Reimagine Virtual Candlelight Vigil with Alua Arthur
Reimagine has been hosting candlelight vigils since March 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to break down taboos and hold space for all that we've lost. This gathering features Alua Arthur: death doula, recovering lawyer, and author of Briefly Perfectly Human, a deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling and authentic lives. Our other featured guest is Luana Morales, a birth and bereavement doula, ancestral healing arts practitioner, and Reimagine community collaborator.
Alua Arthur
Alua Arthur is the most visible and active death doula working in America today. She is a recovering attorney and the founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. A frequent guest on TV and radio, Arthur has been featured on CBS’s The Doctors and in Disney’s Limitless docu-series with Chris Hemsworth, as well as in national print media outlets, such as Vogue, InStyle, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. International newspaper features on Arthur include Brazil’s Estadão and Norway’s Årets Avis. She has appeared on dozens of podcasts, and a Refinery29 video feature on Arthur and her work received ten million views across social platforms. In non-pandemic times, she travels the country and world as a keynote speaker, addressing audiences of several hundred to several thousand people at medical and end-of-life conferences, universities, seminaries, senior citizens’ communities, and more.
Her debut memoir, Briefly Perfectly Human, focuses mostly on relationships with her dying clients—a dozen or so of them in all—and their profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death's periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d'état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life's calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life's painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.
Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real about the End, Alua Arthur (Mariner Books, 2024)
Luana Morales
Luana Morales is a birth and bereavement doula, death midwife, circle keeper, officiant, reiki master teacher, and herbal apprentice devoted to reclaiming our birth, death, and Afro-Indigenous healing practices. She creates containers that support reflection, experimentation, healing, learning, collaboration and joy for our individual and collective liberation be it through an individual sessions, group facilitation, workshops, or retreats. Prior to her current work as a full time healing arts practitioner and facilitator, she dedicated 18 years to working in human services with individuals in a variety of settings including residential long term treatment, outpatient, and supportive housing with individuals and families struggling with mental health issues, trauma, addiction, chronic health conditions, and homelessness. She also dedicated 11 years to community based parenting education supporting families affected by substance abuse, mental illness, and trauma. In 2017 she founded Seeds of Our Ancestors, a mobile interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and multi lineage healing squad. She has previously hosted holiday gatherings for grief support to the Reimagine community.
https://www.handsofgaiareiki.com/
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together in the hopes of healing ourselves and the world. We specifically support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and – at our own pace – actively channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
