According to a 2023 Pew Research Center report, 28% of American adults now identify as religiously unaffiliated — the largest share ever recorded in U.S. history. And nearly all of them will face the same brutal problem: when someone they love is dying, or when they sit with their own mortality, there is no script waiting for them.
That absence is not a small thing. In my years of research into end-of-life care, the pattern I kept seeing was not grief itself — it was the grief about grief. The feeling that without faith, you have no language, no ritual, no permission structure for any of this. That is the myth I want to dismantle today, because the truth is more interesting and more hopeful than most people realize.
The Moment the Old Script Runs Out
Take someone like Marcus, 54, a software engineer in Portland who had called himself a “hard atheist” since his early twenties. When his wife received a stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he told me he felt like he was standing in a room where everyone else had been handed a map. His wife’s family leaned on their church. Her pastor showed up within hours. Marcus sat in a hospital chair and felt, in his own words, “competent at literally everything except this.”
A colleague pointed him toward INELDA, the International End of Life Doula Association. Within a week, he had his first session with a certified death doula named Priya. “She didn’t try to make it spiritual,” he said. “She just sat with it. She helped me figure out what I actually believed about what was happening.” Marcus described the first session as the first time he had cried about his wife’s diagnosis without feeling like he was disintegrating.
That is the entry point for a growing professional field that most Americans, religious or not, have never heard of.
Death Doulas: Professional Support Without a Theological Agenda
Death doulas (also called end-of-life doulas or death midwives) are trained, non-medical guides who support dying people and their families through the process of death. They are not hospice nurses. They are not therapists. They occupy a specific lane: helping people find meaning, create ritual, and face what is coming with intention rather than panic.
INELDA, founded in 2015, now certifies practitioners across all 50 states. A 2022 study published in Omega: Journal of Death and Dying found that families who worked with end-of-life doulas reported significantly lower caregiver burden scores and higher ratings of “meaningful death experience” compared to standard hospice-only care. The effect held regardless of the family’s religious affiliation.
Have you ever actually thought about what happens to your body after you die — not spiritually, but physically — and whether that matters to you? Most people haven’t. Death doulas make space for exactly that conversation, without directing it toward any particular answer.
Did You Know: The death doula field has grown by an estimated 400% since 2016, according to INELDA’s own membership tracking. Certification programs now exist through universities, hospice organizations, and independent professional bodies — and the majority of certified practitioners report that their clients skew secular or spiritually unaffiliated.
The Secular Funeral: It Already Exists, and It’s Better Than You Think
Here is something that surprises almost everyone: secular funeral celebrants have been practicing in Australia and the UK since the 1990s, and the United States is about a decade behind in catching up. A celebrant designs and leads a ceremony that reflects the actual person who died, with no theological framework required unless the family wants one.
A 2022 survey by the Funeral and Memorial Information Council found that 72% of Americans now prefer personalized memorial services over traditional religious ones. Seventy-two percent. And yet the default in most American funeral homes is still a religious officiant, because that is what people reach for when they haven’t planned ahead.
What would a service look like that was built entirely around who you are? Not the afterlife you may or may not believe in, but the specific life you actually lived?
The National Association of Celebrants and Funerals (NACF) and Celebrant Foundation & Institute both maintain directories of trained secular celebrants in the United States. Many offer free initial consultations. The ceremony can incorporate music, readings, storytelling, nature, silence — whatever carries meaning for the person being honored.
Warning: If death anxiety is interfering with your daily functioning — sleep disruption, panic attacks, avoidance of medical appointments — that is not a journaling problem and not something a death doula alone can address. Seek a licensed therapist who specializes in existential concerns or health anxiety. The practices in this article are supplements to professional mental health care, not substitutes for it.
Legacy Letters: The Secular Practice Replacing Last Rites
Forget everything you think you know about “last words.” Legacy letters (sometimes called ethical wills) are living documents that non-religious Americans are using to pass on values, memories, and meaning without a theological frame.
Do you know what you actually believe about how to live? Most people have never written it down. A legacy letter is one place to start.
The practice is not new — ethical wills have existed in Jewish tradition for centuries — but the secular adaptation is gaining ground fast. A 2021 survey by The Conversation Project found that 92% of Americans said talking about end-of-life wishes was important, but only 32% had actually done it. Legacy letters close that gap in a personal, non-bureaucratic way.
Here is a mindfulness-based approach to starting one:
Step 1: Find 12 minutes of silence. Not quiet — actual silence, away from your phone.
Step 2: Write a single name at the top of a blank page. Someone you love. Someone you would want to understand you after you are gone.
Step 3: Complete this sentence without editing yourself: “The thing I most want you to know about how I tried to live is…”
Step 4: Keep writing until the 12 minutes end. Do not read it back yet. Close the document.
The science here is actually fascinating. A 2020 study in Psychological Science found that expressive writing about values reduced cortisol (your body’s primary stress hormone) levels and improved self-reported clarity around personal priorities. The act of articulating what matters to you is itself a physiological intervention.
Pro Tip: You do not need to finish a legacy letter in one sitting. Secular grief researchers recommend writing in short timed bursts — 10 to 15 minutes — rather than trying to capture everything at once. The act of starting is the intervention. Momentum builds later.
You Are Not Alone in This
Here is what I want you to hear clearly: the absence of religion does not mean the absence of ritual, meaning, or support. It means you are in charge of building those things yourself, and there are trained professionals now whose entire job is to help you do exactly that.
Marcus’s wife died fourteen months after her diagnosis. He told me that the work he did with Priya, and the ceremony the family held with a secular celebrant, were the most honest experiences of his life. “We didn’t pretend,” he said. “We just told the truth about who she was.”
That kind of truth-telling is available to you too.
Your Next 3 Steps
Step 1: Go to INELDA.org tonight and use the directory to search for a certified death doula in your ZIP code. You do not need to be in a crisis to reach out — many doulas offer free 20-minute consultations, and a single conversation can reframe how you think about this entirely. Bookmark one name before you close the browser.
Step 2: Set a 12-minute timer before bed tonight and write the legacy letter opening described above. Write one name. Finish one sentence. Save the document. The point is not a finished product — the point is that you have now started, and starting changes the psychological relationship you have with this material.
Step 3: Go to CaringInfo.org right now and download your state’s free advance directive form. Open it. Find the one field you have been quietly avoiding — the one that makes you close the tab. Read just that section tonight. You do not have to fill it in yet. Just read it. That moment of honest contact is where the real work begins.
