My Journey to Becoming an End-of-Life Companion: The Full Series

A few years ago, I spent eight months training to become a certified end-of-life companion (Sterbebegleiter) at a hospice in Berlin. Along the way, I wrote down what I was learning, not just about death and dying, but about grief, fear, presence, and myself. This series is that journey, in fifteen parts.

Some parts are personal stories. Others share what I learned from doctors, nurses, and grief counselors along the way. Together, they're the closest thing I have to a real answer to the question people ask me most often: what actually happens in a training like this?

Part 1: Hospice Care –My first day of training, and the concept of "total pain": the idea that suffering at the end of life is never just physical.

Part 2: A Hole in My Heart – On expectations, support systems, and a simple drawing exercise about what volunteering really means.

Part 3: Communication – What actually gets said when words run out, and why "just sitting with it" might be the most important skill of all.

Part 4: My Relationship with Death – A full-immersion weekend confronting my own fear of dying, and finding a personal source of strength.

Part 5: Grief – Why grief resists every model we try to fit it into, and why it's become so invisible in modern life.

Part 6: The Visit – My first home visit, and how quickly old memories can surface when you least expect them.

Part 7: Pain – What a palliative care doctor taught us about managing pain, and the difficult truth about palliative sedation.

Part 8: Emotions and the Family System – Why this work is ultimately more about you than about the person you're accompanying.

Part 9: The Process of Dying – What happens biologically when someone dies, and why understanding it can be deeply reassuring.

Part 10: Ethics – The ethical dilemmas hospice teams face daily, and why there's rarely a clean right answer.

Part 11: Rituals – From paper stars to daily traditions, why rituals matter more than we think.

Part 12: The Extraordinary – On the moments that defy logic, and a painting that tried to capture one of them.

Part 13: Mr. K – An honest account of my first client: the connection I hoped for, and the one I didn't manage to make.

Part 14: A Day at the Hospice – Shadowing a full day of hospice care, and a stuffed monkey I'll never forget.

Part 15: The End – What eight months taught me, and the one thing I think matters most in the end.

If any part of this speaks to you, whether you're facing your own fear of death, supporting someone who's grieving, or considering this kind of work yourself, I'd love for you to read on on our blog.

You can start reading the first part of the series HERE.