A MIDWIFE TO THE DYING
Hari Khasla is a self-described “end-of-life doula.” Her calling, she said, lies in guiding individuals through the process of death. It’s a deeply intimate and emotional role.
“I’m a midwife to the dying,” Khasla said. “You don’t know when someone’s baby is going to be born; you can’t predict when someone will labor out of life either.”
Khalsa is the only practicing death doula on the Eastside. She is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was raised adjacent to an Ashram yoga community. As a child, she became well versed in mediation, a technique which helps support her work today.
Khasla’s calling as a death doula came knocking when her mother died. Khasla was 19. Ten years later, her husband died of leukemia. Khalsa was there, again, guiding him through his last stages of life.
“It was a path that was laid out before me that I didn’t consciously choose,” she said. “But once it was shown to me that one of my abilities in this life is how to be with somebody in that process, supporting them, supporting myself, and supporting the community, I actively started to choose it.”
Determined to aid the dying, Khalsa received her nursing degree from Duke and a certificate from the University of Vermont’s End-of-Life Doula program. She initially practiced as a hospice nurse in Santa Barbara, before relocating to the Eastside in 2022. Khalsa currently practices as a nurse in the family medicine clinic at the Mammoth Hospital, as there is no hospice wing in the Mammoth hospital.
Khalsa’s pull towards those in the labor of death continued when she saw what she called “a big need” for hospice and end of life programs in the Sierra Nevada.
In July 2024, she hosted a death cafe at the Root Down Community Hub in Bishop, meant to gather the Eastside community for a conversation around death and dying. There, she met art curator Jane Hsu, who she later teamed up with to co-found SIGHT, an organization focused on embracing life and honoring mortality. The organization gained non-profit status in 2025.
The goal of SIGHT is not to be a grief group, but to hold open conversations about death and living life to the fullest, Khalsa explained.
“The underlying theme is that we all have inevitability,” Khalsa said. “Nobody is exempt from the fact that they will die.”
Sight currently hosts a variety of events on the Eastside including death cafes and mortality mixers in Bishop and Mammoth.
The organization is currently hosting its second annual mortality film festival, hosted at C5 Studios in Bishop. The films ran on Feb. 24, and will continue March 10 and March 24 from 6-8 p.m. Each showing features a different full length film, focusing on life and death. Later this spring, Sight will be hosting a celebration of life for an individual who is still alive. All of these events are either low cost or donation based.
SIGHT draws together a large, multi-faceted demographic of all ages and experiences with death.
“I’ve had people as young as teenagers come to the programs, people in their 80s and everything in between,” Khalsa said. “Some people already have an in depth relationship to death, through personal experiences or through spiritual practices. Some people are just petrified of this topic and come to face their fears.”
Looking towards the future, Khalsa hopes to acquire land for SIGHT to build a green burial space in the Eastern Sierra. This would be the first “non-traditional” burial site in the area, meaning without embalming or cement vaulting.
Traditional cemeteries have negative impacts on the environment, Khalsa explained.
“The embalming fluids make it into the soil, and there’s a lot of pollution from the cement as well,” she said. “And there’s a law, that once something is a cemetery, it will be forever.”
These laws include Cal. Code Regs. Tit. 18, § 132 – Cemetery Exemption, which states that once land is used a cemetery, it must remain as such.
A green burial site, on the other hand, would allow the land to be preserved. The bodies buried there would be identified merely by a QR code marking their names and biographical information. This type of environment allows the living to walk around the trees and the land where their beloved are buried, Khalsa explained.
“There are a lot of people here with a deep connection to the natural land,” she said. “A green burial, also known as a natural burial or earth burial, is a way to place your body back into the earth when you’re no longer alive in that way.”
Khalsa also dreams of creating an arts, education, and celebration center in conjunction with this burial site. There, SIGHT would continue to host gatherings and programming for the living public.
In the meantime, Khalsa aims to live each day fully.
“I make sure I’m celebrating, I’m finding joy, and I’m practicing what I preach to live my life right now,” she said.
