meds, we have an abyss of ignorance. What I have described here is end stage dying. It is what most people will describe to you if you ask them what dying ‘looks like.’

What we might say is that the following symptoms are the components of a ‘terminal decline’ - they may be able to be buttressed in early stages for a while, but are indicative that a body is beginning to enter its final wind down.

Increasing fatigue (perhaps sleepiness), decreased appetite and fluid intake, essentially eating less, weight loss, gradual but noticeable from muscle wasting. A doctor would see vital signs changes (mild temperature changes, irregular pulse, slightly lowered blood pressure) and that chronic diseases are becoming harder to treat.

When you think about these symptoms in a person you may well be looking at an ambulatory person, one who does still have a good period of a few hours each day, who can still laugh and talk with you. If your loved one is spending increasing time at the doctor it’s highly unlikely the doctor is offering larger context. They are attempting to treat whatever is presented to them.

There are also cognitive and emotional changes that are the hallmarks of this time in our lives. Perhaps a shorter attention span, less interest in others, periods of confusion, mood changes (could be calmer, irritable, sometimes more at peace).

Accepting and learning about what the end of life can look like readies you to make good decisions - decisions that will shape the process of dying so you do not suffer. These decisions don’t automatically hasten death, they do not represent surrender, and they can firmly switch the locus of agency to you or your dying loved one.

09/30/2025

Welcome to Mortal Support - Dispatches from a Death Doula on Loss, Death and Transformation
(Find me on Substack as ) now!!

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For many years of my practice as a grief counselor and death doula my experience with loss has fit pretty cleanly into the ‘professional’ category. Beautiful people with life limiting illness who asked me to companion them through treatment, planning, conversations and support around the last chapter of their life. I could not ask for richer and more meaningful work. I love it. Even as a ‘professional’ the work is still deeply personal because the mystery of dying and how we choose to approach it is central to all of our lives whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.

If we have that courage we may be able to make choices that protect our agency, our humanity, honor how we have lived, and give grace to the friends and family that support us in that journey. It requires a profound amount of responsibility-taking that can be challenging for most of us. To support this kind of process is sacred and a privilege. It is a cornerstone of what is most important in my own life, and the choices, little and big, that I make daily.

In the same way a scrupulous accountant cannot take responsibility for a parent that hasn’t filed taxes in a decade, ruined their credit by not paying their bills, and hasn’t considered the compound ramifications of these poor choices, neither can a death doula.

That is to say, my parents have been my saddest and most influential teachers in this space. I cannot say work because it isn’t. To each of my parents, my Mother who died three years ago, and my father who is dying now, I have solely been their daughter. To consider my understanding of this space hasn’t been a gift to either of them, but a deep existential threat.

As parents we are all guilty of not always being able to see our children in the full regalia of their adult robes. We may work to make it not be thus, and have the most wonderful glimpses into their separateness, their richness and their capabilities. For some, it is hard to set our own personal centering aside as needed parents to clearly regard our children through such a scrim.

My Mom was deeply regretful, angry and sorrowful at the end of her life. As her youngest daughter, and a person with whom she spent fifty three years of time, it was hard to see the vast chasm of emptiness that opened inside of her at the end of her life. It was as painful then to not be able to help her with it, or fill it, as it was all of my life. It’s a blessing now to see that it wasn’t mine to hold, any of it, and also to be free. She could not be supported or loved in the way I would have liked to at the end of her life, any more than she could in the midst of it. She always had our roles backwards and I can see now quite clearly her emptiness wasn’t mine to own. Sometimes the best instructions of our lives arrived delivered in a package labeled ‘what not to do.’ That was my Mother’s message.

Now I am facing the last chapters of my Dad’s life. He is a deeply alone person, walled off inside a fortress of his own creation and choosing. He is mostly unable to accept any form of meaningful comfort, but when I can sneak a little chicken soup past the drawbridge, or have a rare but contemplative moment with him I cling to it. Whatever I could bring to the table in my role as a death doula is rigidly unwelcome. My potential offering is shunned alongside his unwillingness to understand his health is failing, and that he has slowly begun dying.

I will bear witness to my Dad’s death, too, from the outside. I shouldn’t be surprised. Part of the reason I felt called so strongly to the work of grief counseling and death doula-ing is because it was (among many experiences deeply central to our lives) entirely off limits as a subject to my parents. It was banished to the farthest reaches of their consciousness, and therefore, my sister and I had no choice but to follow suit for many years.

I drop the rope, and cherish those I have been able to offer what I consider to be some of the best of myself. I release that the two people that created the portal through which I entered this world had no space for this offering.

09/28/2025

Hi friends.

I wanted to let you know I am now writing on Substack as ‘Sairey1.’ My missives are called ‘Mortal Support - Dispatches from a Death Doula on Loss, Death and Transformation.’ There is no paid option, all of my content will be free just as it is here for now and the foreseeable future. Free to follow, free to see whatever I write.

The piece I wrote today is about what it’s like to been like to be a death doula and grief counselor at the end of each of my parents lives. My Mom died three years ago, and my father’s last chapter is unfolding now.

If you have been coming to this page for content about grief & loss there will be plenty of it on Mortal Support. My writing will widely embrace grief, loss, and dying as its subject, just as it has here.

The loyalty and support of my FB followers has been one of the most wonderful things this interface has had to offer me - ever. But FB cannot figure out how to make money from my content so it suppresses it, we’ll see how I do on Substack. Please come find me there!

03/26/2025

Culturally we have failed to provide people with an alternative they can imagine at the end of their lives - in fact, most Americans cannot even identify when they might be in the last twelve months of their lives, even with ample medical information.

Doctors, hospitals and insurers are at the ready to take advantage of this incredible personal vulnerability - particularly in the elderly. Of the staggering number of elderly Americans who choose to have surgery in the last year of their lives, half of them will die trying to recover. The standard reported measurement looks at just few months after surgery for a cheery successful look - the reporting at a year is abyssmal - half have died.

Accessing proper mental health support, meaninful palliative options for comfort, and spaces to live in that are wonderful at the end of is a gold standard we cannot even approximate culturally because no one has figured out how to monetize it to the same scale as the surgical chopping block we instead have lined up.

Instead, It is each our own personal work to figure out our options, to live our lives thoughtfully and meaningfully as possible to the best of your ability - and at the end of it all to have positioned yourself in such a way to be able to look at the truth. There are people, such as myself, trained and willing to do such work with you.

Countering overmedicalization of death requires acknowledging that dying patients are living patients. It also requires persistent focus on health and wholeness, especially at the end of life, and a solid interdisciplinary approach to supporting dying patients.

02/17/2025

The thoughtfulness of the reflections that people have shared with me after listening to my 2 Lives Podcast interview have been incredible.
One highly resonant theme has been about death denial - so many of us seem to have (or have had) a loved one, who closed their eyes on this world still insisting they were not, in fact, dying. This isn’t so surprising given that our culture is deeply death denying. It is, however, profoundly sad. I hope I have the courage to face my own final passage when it comes (and it would be a privilege to have the chance - many don’t even get it). It is a gift to our loved ones.
After twenty years of practice I feel that the living suffer when a true good-bye cannot be said. It is difficult for me to imagine that it is comfortable to exit this realm while fabricating an elaborate alternative story to the truth and hard work of dying. We die as we have lived, and it’s painful and hard to attempt to see ourselves clearly - but surely it is worthy and essential work to close our lives.

Photo credit: Anna Luterman

02/13/2025

If you are curious about any of the following - compassion, growth, family legacy, grief, loss and how to approach the end of your life - it’s all here in a 30 minute podcast from yours truly. The stories we tell ourselves to live become the stories we need to make peace with as we reach our inevitable end.

2 LIVES - Stories Of Transformation · Episode

10/03/2024

Often loss is our introduction to pain and suffering. They are two different experiences - we may not have much control over pain, but we can exert some clarity around suffering. We will all suffer, no one is exempt. If you are telling yourself a story about someone you know with a perfect life, please know it’s a story.

I don’t subscribe to any specific religious belief in my personal life or in my practice (and welcome folks from all walks of life and all belief systems). I am a magpie and collect what resonates for myself. Twenty years into grief and death work the Buddhist thought around the issue of pain and suffering grows richer and more light filled for me every day.

We tend to think when there’s pain, there’s suffering and we can only be free from suffering if we eliminate pain.

09/22/2024

Yes to these powerful truths of grieving. Platitudes are not helpful, and as heavy as the truth can be it’s more of a ‘comfort’ to have the reality of the situation acknowledged than it is to have it reduced to phrases that we feel to our core are not the truth of our experience.