The Team

The Team of Doulas have all completed “Living Well Dying Well - End Of Life Doula Foundation Training”

The team understand the holistic nature of care that is needed at this potent time, which includes practical, emotional, and spiritual support. We feel honoured to be able to deliver this care, alongside health professionals. We celebrate human differences and respect diversity of culture, spiritual beliefs, race, gender and disabilities.

Sarah

Sarah Parker is the founder and director of Dying with Grace CIC. Sarah works as a death doula, grief tender and craniosacral practitioner. She is passionate about offering spaces in the community to approach the subject of death and dying, as well as creating spaces to honour our dead and tend to our grief. Sarah holds a flame in her heart to change the culture around death and dying, grief and loss, where it is no longer considered a taboo, but where people can speak and express openly in their communities, and feel safe to do so.

Sarah’s Story

Sarah works as a death doula, grief tender and craniosacral practitioner. She is passionate about offering spaces in the community to approach the subject of death and dying, as well as creating spaces to honour our dead and tend to our grief. She holds a flame in her heart to change the culture around death and dying, grief and loss, where it is no longer considered a taboo but where people can speak and express openly, in their communities, and feel safe to do so.

  • I went on to study Medicine in London and completed my medical degree, but after a year as a junior doctor I left my job. I was disillusioned and felt unable to authentically connect with people the way I wanted to, within the medical system. I went on to train and practice as a craniosacral therapist, which developed and deepened my skills, particularly in nonverbal communication, deep listening and holding a safe space for people to rest in to.

    A few decades later, I underwent a huge initiation with the death and dying of my father. He endured intolerable pain with pancreatic cancer. As I sat alongside him in his dying, my capacity and resilience to not turn away from suffering but to stay present, open-hearted and connected became clear. My father meant the world to me, and I knew that if I could stay in connection with that degree of pain and suffering, with the person I loved so much, then my place was with those who are in their dying. I had become an “Amicus Mortis – a friend in death.”

    With a sense of gratitude, I can now see that the threads of my life have come together, and the moment under the tree in Ghana has been realised. I am living that deep and meaningful life that I yearned for. As I weave these threads together into my work with death and dying, I bring with me my medical knowledge, as well as deep compassion and steady ground.

    I live in Dartington, Devon with my daughter, partner and dog. I love to walk and swim in wild nature, connecting to these lands and seas, and to spend time with my family and friends.

Ruth

Ruth Dillon is based in Exmouth. She is the co-founder of Daisy Chains Cancer Support group in Exmouth. She is a listener volunteer with Samaritans, and a part time Chaplain.

Ruth’s Story

I have been a friend to many people who have journeyed through the veil of death, and it is always a privilege, for it is a place of healing where the spiritual and physical meet, where a sacred place emerges, and the tangible presence of Love can be witnessed and felt.

  • At certain points in my life, I have paused and asked the question, “What is my life’s purpose, and what can I contribute to bring wholeness to others” ? 

    As a registered nurse for 26 years and a single mother, my love and care revolved around my daughters and my patients, yet I was mindful of the suffering and pain life’s experiences can bring.  During this period, I worked as a nurse in Zambia, just as the AIDS crisis was emerging. I was all too aware of the pain and fragility of life, and African spirituality of being a friend to those in need, became deep rooted within me. 

    While at this juncture in my life, I changed careers and trained for full time ministry in the United Reformed Church. I then worked in deprived areas of Liverpool and Manchester, ending my full time ministry in Hampshire.  

    Within my Christian ministry, I always pondered on my original question, about bringing wholeness to people, that is a sense of Shalom:

    A peace that is beyond human understanding,

    A peace that heals,

    A peace that restores us to our true selves,

    A peace that enables us to be whole, through Love.

    — Numbers 6:24-26

    Death is part of our human journey and being a Doula with Dying with Grace enables me to walk with people, surround them with Love and blessing, and be in a holy place, that transforms fear to gentleness, emptiness to appreciation and tears to gratitude... until they are at peace.

    I see my role as being a loving ‘friend in death’, to enable and support their family and friends to feel at ease, and to provide a safe space to cry and to share memories - this is my prime concern and calling. 

    I am a widow, with two daughters and two grandchildren who live in East Devon.

    To read my reflections on death and dying visit my blog.

Anne

Anne Overzee lives with her Dutch partner on the edge of Dartmoor, a place she loves. As well as being a death doula Anne offers workshops and retreats in the UK and in Italy , and small online offerings providing heart spaces for connection and community through shared contemplative practice.

Anne’s Story

When I was living in India, I had several experiences that now seem relevant to being an end-of-life doula. Looking back, they all seem like initiations, opportunities to connect with our sacred nature and the mystery of our interconnectedness.

  • At one point when in a South Indian hospital with meningitis in my mid-twenties I became acutely aware that I could be dying. I knew then what it is like to feel ill, vulnerable, and close to death. Afterwards I learned that unknown to me, I had been held in a circle of love by people most of whom I didn’t even know.

    In Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta, I witnessed how the Sisters’ loving care for people brought in off the streets seemed to be creating a warm glow shining in that room of suffering, creating an atmosphere of benediction and peace.

    Since that time I have had an intention to learn how to co-create a transformative field of loving presence in which we can birth each other into the mystery of our deepest nature through the thresholds of life, including our dying.

    Following on from doing research in India and the U.K. and working in the field of Religious Studies, I trained and practised for many years as a Core Process psychotherapist. This work of accompanying others for a while as best I could was an amazing gift involving, as it does, a connecting and sharing with others often at threshold moments in their lives. Through this work I have learned and continue to learn how to co-create a transformative field of open-hearted presence to be with our experience, however that is. Such a context can, I have found, support a natural movement towards our intrinsic wholeness which you could say is our deathright as well as birthright.

    I bring this experience to my doula work, offering to be with someone on the threshold of dying; to be a companion, accompanying them for their potentially healing last stage of life.

The Directors

  • Fiona Shaw

    DIRECTOR

    I trained as a nurse, midwife and therapist. I am also an initiated medicine woman and hold healing ceremonies, with a particular interest in rites of passage and grief work. I carry an earth-based tradition and am resourced and nourished by nature in all her forms.

    I have always worked between the veils with birth and death and since the death of my 19 year old son in 2018, feel the increasing importance of bringing death and dying back into our language and our lives.

  • Daverick Leggett

    DIRECTOR

    I have been a teacher for most of my adult life, initially of children and then, for the last thirty years, a teacher of Qigong and Chinese medicine. I have written two books about Chinese medicine nutrition.

    Outside of work, my core passions are growing food, stewarding land and creating community. I walk between continual grief for the planet and deep wonder at its beauty, a journey I have celebrated in two volumes of poetry.

  • Kim Babiker

    DIRECTOR

    MBBS Bsc MRCGP Dip IBLM/BSLM

    I live in Totnes, Devon and work as a GP in a medical practice in Cornwall. I have a special interest and Diploma in Lifestyle Medicine. Aside from Medicine I am a mother of three children, I like to be in the Wild, swim wild, and to forage, bake bread, ferment foods and create ceramics.