Ted Audio Collective

Audio Collective

Hey listeners, it's Ted Health and I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerlighter. In a world fixated on prolonging life we often overlook the profound journey of its final chapter.

In her TEDx Newcastle talk,

palliative care physician, Dr. Catherine Mannix

invites us all into a crucial conversation about life, death, and the poignant moments in between.

Blending empathy with expertise, she explains how modern medicine has helped us and

failed us when it comes to confronting death and she offers insights that

reconnect us with a long lost wisdom.

Then join me after the talk for my own personal story

of how one patient's death changed my life forever and led me to found EndoWell Project.org, a platform dedicated to making end of life

a part of life. human beings are the only animals capable of contemplating their own mortality

and they've been doing that for thousands of years.

And yet somehow in the very recent past we have lost the practical wisdom of what happens as people die.

I think that that's a problem and if you agree with me that it is a problem then we have to work out what we're going to do about it.

When she was in her mid-20s, my grandmother was already deeply familiar with the sequence of events that happened to a human person

as they were coming to the end of their life.

And that's because as a woman, and it was usually women's work, she was doing what women had done for centuries.

Looking after people at the very end of their lives, in their own beds, in their own homes,

supported by their own people because hospital had nothing to offer once

a person was so sick that their death was imminent. And yet when I reached my mid-20s in the 1980s, I had none of her wisdom and understanding

and knowledge of dying.

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