Best Life Best Death

In this conversation with long-time hospice nurse and educator Barbara Karnes, she states: “We’ve lost our role models on what it’s like to die, and we’ve lost our role models on how to take care of someone who is dying.” What does she mean? What are we missing? What would be the benefit of learning more, for the dying as well as for those who are caregiving and grieving?

This podcast is personal, and I thank Barbara Karnes for her candid sharing of what the first year has been like after the death of her long-time husband, Jack. She reflects on her experience of caregiving and talks openly about what she has learned through this year of grieving. What I see is that Barbara lives her truth: “Because I work in the end of life, I’ve learned this:

Resilient grief, complicated grief, anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief. These are terms you may or may not be familiar with, but trust me, learning about them will help you and help you understand your friends and family in times of loss and grief. – Which, by the way, is pretty much going on all the time, hand-in-hand with joy and expansion. This human life is filled with

When Annie Sklaver Orenstein’s brother died, she looked for books that would help her to understand her experience as a surviving sibling. While she encountered a fair number of books about grief, she found nothing that began to touch on her experience – so she set out to write the book she needed. Part personal story, part interviews and surveys with hundreds of siblings, and

It's all well and good that I keep saying “You should really have conversations about death and dying….” Yet you might be thinking, “What the heck! This is too hard! How am I supposed to even start that conversation?! Please give me some suggestions that can help.” In this episode, I’ll do just that, laying out some ways to think about how to approach this, and even

Tarron Estes is no stranger to death. Raised by a mother who sat vigil with the dying, Tarron understood from a young age the power and possibility of liminal spaces. With her mother now 94 years old and living with dementia, Tarron and her siblings grapple with mom's dementia and the complexities of the family system. How do these dynamics affect all involved? What are some re

Gabby Jimenez – hospice nurse, doula and social media content creator extraordinaire – explores these questions with me. What do the dying take with them? How do we understand and explore regrets? Why so much guilt? What do grievers take away from the experience of losing their loved ones? Eventually, everyone dies – how can we improve this universal experience in simple yet

Gabby changed everything up mid-life after taking care of a friend who was dying. She realized that she wanted to make a difference in people’s lives by becoming a hospice nurse and doula, and learning and sharing all she could about death and dying. Having witnessed and supported more than 2,000 people as they die, Gabby brings true “bedside knowledge” to her presentations,

When you are in that terribly complicated time of making medical decisions around advanced cancer, what framework can you turn to? Oncologists are called upon to treat and offer options; patients hope to gain time if not be cured. What are the choices and the impact of those choices for advanced solid tumor cancers? What if I told you that two doctors have gathered the data to find

This conversation is one of those that is personal and universal. What do you do when your partner dies unexpectedly? What Kim did was delve into that experience and, over time, lean in to help others as they are hit by loss and grief. As she says, “I can be an upbeat, energetic person, and I’ve had this big loss. The content that I’m talking about is grief, and yet I’m ent