Marie Laveau: The Patron Saint of Death Doulas?
There are figures who live so fiercely at the edge of the sacred that their stories blur into myth. Marie Laveau is one of them.
In New Orleans, her name still echoes: whispered in cemeteries, painted on candle labels, invoked in tourist rituals that have long outlasted their context. But behind the folklore and fear lies something far more human and holy: a woman who walked between worlds, tending the living and the dying with unwavering devotion.
When I first began working as a death doula, I often looked to my own ancestors for guidance — women who cooked, prayed, buried, and remembered. But as I studied the history of care in my home city, I kept returning to Laveau. Her story is not just a legend; it is a lineage.
Born of Freedom and Faith
Marie Laveau was born in 1801 to a free Creole couple in New Orleans’ French Quarter, part of a thriving community of free people of color unique to Louisiana at the time.
She grew up surrounded by Catholic ritual and African spiritual tradition, each shaping the other in the syncretic way that defines New Orleans itself.
In a world where women of color had limited power, she wielded hers through care. Before she was known as the Voodoo Queen, she was a mother, a nurse, and a midwife; a woman rooted in both medicine and mystery.
The Misunderstood Healer
How does a healer become a legend of “dark magic”?
Laveau’s legacy was reshaped by fear, racism, and sensationalism. The white press of her time, uncomfortable with a Black woman’s authority, recast her as a sorceress. Later generations folded her life into myth, confusing her with her daughter and turning a devoted servant of the dying into an exotic story to be consumed.
But her obituary, published in The Times-Picayune in 1881, tells a truer story:
“Very wise... skillful in medicine... a most wonderful woman.”
In those words we glimpse the nurse, the doula, the community matriarch, the woman who sat with the condemned, prayed with the dying, and nursed the sick through every fevered summer.
To call her a witch was to misunderstand what her city had long known: that her power came not from spells but from presence. She worked in the oldest tradition of care; one that predates medicine, rooted in intuition, touch, and reverence for the unseen. The discrediting of women like Laveau mirrors the broader silencing of midwives, healers, and death tenders across centuries of colonization and patriarchy. Her story reminds us how easily women’s wisdom is rewritten as threat, and how vital it is to reclaim that lineage now, not as myth, but as inheritance.
A Lineage of Threshold Tenders
Maybe Marie Laveau wasn’t a sorceress at all. Maybe she was something we recognize.
A community member who served those in need. A midwife. A nurse.
A woman tending the threshold between life and death. A death doula?
She moved through the city the way we move through a home at the end of life: quietly, reverently, attending to what most people turn away from. Her hands anointed bodies; her prayers steadied families; her presence gave permission for release. Though she did not have the language of “death doula,” her work carried its essence: to witness without fear, to serve without agenda, and to meet death as sacred labor.
In her, we see a lineage that spans generations of women whose work has gone unnamed: the caregivers, the nurses, the neighbors, the grandmothers who prepared bodies and comforted the bereaved. Long before certification or curriculum, this knowledge was inherited through presence. It lived in kitchens and parlors, in songs and whispered prayers, passed from hand to hand, heart to heart.
To reclaim Laveau as a foremother in this lineage is to remember that deathwork is not new; it is ancient. It has always belonged to the people who stayed.
A Patron Saint for Deathworkers
Could this blessed woman be our own patron saint?
Marie Laveau: not an icon of fear, but of courage and mercy.
Not a mythic witch, but a keeper of the dying flame.
To name her as patron is not to sanctify myth but to honor memory. In reclaiming her, we reclaim all the women whose care has been misnamed, misused, or forgotten — the midwives and healers, the hospice volunteers and doulas, the ones who made death bearable simply by staying close. Her altar, her city, her presence remind us that service is sacred and that every act of tending is a form of prayer.
When I think of Marie Laveau now, I don’t see the sensational figure painted by history. I see the quiet work of her hands, the rhythm of her breath as she prayed over the dying, the sound of water and hymns and the steady pulse of her devotion. She was not performing magic; she was performing mercy.
In a world that still fears death, that hides the body and silences grief, her life feels like an invocation:
to show up, to listen, to serve with reverence.
She teaches us that our presence is medicine, that our care ripples far beyond the bedside.
To walk in her lineage is to walk as she did — between worlds, carrying a candle, guided by both faith and curiosity.
To remember her is to remember ourselves.
Before the Myths, There Was Medicine
She married young and was widowed early. Later she shared a long partnership that welcomed fifteen children. Her life was marked by ordinary loss, birth and death braided together, as they always are in the households of women who tend.
Each day began with Mass at St. Louis Cathedral and ended at the bedsides of the sick and dying. When yellow fever swept through New Orleans, she was there with poultices, prayers, and presence. Her vocation was not spectacle but service.
She understood healing as both physical and spiritual labor. Herbs, oils, and ritual lived side by side on her table, a practice that saw no divide between medicine and faith, body and spirit. Her presence itself was the medicine: a steadying hand, a whispered prayer, a woman unafraid to meet suffering where it lived. In a world that feared contagion and death, she stayed. That choice: to remain, to witness, to tend, is the heart of what we now call deathwork.
Altars and Ancestors
Her home was filled with altars: saints and ancestors side by side. Prayer and healing were not separate acts but one continuous gesture of reverence. At Congo Square and St. John’s Bayou, she led rituals of song, drumming, and dance; acts of spiritual medicine for a people who refused to forget themselves.
Each altar in her home was a map of belonging, a gathering of holy things that tethered her to those who had come before. Candles flickered beside bowls of water, rosaries wound around carved figures, herbs hung to dry near portraits of the dead. These were not symbols of superstition but of survival, ways to honor what the church could not hold and what the state could not name.
In public and private, Laveau made space for remembrance. Her rituals stitched together what had been torn apart by slavery and colonial rule, body from spirit, people from ancestors, the sacred from the everyday. Through prayer, music, and medicine, she kept the dead close and the living whole.
To those who followed her, she offered more than cures; she offered coherence, the assurance that death did not sever relationship, it deepened it. This is the quiet truth that undergirds deathwork today: that tending the dying is inseparable from tending the ancestral. Laveau’s altars were the early blueprints for what we now call sacred space, places where grief and grace could coexist.
Jade Adgate is a Certified Death Doula and founder of Farewell Fellowship, Farewell Education, and The Farewell Library — a living ecosystem for end-of-life care, grief literacy, and compassionate education based in Nashville, Tennessee. Through bedside presence, teaching, and writing, she helps others live, grieve, and remember with intention.
