The Bereavement Doula
The Bereavement Doula
The Bereavement Doula is eight chapters of honest, evidence-based training that doesn't hide behind sanitized medical language or offer empty platitudes. Written by a labor and delivery nurse who has held hundreds of babies who never took a breath, this book teaches what years of bedside experience and hundreds of supported families have made clear: grief doesn't need fixing.
It needs witnessing.
Readers will learn the physiology of pregnancy loss and why it matters for support. They'll understand how culture, faith, and family structure shape what grieving families need—and how to ask instead of assume. They'll gain practical skills in memory-making, hospital navigation, and advocacy. They'll develop language for the conversations no one prepares you for, and they'll learn what never to say. Three composite families appear throughout the chapters, their stories illustrating how loss unfolds differently depending on circumstance, and how a doula's presence can change everything.
This book also addresses what most training programs skip: how to stay in this work without losing yourself to it. Boundaries, scope of practice, secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, because the families who need support five years from now deserve doulas who are still standing.
For anyone who has ever felt the pull toward this work but didn't know where to start, this is the foundation.
The Bereavement Doula - Companion Workbook
Knowledge means nothing without practice.
This workbook exists to close that gap.
The companion to The Bereavement Doula, this workbook breaks the training into eighteen focused sessions across eight chapters, each one designed to move readers from understanding to action. Discussion prompts surface assumptions and beliefs that will either strengthen or sabotage their work with families. Reflection exercises build the self-awareness that sets exceptional doulas apart from adequate ones. Community research activities transform readers into local experts, mapping the funeral homes, therapists, support groups, and financial assistance programs in their own area so they're prepared before the first call comes.
Readers will build real tools: scripts for impossible conversations, boundary statements, self-care plans, ceremony guides, and a professional sustainability roadmap. Three families' stories continue from the textbook, their journeys deepening through each chapter and challenging readers to apply what they've learned. This workbook doesn't let anyone coast. The prompts will surface old grief. The exercises will sit readers in uncomfortable silence with questions that have no clean answers. That's intentional, because holding space for someone else's pain requires first learning to hold your own.
By the final page, readers won't just have completed a training. They'll have built a personalized field guide for their own community and done the internal work this calling demands.
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