Briefly Perfectly Human
Alua Arthur is a death doula who offers companionship and assistance at the end of life. This can mean different things, depending on the client's needs: sometimes it's about accepting that death is imminent, while others, it's about the business and logistics of death. As a former lawyer, Arthur is uniquely qualified to help with both. In this memoir, she recounts her path to becoming a death doula, which included a devastating personal loss. She also offers stories from her work, which puts her right in the face of the gray areas of life: the complexity of grief, forgiveness, acceptance, and more. She also explores her own personal struggles with depression and how her work gave her insight into her own life.
This is an absolutely beautiful memoir, filled with thought-provoking insight on how we all approach death--and life. Arthur is an exquisite writer and narrator; I highly recommend the audio, which she narrates herself.
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Publisher’s Description
For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death–whether imminent or not–will breathe wild, new potential into your life.
Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air–or maybe not shown up at all–and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments–when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.
This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.
Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care–what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”