Nicole Hoover Wants You to Write Down the Recipe

I'll be honest with you, going into this conversation, I didn't know what a death doula was. I told Nicole that up front. The word "doula" hadn't crossed my radar, and the pairing with "death" is the kind of thing that either makes you turn away or lean in. I leaned in, and I'm glad I did, because this ended up being one of the more affecting conversations I've had on this show.

Nicole Hoover runs deathdoulanicole.com out of Northeast Ohio, just outside Akron. The word doula, she told me, means servant, servant to the people. On the birth side, that's the person coaching mom through contractions. On the death side, it's the inverse: sitting with families and the dying, walking through the journey, handling comfort care (sometimes as simple as brushing someone's hair), navigating family dynamics, and being a steady, loving presence when nobody knows what to do next.

That last part turned out to be the real pattern in her work. Nicole described what she calls "11th-and-a-half-hour" phone calls, families in crisis mode, someone on or near hospice, nobody sure what happens next. She's also sat vigil so exhausted caregivers could just take a shower or grab a cup of coffee together. If you've ever watched someone you love go through caregiver burnout, that part of the conversation will land close to home.

But the section I keep thinking about is the one on legacy work. Nicole told me about caring for her mother through a stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis, and how, in the day-to-day of MyChart updates and hydration tracking, she never got her mom to sit down and write out the family meatball and spaghetti sauce recipe. Her mom was in denial about the diagnosis, and every attempt got pushed to "we'll talk about that later." That recipe never got written down. Nicole now builds her practice around making sure other families don't lose that chance, legacy reels, recorded conversations, someone's origin story captured on camera, all of it doable virtually over Zoom, no matter where you live.

I told her this hit close to home for me too. My dad's a lifelong songwriter with a catalog of hundreds of songs, and we've started doing our own version of a VH1 Storyteller sit-down, week by week, before either of us needs a reason to.

We also got into something I hadn't thought about before: the "silver tsunami" she describes moving through the healthcare system, and why she thinks every family should have these conversations long before they think they need to, not just for the dying, but for the caregivers left checking their egos at the door.

If any of this resonates, whether you're navigating it right now or just filing it away for later,Nicole is at deathdoulanicole.com, or you can email her directly at nicole@deathdoulanicole.com.

Full episode: futureproofpodcast.com/ep-016-nicole-hoover

If this one got you thinking about the "what happens next" side of things, a couple of past conversations pair well with it:

• Episode 009 with Luke Tatum of Perfect Spiral Capital — where we get into life insurance, final expense planning, and thinking generationally.

• Episode 008 with Claudia Duffy of Sapphire & Silk Travel — a different kind of reinvention story, from retired x-ray tech to travel entrepreneur.

• Episode 014 with Jennifer Palcic of Breaking Through Intensive Therapy — on the deep, personal impact of showing up for people at their hardest moments.