Profiles in presence: HELENA HINDEN

Interview with Helena Hinden in her own words:

You are in your “third third” of life, as they say, and have recently moved into a retirement community. What happens next?  If you are Helena Hinden, you become an end-of-life doula! Helena relates, “Three years ago I decided to sell my house which was getting too big and too much work and bought a retirement cottage in the north of Sydney, and I needed something to DO. I’m not exactly sure how I found The Peaceful Presence Project but I went online and started looking around and found the course. I took to it like a duck to water, feeling THIS is what I need to do!”

Helena lives in New South Wales, Australia (population 8.5 million) and found The Peaceful Presence Project through an online training platform called Learning Cloud, a global leader in cloud-based vocational and educational training. TPPP has offered a self-paced, eight module Professional End-of-Life Doula Training available through Learning Cloud for the past three years. Like Helena, residents of Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia can take this training and apply the doula service lessons in their respective communities.

During her working years, Helena studied for an advanced diploma in counseling which led to an internship and then a job at The Quest for Life Foundation. This organization provides workshops and self-help programs to assist people in overcoming and healing from a variety of life traumas including the death of a loved one. Helena found that the skillset she had used during her working years was further enhanced by the doula model of care, and soon she had found her retirement calling.

“I signed up with an organization called Hammond Care and they sent me into a nursing home as a social visitor. My first client was a woman with very advanced motor-neuron disease; she couldn’t talk anymore so we communicated with a little white board. Within six weeks she could no longer hold a pen, so I sat with her, massaged her hands . . .” and Helena found ways to communicate non-verbally. “I also signed up with VAD–Voluntary Assisted Dying–when this became legal in October 2023. I worked with a man who chose to do this, and we became quite close in the end. He asked me to write his life story for his family. I saw him twice a week and was with him when he died.”

She has worked with seriously ill people who are young and old. One client was a boy with Cockayne Syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder: “his name was Daniel, and he was 19 years old but had the body of a three year old. He was a wonderful, wonderful soul. He couldn’t walk anymore when I met him. I was with him for about nine months, until he died. We were going to take him to the hospice in the morning, and he slipped away in the night, and died at home. His mom had died two years earlier of breast cancer so it meant a lot to his dad, the help with Daniel. . .  The hospice where Daniel used to go for respite is AYAH: Adolescent and Young Adult Hospice; they care for seriously ill teens to young adults ages 15 to about 35 . I am now one of their very regular volunteers.” Helena so beautifully shows that doula care comes in  many forms, with meaningful service to a wide range of people.

Her willingness to move toward and not away from people in their sorrow comes from a deeply personal place, dating back to the sudden death of a nephew, “Sevi”, who came to live with Helena when he and her children were in their teens. After only two months into the school year, three boys died in a car accident, Sevi among them, and the whole school community was impacted. Helena thought, “there must be something more for me than just being a howling mom; how can I help this problem?” This launched her career in counseling and grief work, followed in retirement by her varied and rich experiences as an end-of-life doula. 

In recent years, Helena has learned and utilized a meditative art form of drawing structured patterns, for self care. Calling hers a “Tao scribble”, Helena has a ritual of making one after a client dies. Each piece takes about five days. “This allows me to let go, to move it out of me. The meditation is all tied in with the process.” And a beautiful piece of art is another outcome!

To sum up her feelings about The Peaceful Presence Project’s training and her new “career” as a doula, Helena says, “I want to say how grateful I am for everything I was able to learn, which I can use literally on a daily basis. . . the listening skills, being more aware, being present, just being! It’s been very very valuable for me personally and I’m always glad when I can give back.”  And is she ever!  Across the many miles, we remain deeply grateful and continually inspired by all that Helena brings—as an end-of-life doula and as a wise, generous human being.

Helena’s TAO SCRIBBLES: