Specialty training
Bearing witness to love and loss intertwined.
The textbook and workbook for the 16-CEU bereavement doula specialty course offered through Mary’s Hands Network. The most comprehensive bereavement doula training resource available.
Sold as a bundle with the Companion Workbook. Both books are required for the Mary’s Hands Network certification. Get them together for $50. See the workbook →
When a family loses a baby, the clinical team knows how to manage the medical crisis. Almost no one knows how to manage what comes after.
This book fills that gap. Every framework, protocol, and clinical communication approach was developed in collaboration with morticians, obstetricians, social workers, and labor and delivery and NICU nurses. The result reflects the full reality of pregnancy and infant loss across every setting where it occurs.
This is not a book about what to say. It’s a book about becoming trained well enough that the right response becomes instinct.
For doulas, labor and delivery and NICU nurses, social workers, and anyone called to show up with skill, not just sympathy.
Course materials are required for the certification. Add the live course to earn the 16 CEUs and the specialty designation.
Textbook ISBN: 979-89-03103-82-9 · Workbook ISBN: 979-89-03103-91-1
Important: books ≠ certification
The textbook + workbook bundle is the course materials. To earn the 16 ICEA CEUs and the bereavement doula specialty designation, you must also enroll in and complete the live course offered through Mary’s Hands Network ($450). Buying the books alone does not equal certification.
Grief frameworks applied at the bedside. Clinical communication scripts for the worst moments. Bereavement protocols across hospital, birth center, and home. The emotional sustainability work for the people who do this work for years.
The active-practice partner. Designed to be worked through chapter by chapter alongside the main text. Built for cohort training and self-paced study alike.
Open-ended questions with full writing space. The kind of prompts that surface the assumptions, fears, and lived experiences students bring with them into a bereavement room.
Honest checks on what students know, what they don’t, and where their competence still has to grow. Built to be repeated — once at the start of the course, once at the end.
Scenarios drawn from the kinds of losses bereavement doulas hold — stillbirth, NICU loss, termination for medical reasons, infant death — with structured space to work through what care looks like in each.
Every framework, protocol, and clinical communication approach in this book was developed in collaboration with the people who hold these families: morticians who handle remains, obstetricians who deliver in silence, social workers who walk the families to the door, labor and delivery nurses who count fingers and toes, NICU nurses who watch monitors fade.
The book reflects what they all know to be true and what they all wish someone had taught them. It is the only bereavement doula training resource of its kind because it was the only way to write one honestly.
“You don’t need to be wise. You need to be trained. Wisdom is what training looks like once it has become instinct.”
To earn the bereavement doula specialty designation and the 16 ICEA CEUs, you must complete both of the following. Neither is optional.
The Bereavement Doula textbook + Companion Workbook, sold together. Grief frameworks, clinical protocols, bedside communication, plus reflection prompts, self-assessment, and case studies.
The 16-CEU live specialty course at Mary’s Hands Network. ICEA-approved. 6 months of online access. Required to earn the CEUs and the specialty designation.
After you complete both steps
Submit your continuing education credits directly through ICEA at icea.org to log your 16 CEUs toward your certification renewal.
Course materials bundle. Sold through Mary’s Hands Network.
