Death positivity can help us die better deaths. One death doula wants to bring the movement to Akron. BY H.L. COMERIATO, TDS STAFF REPORTER PHOTOS BY: H.L. COMERIATO
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ngela Laakso traces a name etched in stone with the tip of her index finger.
Nearly 200 years ago, Glendale Cemetery was founded in Akron’s West Hill neighborhood. Today, it holds the city’s dead in more than 26,000 graves. On a humid, summer morning, Glendale’s hills are lush against a gray sky. At the main entrance, a row of elaborate family mausoleums stretch around a curve in the narrow road. “I’ve always been enamored with the dark side of things,” Laakso says. “I was into goth music in high school and in my early 20s. I always loved hanging out in cemeteries. [I had] kind of a fascination with death, but also a good dose of healthy fear of death.” “This must have been a child,” she adds, finger still pressed to the stone. As a death doula, Laakso, now in her
late 40s, helps dying people and their loved ones navigate the dying process and what comes after. Often, she takes on more pragmatic tasks, like drafting a living will or health care power of attorney, planning or officiating funerals or advocating for the dying in medical settings like hospitals or hospice care centers. But death doulas also practice spiritually and emotionally intimate work with the dying and their loved ones, and they can help families learn to care for their own dying in the process.
launched Astral Dragonfly, an Akronbased nonprofit designed to provide death education, promote death positivity and provide death doula services to dying people and their loved ones. Much like birth doulas, death doulas have a long legacy spanning cultures and continents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Laakso completed a program with the International End of Life Doula
Association (INELDA) and earned an official certification. But death doulas, sometimes called death midwives or end-of-life-doulas, don’t always operate in an official capacity. INELDA began offering doula certifications in 2016, but this type of intimate, communal death work has been practiced for centuries, and it is often deeply connected to indigenous customs and ancestral knowledge. Death doulas treat dying as a natural
It’s that type of work Laakso hopes will spark a thriving death positive community across the city — and radically change the way Akronites think about, talk about and experience death and dying. What is a death doula? To help make that death positive community a reality, Laakso and her teenage son, Casper — a student enrolled in Firestone Community Learning Center’s International Baccalaureate Programme — Above: Death doula and educator Angela Laakso at Glendale Cemetery in Akron.
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The Devil Strip
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