Filmmaker Chloé Zhao revealed that she’s training as a death doula to help her process her own fears around dying — here’s everything to know about the role, the people who do it, and why the movement is growing faster than ever.
Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao is having a career moment that would stun most filmmakers into pure celebration. Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespearean grief novel, claimed the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in Drama and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. But off camera, she has been quietly pursuing something far less glamorous and arguably more profound: training to become a death doula. The revelation — drawn from a recent New York Times interview published January 24 and since circulated widely on Instagram — has sparked a conversation that extends well beyond awards season.
When asked why she chose this path, her answer was disarmingly direct. “Because I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am,” she told The New York Times. “And because I’ve been so afraid, I haven’t been able to live fully.”
She has already completed Level 1 training in the United Kingdom. “In one of the training sessions, we had to research Indigenous cultures from around the world, how they deal with death and dying both today and in the past,” she told the Times. “You can see that the grief of losing a loved one doesn’t change.”
What a death doula actually does
For the uninitiated, a death doula — also called an end-of-life doula — is a nonmedical professional trained to support individuals and their families through the dying process. The International End-of-Life Doula Association (INELDA) defines the role as a “nonmedical companion who provides personalized and compassionate support to individuals, families, and their circles of care as they encounter and navigate death, loss, and mortality.” The keyword there is nonmedical. A death doula does not manage pain, administer treatment, or stand in for hospice nurses. The work lives in the spaces that clinical systems leave empty: helping someone write letters for the people they love, planning meaningful rituals, facilitating legacy projects, or simply sitting vigil.
Henry Fersko-Weiss, a licensed clinical social worker who created the first end-of-life doula program in the United States in 2003 and co-founded INELDA in 2015, explained that with all of the stress that families are going through as someone nears the end of life, “attention is not always given to what that actual dying process will be like.” He says having an EOL doula can help the dying person “contemplate what might bring meaning at that time.”
Alua Arthur, a leading death doula, founder of Going with Grace, and author of the New York Times bestseller Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End, is perhaps the most prominent practitioner working to shift how Americans relate to mortality. “When I’m thinking about my death, I’m thinking about my life very clearly,” she told NPR. “What I value, who I care about, how I’m spending my time. And all these things allow us to reach the end of our lives gracefully, so that we can die without the fear and the concerns and the worries that many people carry.”
“When folks are grappling with the choices that they’ve made, my role is to be there with them,” she says. “Sometimes the greatest gift that we can offer is grace. … Part of the reason why I named the business ‘Going with Grace’ is because of the grace that needs to be present at the end of life, for people to be able to let go of it.”
The work starts long before the end
This is what makes death doula training so unexpectedly well-suited to someone like Zhao — a filmmaker who has spent years telling stories that require sustained, close contact with grief. Hamnet demanded that she inhabit a mother’s devastation, a father’s guilt, and the silence that follows a child’s death. 2020’s Oscar-winning Nomadland explored the grief of aging and impermanence. Art and life, it turns out, were posing the same question at once.
Practitioners in this field are quick to note that end-of-life work is not solely, or even primarily, about death. It is about the quality of whatever days remain. A doula may begin working with someone months before a terminal diagnosis, helping that person clarify what a meaningful life looks like, what legacy they want to leave, and what remains unresolved. INELDA describes the role as one that ideally begins early in the dying process — not at the final hour, but in the slower, more honest work of reconciling how someone is living with how they want to die. For Zhao, the impulse to train and the impulse to finally live without the weight of unexamined fear are very much the same impulse.
Why death became something to avoid
Zhao traces the dread so many people carry — and the shame layered beneath it — to a cultural shift that accelerated across the 20th century. “In the modern world, when death is no longer seen as a natural part of life — because now, it’s about staying alive as long as we can — there’s almost shame around death,” she told The New York Times. End-of-life practitioners have been making the same observation for years: as medicine grew more powerful, dying moved from the home to the hospital, stripped of ritual and community. Families arrived at the bedside underprepared, and silence filled the space that ceremony once occupied.
For Zhao, the fear is not abstract. “I haven’t been able to love with my heart open because I’m so scared of losing love, which is a form of death,” she said. Training as a doula, she says, was born out of necessity, not intellectual curiosity. “You can’t run from this feeling. Your body is changing, and you can feel death. And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It shouldn’t be this terrifying that I can’t even live.”
She is not alone. Since INELDA’s founding in 2015, the organization has trained 8,000 end-of-life doulas worldwide as of early 2025. The National End-of-Life Doula Alliance grew from roughly 260 members in 2019 to nearly 1,600 by 2024. The appetite for this work — and for the conversations it demands — is clearly not niche.
Arthur, for her part, resists any impulse to treat death as a romantic leveler. “I am exasperated that people believe death is the great equalizer,” she wrote. “Yes, we all die, but we die of different causes at different rates in different ways. There is nothing equal about death, except that we all do it. Death and dying are culturally constructed processes that reflect social power dynamics — they are unequal.”
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