Peir Woon is an end-of-life doula in training and will host a Death Cafe get-together in Wagga. Photo: Erin Hee.
“Losing control” is how Peir Woon would describe losing her father and brother within two months, a feeling she remembers vividly even after a decade.
She’s a death literacy advocate and an end-of-life doula in training, and will be hosting a Death Cafe event on 19 July at the Wagga Wagga City Library.
“Where I come from, in Malaysia, the way we deal with death is like as soon as someone stops breathing, or perhaps even before that, you actually lose control,” Mrs Woon said.
“Not only just the person who is dying loses control, but also the family.
“That’s how I see it, because you see how we run our funerals there, you hire someone.
“Someone told me what I’m going to do, including where I stand and when to bow, and there will be a lot of different relatives come and tell you what to do.
“I had a very, very strong feeling when I was at my father’s funeral that I don’t know what to do. I totally lost control, let alone the person who died.”
A doula is a non-medically trained person who provides support to people during health-related experiences such childbirth, a miscarriage or end-of-life palliative care.
Death literacy is “the knowledge and skills that make it possible to gain access to, understand and act upon end-of-life and death care options”.
Mrs Woon believes that by accepting death, you can actually live better.
Her goal is to give people the three Cs: the capacity to make decisions for themselves, but to do that they would need to know what choices they have, and eventually that gives them control over how they go.
“We just don’t talk about death enough,” she said.
“Yeah, and I’m so grateful that when I came here, there are these big groups of people who are actually passionate about talking about death and dying and tell us that we have control, we have the choice.
“But in order to know what our choices are, we need to be aware of all the different choices, and by knowing our choices, then we can reflect on our own death and be able to make the decision before our own death approaches.”
The Death Cafe is not a support session for grief, but rather an opportunity and space for people to talk freely about death and dying, whether it is the fear of dying or their experiences dealing with deaths in their family.
“They can say as little as nothing while they are there, or they can say as much as they want during the session,” Mrs Woon said.
“My main purpose of running this is to give people an opportunity to talk about death.”
Jon Underwood hosted the first Death Cafe in the UK, and designed it to be free of any themes, topics or agenda.
“That means I’m not there because I have a business as a doula. I’m not there because, you know, I want to make sure my survey form is completed,” Mrs Woon said.
“None of that at all. No agenda or no motive at all.
“If you look at the news every day, although we don’t talk about our own death and dying, every day has news about someone’s death.
“But after I get exposed in this area of work, I find that we can have what we call a ‘beautiful death’, also called a ‘peaceful death’, if we prepare for it, just very much like we prepare for our kids’ births.
“We can’t prepare for our own birth, but we can prepare for our own death.”
Peir Woon will be hosting a Death Cafe gathering on 19 July at the Wagga Wagga City Library, and you can RSVP by SMS or WhatsApp at 0431 820 663. Cake and muffins will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to bring their own hot beverage. Photo: Supplied.
