"Being born and dying connects us all"
Ellen Matzdorf has two professions that might seem contradictory at first glance. After all, she is a midwife and a mortician. For the 61-year-old, however, this combination is as logical as it is obvious. After all, the beginning and end of life are "amazingly similar".
Anyone looking for a midwife in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, might end up with Ellen Matzdorf. And anyone looking for a funeral home will too. For the 61-year-old, there is nothing surprising or even contradictory about this. "Both professions have in common that they accompany the most elementary moments of a person's life, the beginning and end of life," she tells ntv.de.
"We are all connected by being born and dying. What happens in between is different for everyone." Matzdorf wrote the book "Vom ersten bis zum letzten Atemzug" (From the first to the last breath), which has just been published, about her own in-between, which led to the professional combination of midwife and mortician.
In it, she describes her own path out of difficult family circumstances, the fate of a girl who spends parts of her childhood in a home and later studies law, politics and German language and literature. However, Matzdorf only found her professional purpose after the birth of her daughter and the realization that she wanted to help people. She had the idea of becoming a midwife while riding her bicycle. Her training began soon after, and eight weeks into it she was in the delivery room, certain that she had found her profession. At the end of her training, she knew that she wanted to work as a midwife, but not in a clinic.
"There is no choice anyway"
She has now been attending births for more than 30 years, as an attending midwife in hospitals, in birthing centers and in families' homes. "For me, the best option would be for women to be cared for exclusively by midwives during pregnancy," she says with conviction. "We only need all this high-tech obstetric medicine in situations where we know the woman is not stable during pregnancy."
Matzdorf is a convinced self-determiner, not only when it comes to her own life, but also that of the people who entrust themselves to her. "Every woman naturally knows how to give birth. And every person can also deal with death - there is no choice anyway," she writes in her book.
"I have had to attend and accompany births where it was clear that the children would not survive or were no longer alive when the birth began. And it was always my aim to attend a good birth anyway." In these situations, the effort and exhaustion were followed by sadness and the pain of loss and, above all, a mechanized, cold process that left the mothers and families hardly any time or space to grieve or even comprehend the loss. In these cases, she found that the intensive support came to an abrupt halt. "That was the impulse that made me think, there must be another way."
So the midwife also becomes a funeral director and can now say: "I will accompany you through this time so that you can find a way to go. You can see your child as often as you like. We can also take it home again." Many did not dare to ask a woman whose child had just died: What do you need now, what is important to you? Instead, they hid behind formalities and actionism. "But experience shows me that the women and families who were able to walk this path consciously and together cope better with the loss of their child. Because everything was done the way they wanted it to be and they simply used the time between dying and burial as well as they could."
Not just either or
Time and again, Matzdorf has found that women barely want to look at or hold their stillborn child at first. "If I then make no further attempts to listen again, but place the child in the coffin and take it as quickly as possible either to the crematorium or to the grave, then I miss that moment when a woman might change her mind." So the Oldenburg woman keeps the door open. "And then I experience with a lot of women that they actually want to do it and just don't dare and are ultimately grateful that they did it."
At the beginning, she thought she would have to give up obstetrics or midwifery to do funerals. "And then at some point I realized that I didn't have to choose at all. I can do both." In the meantime, she naturally alternates between caring for pregnant women and women giving birth and accompanying the deceased and their relatives. She drives her blue hearse to provide follow-up care after births, and some pregnant women come to the funeral home for preventive care.
In both of her professions, Ellen Matzdorf has found that the beginning and end of life are amazingly similar. "They are moments when time seems to stand still," she writes. And they are the two moments that are the same for everyone, she says: "We no longer remember what it was like before we set off into the world. And when it comes to dying, we don't know how to do it because we haven't learned or practiced it."
She herself accompanied the dying of her brother, who had ALS, and believes that you can approach your fear of death. You can dig a hole in the ground, visit a crematorium or plan his funeral. Or "punch your fear in the face". Only self-determination is important to her, especially in these decisive moments in life. If nothing came after death, Matzdorf would be fine with that.
Ellen Matzdorf's unique practice in Lower Saxony extends beyond midwifery, as she also runs a funeral home. Recent reviews praising her compassionate approach to both fields underscore her ability to provide invaluable support during critical moments of life and death.
The international community has shown interest in Ellen's unique blend of midwifery and mortician services, recognizing the profound similarities in the beginning and end of life that echo across all cultures.
Source: www.ntv.de
