Specialty training · 16 ICEA CEUs
The Bereavement Doula.
Bearing witness to love and loss intertwined.
When a family loses a baby, the clinical team knows how to manage the medical crisis. Almost no one knows how to manage what comes after.
This book fills that gap. Every framework, protocol, and clinical communication approach was developed with morticians, obstetricians, social workers, and labor and delivery and NICU nurses, so it reflects the full reality of pregnancy and infant loss across every setting where it happens.
This is not a book about what to say. It is a book about becoming trained well enough that the right response becomes instinct.
For doulas, labor and delivery and NICU nurses, social workers, and anyone called to show up with skill, not just sympathy.
You don’t need to be wise. You need to be trained. Wisdom is what training looks like once it has become instinct.
The textbook
Grief frameworks applied at the bedside. Clinical communication scripts for the worst moments. Bereavement protocols across hospital, birth center, and home. The emotional sustainability work for people who stay in this for years.
The Companion Workbook
Reflection prompts
Open-ended questions with full writing space. The kind that surface the assumptions, fears, and lived experiences students carry into a bereavement room.
Self-assessment
Honest checks on what students know, what they don’t, and where competence still has to grow. Built to be repeated, once at the start and once at the end.
Case studies
Scenarios drawn from the losses bereavement doulas actually hold — stillbirth, NICU loss, termination for medical reasons, infant death — with structured space to work through care in each.
Textbook ISBN 979-89-03103-82-9 · Workbook ISBN 979-89-03103-91-1
Two required pieces. Neither is optional.
Get the textbook and workbook — $50
Grief frameworks, clinical protocols, bedside communication, plus the reflection prompts, self-assessment, and case studies. Buy them in the panel on this page.
Take the live course — enrolled separately
The 16-CEU ICEA-approved specialty course with 6 months of online access. I am the lead instructor, but enrollment and pricing are handled by Mary’s Hands Network, not this site. Ask about course dates →
Submit your CEUs
After both steps, log your 16 CEUs toward certification renewal directly through icea.org.
Every framework, protocol, and communication approach in this book was developed with the people who hold these families: morticians who handle remains, obstetricians who deliver in silence, social workers who walk families to the door, labor and delivery nurses who count fingers and toes, NICU nurses who watch monitors fade.
The book reflects what they all know to be true and what they all wish someone had taught them. It is the only bereavement doula training resource of its kind because that was the only way to write one honestly.
