He lived his last chapter his way with the help of a death doula

[Zorro]

The doula coordinated care, helped the family understand their loved one's limited energy for goodbyes and guided everyone through his final days

Ron Eisenberg called himself “forever young” — not just as a motto but as a way of life. At 85, he worked out with a personal trainer three times a week. He’d owned a beloved cookware store and cooking school for decades. He met his second wife, Devora, in traffic school. He played poker, traveled and made friends wherever he went. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 2024, the couple asked themselves: “How can we do this best?”

You may remember Eisenberg and his wife, Devora Safran, from my November column when I wrote about their decision to retire to Ajijic, Mexico — a life they described as one long adventure. What I didn’t know then was that he had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He lived almost exactly one year from diagnosis — and spent that year living it his way.

He and Safran visited Cleveland (his hometown), Florida and San Diego to see old friends. His San Diego poker buddies planned games around his visits. They went to the New Year’s Eve party they always attended. And at 5:20 a.m. April 6, he slipped away at home in Ajijic with his night nurse next to him.

Shortly after Eisenberg’s death, I talked on Zoom with Safran and Loretta Downs, the death doula who guided his final days, about what a “good death” looks like. It is one of the most meaningful conversations I have had in all my years as a journalist.

Downs, 76, spent 30 years in sales management in Chicago’s home fashion industry before retiring at 50 and reinventing herself around a calling: helping people die well. Her path began in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic swept through her professional world, taking colleagues and friends. In 1995, she began volunteering on an AIDS ward at a major Chicago hospital where she saw that patients who accepted their dying — whose friends decorated their rooms, smuggled in small pets, threw parties — and then tended to go into hospice care and die peacefully at home. Those who fought dying often died alone in the ICU.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/23/he-lived-his-last-chapter-his-way-with-the-help-a-death-doula/?share=nhswl2ihhmst2te2ured