Social worker uses death doula training on the job
When Tanisha Bowman was a child, she told her mother she wanted to work at a funeral home because she would “get to sit with the sad people.”
She doesn’t know how that idea entered her young mind, but her past self might be satisfied in knowing that Bowman now does a lot of sitting with sad people, but in a different environment.
“A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a room for hours listening to this family tell me stories about their loved one. ... What I can do is leverage my palliative social work conditions, in the hospital and community and do the same work,” Bowman said. “I am really comfortable literally sitting in the sadness, and sitting there where someone is dying.”
Bowman is a palliative care social worker at Butler Memorial Hospital, but also has death doula training, which she can call upon when meeting with patients and their families in the department.
Palliative care is specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness. A death doula, according to Bowman, is a person who stays with people who are on the brink of death to help them process their emotions, along with any loved ones present with them.
Bowman said that while she trained and is certified as a death doula, being a social worker in palliative care gives her more freedom to work with patients in a hospital, for several reasons.
“As a social worker, I can advocate directly for patients; I can push; I can have a more vocal voice in helping them make decisions,” Bowman said.
According to Bowman, death doulas do not necessarily need extensive training, or certification to perform their work. She said she went through trainings and took an online test through the International End-of-Life Doula Association, as ways of legitimizing her practices as a doula.
Bowman said she decided to become a death doula after working several jobs in social work and childhood care and development.
“I was on scholarship at Pitt ... my last semester, I needed one more elective and the only one that was open was ‘death and dying,’” Bowman said. “That class changed my life. I had been a children's bereavement counselor in undergrad.”
Following graduate school, Bowman worked at UPMC Presbyterian in the emergency department, which she said was not fulfilling.
A Twitter message from Dr. Dillon Stein, director of the Division of Palliative Care at Butler Health System, earlier this year led her to start commuting an hour from Pittsburgh to work at the hospital in palliative care.
“There is a lot more freedom for me to be who I am here,” Bowman said. “I'm bringing my natural empathy and intuitiveness and weird ability to sit in that really dark place along with death doula training. I was in the ICU when I got that training.”
According to Stein, bringing Bowman to Butler Health System was a move to help accommodate more people and perspectives, which is needed in an area where patients may be experiencing traumatic sickness.
“It really comes down to the way that our division works is all about perspective around an individual and their family,” Stein said. “When it comes to how we can treat people better, it's all about different talents, different characteristics to make sure that we're not missing anybody.”
A self-described “kooky person,” Bowman said she enjoys getting to hear about people’s world views, which is particularly interesting when someone is receiving palliative care.
“I really like being able to offer something that people don't get, which is not a bunch of platitudes, but someone who is going to tell you, ‘This sucks,’” Bowman said. “I can meet them where they are. Our job is to walk with everyone.”
Bowman can often be seen wearing shirts that say “Death care influencer,” or “End of life doula,” or other pieces of clothing she makes herself. Because the mental state she enters when working in the palliative care department is a head space she can’t entirely turn off, and doesn’t really want to.
Even if she did, her personality and favorite emotion of melancholy make her constantly embrace feeling.
“I actually consider myself a death walker; I am able to be weird and kooky and teach these guys a little more about death,” Bowman said. “I believe in feeling all of the feels and sitting with it. I believe that the darkness is not something to be feared; it’s something to be embraced and worked with.”
Bowman also can’t turn off her career because she is consistently in contact with patients and family members who found themselves in the palliative care department at the hospital. Many of the decorations placed around her office space on the fifth floor of Butler Memorial Hospital are keepsakes from patients, or crafts she made for them.
“We gave somebody fingerprints, they turned it into a tattoo,” Bowman said. “I took a patient’s last note and tick-tack-toe game and turned it into a project to give the person’s mom.”
Stein said the talks people have while going through treatment in a hospital are really what can make their experience good, rather than the health-related processes they are there to undergo.
“When it comes down to caring for people when they are sick, we need to make sure there are all different angles of care being looked at,” Stein said. “The nonmedical stuff we bring, that's what people remember. They remember sitting down, talking, connecting. Tanisha's got that talent to connect, and she's got that perspective that is incredibly helpful.”
Bowman also said she prefers palliative care to hospice care, because patients in palliative care are not necessarily at end of life, nor does she always think of them that way.
She said she thinks of every patient and their family as an opportunity to teach them something about life, and help them enjoy theirs at any point in their journey.
“All I can do is try to limit the amount of trauma that they are about to experience,” Bowman said. “I'm trying to help people get the best they can get with the resources they have.”
