Remembering Amanda Lin Carr
On this photo posted to Amanda’s Facebook page on October 19, 2018, she wrote, “This picture is from a location called Elephant Rock in Australia - taken 3 years ago after we did a shamanic ritual there during my Death Doula training/self-exploration. A reminder of the ability to feel grounded, rooted and completely free, powerful and powerless simultaneously.”
Amanda Lin Carr described herself on her Facebook page as a “traveller, musician, nurse, friend, auntie, a death doula and educator, and an aspiring unicorn.” She was also my friend. Amanda died suddenly at the age of 41 on December 10th, 2019.
In 2015, Amanda began her work as a death doula, founding Changing the Face of Dying. As I remember her, I’d like to share a piece of communication from Amanda. She’d wanted to share ideas and was interested in my thoughts as a physician. I’ve edited the following for length and clarity. Amanda wrote,
“Delivering the full weight and breath of devastating information is vital and kind to patients and families. Without adequate information about the real truth of a diagnosis and treatment plan, a patient cannot confront their grief, process their choices, and choose what is right for them. It may not seem hopeful or gentle or kind, but it is right and respectful and ethical—the higher authorities of practice we all are bound to.
Someday we will help all our practitioners understand that we do not rob patients of hope when we give them the truth they deserve. We simply give them respect and honor and the ability and opportunity to confront their future with as much information as possible. We allow them to move forward into treatment—curative or palliative—or into death, each course brave and beautiful and true for the one who chooses it.”
She ended the communication by saying, “Thank you for believing in my work and for taking such good care of your own living and dying.”
On September 23, 2019, just over a month before her untimely death, Amanda wrote a blog post on her company’s website. In it, she writes, “I may be a woman that works with death all the time, but let me tell you: all the practice in the world doesn’t make it easy when it’s your friends that are dying, when the people that you are asking to let go are ‘your people.’
The post ends like this:
“Love
becomes grief
becomes breath.
I inhale deeply and exhale slowly, and a mighty chorus roars up from my heart and out through my throat when I let it, the grief-love turned to the breath of all those whom I have had the privilege of loving and letting go. I forget, too often, the power of all of them behind me and the beauty of that legacy of love I am honored to carry and share with the world. I forget it when I need it the most, when I want to let the pain of grief pull me down into the depths of that ocean where there is no breath. When I finally do remember, inhale, exhale, their wings lift me back up.
They are not gone when I breathe their love back into the world, when I grieve-love with each breath. Their form is different, but they are never gone, not while those that love them keep breathing.”
Let us honor Amanda’s legacy by engaging in the work she believed so deeply in by considering our own end-of-life plans and communicating them to our loved ones.