Death Comes to Us All

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former Bishop Richard Holloway, author of My Father’s Wake Kevin Toolis and palliative care consultant Kathryn Mannix join Philip Dodd to consider mortality. “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes” Benjamin Franklin once wrote, but as we face the final curtain what can death teach us about ourselves and the ones we love?

Richard Holloway is a writer, broadcaster and cleric, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh. His books include A Little History of Religion and Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt.

Kathryn Mannix is a pioneer of palliative medicine, who has worked in hospices, hospitals and patients’ homes, helping enhance people’s quality of life as they near death. Kathryn started the UK’s first CBT clinic exclusively for palliative care patients. Her new book With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial explores the process of dying.

Kevin Toolis is a BAFTA winning filmmaker who has encountered death often in his work as a foreign correspondent in places of famine, war and plague all around the world. In his memoir My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach us to Live, Love and Die Kevin asks ‘Why have we lost our way with death?’ He offers both an intimate account of his father’s death and a history of the Irish way of dying.

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.1	Hello, I'm Philip Dodd and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Discussion Program from BBC Radio 3,
0:38.1	which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers.
0:42.2	If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe to the Arts and Ideas podcast,
0:47.1	and wherever you get your podcast from, do rate and reviewers.
0:51.8	It'll help other people to find us.
0:54.8	This is the BBC.
0:57.8	A figure in a cowl with a comically large scythe.
1:01.9	That's how Monty Python imagines it.
1:04.2	The poet Philip Larkin says rather more glumly,
1:07.3	Nothing contravenes the coming dark.
1:10.1	One of Emily Dickinson's most famous poems begins,
1:13.6	Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
1:18.2	It's coming our way like Christmas, but orthodoxy has it that we don't want to face it,
1:24.2	yet we build hospices for the dying.
1:26.3	The publishing world is full of books about
1:28.5	dying, and programs such as this one are hardly unusual. Maybe it's that we've outsourced
1:35.3	death, once to religion, now to experts, medical and otherwise, even to scientists in the quasi-discipline
1:42.9	of cryogenics, anybody but ourselves.
1:46.6	We'll be talking about death and dying, how we deal and how we might deal with it,
	...

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