I'm Krista Tippett.

My guest today, Joan Halifax, says that Americans often think of death as a failure.

This hour, we'll explore her very different perspective on the qualities and meaning of

death after many years accompanying others to the final boundary of life.

From American public media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about

belief, meaning ethics and ideas.

Today, a midwife to the dying, a conversation with Joan Halifax.

In a kind of quiet revolution, the medical professions' approach to death has broadened

radically in the last four decades.

Beginning in the 1960s amidst many consciousness-raising movements, caregivers and family members

developed new practices for what they called conscious dying.

Psychiatrists Elizabeth Kubler-Ross theorized there are stages towards the acceptance of death.

She also described her controversial but influential studies of near-death experiences, opening

up a new public contemplation of death as part of the journey of life.

Around the same time, the hospice movement was creating the means for medical professionals

and families to accompany people compassionately into natural death.

In the ensuing years, the field of palliative care to ease extreme pain at the end of life

has become far more advanced.

And there is an expanding universe of study and conversation across medical, psychological

and spiritual disciplines to support the human experience of dying.

For example, the Open Society Institute of Philanthropist George Soros recently concluded

a far-flung three-year project on death in America.

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