“Every time I tell people what I study, I get so many different responses,” said Jenna Yeam T’25. “Some people are really taken aback. Some people look at me really weird.”
When Yeam first stepped onto Duke’s campus her freshman year, she never would have imagined that she would graduate planning to become an end-of-life doula — a non-medical professional who provides support, companionship, and guidance to people facing a terminal illness or imminent death.
“I would have laughed,” she said. “I was applying to marketing internships and things along those lines.”
Originally from San Clemente, California, Yeam graduated from high school in 2020. Not wanting to begin college in the middle of the COVID pandemic, she decided to take a gap year. She spent two months backpacking and working as a tour guide at a butterfly conservatory in Costa Rica.
“I’ve never felt more alone and never felt more community with strangers,” she said. “I met awesome people along the way with very different life philosophies, so that definitely expanded how I conceptualize my own ‘good life.’”
Yeam’s experiences abroad — and countless hours listening to psychology podcasts — activated a deep interest in how the human mind works. She entered Duke planning to major in psychology.
In typical first-year fashion, Yeam took ECON 101 and tried out different clubs. She had waffled between joining FOCUS clusters on neuroscience and ethics, but she ultimately chose ethics, “because I just didn’t know how to conceptualize ethics. Truthfully, I didn’t know what ethics was.”
She soon found out that ethics entails asking questions. In “Globalization and Corporate Citizenship,” one of her FOCUS cluster courses, professor Dirk Philipsen asked his students to challenge everything — authority, institutional structures, and even entire value systems.
“He shifted how I understood the way that the world works and what living well in America looks like today — especially the narratives we’re fed about being a student and chasing success, and if that actually aligns with what it means to live well,” Yeam said.
Her sophomore year, Yeam was a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Hindsight. While working on a project on financial resiliency in Latin America, she learned about a developing qualitative research project focusing on end-of-life doulas.
“When you talk about dying well, it’s really just about living well at the end of life. It’s about what people prioritize when they start to confront their mortality and reflect on life’s fragility.”
— Jenna Yeam T’25
End-of-life doulas work with dying individuals and their loved ones to provide holistic care in conjunction with other death care providers such as hospice or medical professionals. This can entail providing emotional support, offering informational resources, or helping to create an end-of-life plan. Most importantly, they create opportunities for people to speak openly about death and dying.
After independently interviewing 67 local end-of-life doulas and reviewing transcripts, Yeam identified common themes in the doulas’ descriptions of what it means to “die well.”
“When you talk about dying well, it’s really just about living well at the end of life,” she explained. “It’s about what people prioritize when they start to confront their mortality and reflect on life’s fragility.”
End-of-life doulas can facilitate hard conversations about death that make it easier for the dying person to identify what they want — which Yeam said is essential for creating an end-of-life plan.
“Everyone has their own definition of a dignified ending because everyone has different values,” she said. “A dignified ending is an ending that the dying person wants…centered around their agency and ability to have ownership over the process.”
Through the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Yeam found an opportunity to take what she learned from her research on end-of-life doulas and put it into practice. She had stayed in touch with Dirk Philipsen after taking his class, and he introduced her to the Transformative Systems Project, a student group focused on reimagining a more just society that promotes well-being. During her sophomore year, this group formed a student-led research and action lab at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Regenerative Futures Lab (rLab).
Yeam saw a way to apply her research to the theme chosen by rLab at the beginning of her senior year — dignity. She wanted to get her peers thinking about what a dignified ending looks like. So she, along with rLab’s Dying with Dignity research team, decided to host a death café.
Part of a growing death positive movement, death cafés create a space for people to come together and discuss complicated feelings and thoughts about death and dying. Typically, death cafés are geared towards the elderly or people with terminal illnesses.
“But I wanted to bring young people into it,” Yeam said, noting that death and loss are topics that are tough for everyone — including Gen Z.
The Dying with Dignity research team convened the first-ever on-campus death café at Duke University in the fall of 2024. In a packed classroom, students balanced plates of cookies and snacks on their laps while sharing their thoughts on death, loss, and dignity. While all of the groups responded to the same prompts, no two discussions were the same. Topics ranged from religious and cultural traditions to the idea of legacy and its meaning.
“I think the most meaningful part of this death café was just holding space and being able to create a cozy environment where students can come together and just talk about these big, high-level questions,” Yeam said.
Yeam’s research and activism culminated in a senior thesis on the evolving landscape of death in contemporary America. Advised by Dr. Anne Allison in cultural anthropology, her thesis builds on her interviews with death doulas, examining their position in a rapidly evolving end-of-life market.
After graduating in May, she plans to complete her doula training through courses and peer-to-peer learning. And afterwards, she plans to travel as an end-of-life doula, attend death cafés, and bring more young people into the Death Positive Movement.
Beyond academics and beyond her career path, Yeam’s focus on end-of-life doulaing has had a profound and positive effect on how she approaches life.
“I think my research around dying well has been one of the most personally nourishing and inspiring projects I’ve ever undertaken, because the people that I have met along the way are some of the most compassionate humans I’ve ever met,” she said. “It has restored a lot of my faith in humanity.”
She cautions that death doesn’t cease to be a difficult topic, no matter how much we talk about it.
“Talking about endings is obviously so heavy, because losing loved ones is hard,” she said, “and that’s also life, because life intrinsically has suffering.”
But “death and dying isn’t all tears and rain,” she said. “It shows a lot of the beauty in humanity, too. It shows a lot of beauty that comes from really hard life transitions.”
Those transitions could be anything from graduating from college, hitting a big birthday milestone, or going through menopause, she said.
Perhaps the most important outcome from her research, Yeam said, is that she now prioritizes spending time with loved ones.
“It prompted me to do things like go home over spring break and throw my mom a surprise birthday party,” she said. “Maybe if I wasn’t doing this kind of research, I wouldn’t be as intentional with letting the people I love know that I love them. That’s my good life, you know — just making sure the people I love know that I love them.”
