Stories at the Threshold: Jane K. Callahan and A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End

Stories at the Threshold: Voices on Death, Dying, and Living Fully

The Emberlight Author Series

Every month, we’ll be featuring a new author writing about the intersection of love, presence, community, consciousness, life and death. Join us for an in depth conversation between hospice physician and Emberlight founder, Aditi Sethi, and these living legends on death on dying.

What does it take to have a good death? And what might preparing for one reveal about how we are living right now?

Emberlight continues our monthly Author Series with a conversation we have long wanted to hold: an evening with Jane K. Callahan, end-of-life doula, journalist, and author of A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End, published by Chicago Review Press.

RSVP HERE

What to Expect

Join Emberlight Executive Director Aditi Sethi as we welcome Jane into conversation about her book, her years accompanying the dying, and the quiet wisdom that lives at the threshold between life and death.

In our hour together on zoom, we will enjoy a reading from A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End, a guided conversation with Jane and Aditi, and an open Q&A. While we warmly encourage you to attend live so you can bring your own questions, you are also welcome to submit questions in advance if you cannot join us in real time.

The series will be recorded and made available afterward for anyone who cannot attend live.

About the Book

A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End is many things at once: a memoir, a practicum, and an invitation. Jane weaves together patient stories, deeply personal chapters from her own life, and practical guidance for anyone thinking about how to move through the end of life with more clarity, more intention, and less fear.

Each chapter takes up a different dimension of dying: grief, caregiving, patient advocacy, the particular texture of dying within the American healthcare system, and the emerging community-centered models that are slowly, quietly changing what is possible. The book covers the logistical and the sensory, the philosophical and the entirely concrete. And it does so with the sharp, warm, sometimes funny voice of someone who has sat with around a hundred people as they died, and paid close attention to all of it.

Jane's own origin story runs through the book as well. In 2009, at 27, she received a call that her mother was dying, and she was wildly unprepared. That experience set the course of her life. Years later, she wrote the book she wished had existed then.

You can purchase a copy of A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End  online here. We encourage you to read ahead and come with questions.

About Jane K. Callahan

Jane K. Callahan has been practicing as an end-of-life doula since 2018. She completed her training with the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), holds a professional certificate from the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine, and is a certified member of the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance. She has worked with four hospices across two states, sits on the Board of Directors for the Funeral Consumers Alliance North Carolina, and hosts community educational sessions throughout the Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh area.

Jane is also the author of The Terminal, a Substack newsletter for end-of-life and death care professionals, where she brings her background in journalism to the work of keeping the field informed, connected, and honest. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Why This Conversation, and Why Now

At Emberlight, we hold that death is not a problem to be solved. It is a passage to be met, with presence and with as much preparation as we can offer. Jane's book asks us to do just that: not to wait for a diagnosis or a crisis, but to begin now, while there is still time to make meaning.

Her voice carries something rare. It does not pretend the work is easy. It does not look away from grief, from the failures of our healthcare system, from the places where love runs up against its limits. And yet it remains grounded in something generous: the conviction that how we accompany one another through dying shapes how we know ourselves in living.

This is not a conversation for people who are dying. It is a conversation for all of us.

100% of proceeds donated go to support the mission and vision of Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living and Dying.

This event is open to all, with a suggested donation. No one is turned away for lack of funds, and we welcome everyone who feels called to be part of this circle.

RSVP HERE