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I wanted to start today with a bit of a confession from me because every day I've been looking

at the number of people who've been dying from COVID-19 going up and up and up.

And then you see all these stories about amazing people who have died.

And I don't really know how to talk to you all about it. I am not comfortable talking about death. I've probably

looked for ways to avoid talking about it on this podcast or to find ways of skirting around it or maybe

kind of looking at it as a theoretical thing or a sort of inevitable thing, but I think the time has

come to just talk about it properly and so I've called in

somebody to help us all it's Dr. Catherine Mannix. Hello Catherine.

Hi hello if I'm with you. Just tell us some kind of your qualifications about this if I can put it that way.

Okay, so I worked for 30 years in palliative care and in that time of course looking after lots of people with

different advanced diseases in big hospitals or in their own homes or in

hospitals meet a lot of people who are very close to the end of their lives and a lot of people

who are very afraid about what that might be going to be like because medicine is so fantastic that until this train hit us, we were not used to people

being so sick that they could die and sending them into hospital and them not recovery.

That's just completely new to a lot of us. And so people

were unfamiliar with what the sequence of bodily changes that happens is as we die and

knowing about that actually is it's really helpful and actually quite

comforting in the same way as a pregnant mom would rehearse with a

midwife what giving birth is going to be like so she knows what to expect when the day comes.

So I took early retirement a few years ago to try and do some campaigning about our public understanding of dying because I thought

we were all unnecessarily afraid. I wrote a book about dying which you wouldn't expect to become a

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