The rise of death doulas

In 2022, actress Nicole Kidman told a reporter she was training to be a death doula. The same year, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao told the New York Times she had trained as one because she had "been terrified of death my whole life" and that fear had kept her from living fully. These celebrity disclosures surfaced a quiet but growing phenomenon: a profession dedicated to sitting with the dying, handling the logistics of death, and filling a gap the American healthcare system leaves wide open.

Vox’s Anna North, who reported on the rise of death doulas, says the celebrity interest mirrors a broader cultural shift. Interest in the profession has spiked since the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced millions to confront mortality at once. At the same time, social media has seen an explosion of content normalizing conversations about death. A TikTok creator with stage four colon cancer greets his followers with, "Good evening, fellow mortal souls. My name’s Tanner and I am dying." A newly certified "baby death doula" posts a recommendation: "We need more death doulas in society." The result is that a role humans have filled informally for millennia—sitting with the dying, bringing food, weeping with the family—is being professionalized, paid, and talked about openly.

What a death doula actually does