Hi, I'm Summer. I'm an end-of-life doula living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina
My path here has been shaped by plants and goodbyes. I've been steeped in plant medicine for over a decade, with formal herbal study beginning at the Self-Heal School of Herbal Studies in San Diego in 2016. Not long after, in 2017, my Mom, my Dad, and my beloved father-in-law all died within ten weeks of each other. That grief cracked me open in ways I'm still tending to, and it's a big part of what brought me, eventually, to this work.
I began exploring home funeral education in late 2022 through volunteer work with the Home Funeral Alliance, and began serving as a direct care volunteer with Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living and Dying in Swannanoa, NC. I completed my doula training soon after, earning End-of-Life Doula and After Death Care Educator proficiency badges through the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance and graduating from the International Doula Life Movement program. This past year brought a new piece: certification as a funeral celebrant, which feels like a natural step in learning how to serve families well.
I also serve as a volunteer with the Trauma Intervention Program, offering emotional first aid and practical support to survivors in the immediate aftermath of tragic events. I see this as a path of lifelong learning: continually listening, growing, and finding new ways to serve.
I offer bedside vigil for the dying and relief for their weary caretakers. I sit with people in uncertainty, in the last stretch of a lifetime, making space for hard questions, deep sadness, and all the unexpected joy that can still unfold. I offer this support for families who want to bring more presence, meaning, and agency to the dying process.
I believe we already know how to do this. The capacity to show up for each other at the end of life lives in all of us, it’s the remembering that's tricky. That's what I'm here for.
If you're looking for someone to walk alongside you or someone you love, I'm glad you found your way here.
Welcome.
There’s a little black train a-coming, fix all your business right,
There's a little black train a-comin, and it could be here tonight.
There’s something about that old folk song, which originated among enslaved people of the Appalachian South and so plainly states the truth that death is coming for us all, that resonates deep within me.
The way it speaks to the inevitability of death and the uncertainty of how much time we have left to make right anything we’ve made wrong. And a not so gentle reminder in another verse that “you better get your house in order, for you must surely die”.
I suppose the idea of a little black train creeping behind us at all times is a bit dark, but I’ve obviously never been afraid to connect with that low hum. For me, full awareness that it might roll around the bend at any moment is a liberation. It compels me to live in integrity and be freely and unabashedly myself, with the added reminder that my deeds on this earthly realm will be all that’s left behind of me.
When considering what name I’d use for my personal death doula practice this song that spoke so clearly to me often came to mind as one that felt both regionally and personally reverent, and I have an ancestral connection to trains, quite literally.
On New Years Day, 1887, my 2nd great grandfather and train conductor James Michael Flanagan was killed at 27 years old in a railway accident, leaving behind a wife and small child, my great grandfather.
James never had the chance to set his house in order.
The Little Black Train doesn't demand that you, or I, acknowledge it. But choosing to can change how we live, and how we experience our last days here.
Ready to Connect?
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