I Was Clinically Dead for 2 Minutes. Then I Became a Death Doula.

Elayne Sallemi calls death itself her guardian angel.

She grew up in a tight-knit community where death, birth, and illness were handled communally, not clinically. Watching her grandmother decline in an aging center — cared for by people who were kind, but not family — she decided someone needed to be the one who shows up. Not because it's a job. Because it's love.

Her Own Brushes With Death

A car accident left her clinically dead for over two minutes as a child. Since then: multiple cancer diagnoses, and a plane that lost power mid-flight after a lightning strike. Rather than fearing death after all of that, Elayne has come to personify it as "she" — an almost guardian-like presence she says has walked alongside her whole life.

What Actually Helps Someone Who Is Dying or Grieving

"Don't do nothing" matters more than saying the perfect thing, in her experience — showing up beats finding the right words. So does saying a name out loud. And death, she's clear, doesn't end a relationship. It just changes it.

Ancestors in the Everyday

She tells a personal story about her grandfather, and the small, daily ways ancestors stay present rather than becoming a single fixed memory — a theme that runs through her writing on Italian ancestor veneration as well.

From Survivor to Death Doula

Her path ran through emergency medicine first — years as an EMT and paramedic — before moving fully into death doula work. It's not the only way in (Marissa Overcash's path ran through estate law, Victoria Holmes's through birth work), but crisis and clinical experience is a common on-ramp into the field. She now teaches what she knows about working with plants at the deathbed in her course, Plants at the Deathbed, and writes for Otherside Life on the rest of it.