One day in 2009, Jane K. Callahan picked up the phone and learned that her mother was dying.
Callahan, then 27, hadn’t spoken to her mother, whom she had a complicated relationship with, in two years. Suddenly, she was thrust into the position of coordinating urgent medical decisions and flipping through her mother’s address book, making goodbye calls on her behalf. She felt wildly unprepared.
“I can tell you the awful writhing of my spirit, the systemic pulling apart of my very core, as I sat alone in my room and watched my mother’s hands and feet turn purple,” Callahan writes in A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End, her new book out this month from Chicago Review Press…