My mother's final wish — and the right to die with dignity | Elaine Fong

TED Health

TED

Health & Fitness, Fitness, Shoshana Ungerleider, Medicine, How To Be Healthier, Ted Shoshana, Ted Talks Health

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a terminal cancer diagnosis upended 12 years of remission, all Elaine Fong's mother wanted was a peaceful end of life. What she received instead became a fight for the right to decide when. Fong shares the heart-rending journey to honor her mother's choice for a death with dignity -- and reflects on the need to explore our relationship to dying so that we may redesign this final and most universal of human experiences.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective
0:08.6	Welcome to the new Ted Health.
0:10.1	I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Unger-Lighter.
0:16.4	Starting today, we're launching a new season of a podcast, and it's going to be a little
0:20.2	different.
0:21.5	After each talk, you'll hear a short reflection, a lesson, or an interview related to what
0:26.2	you heard in the talk.
0:27.8	And we're starting with this episode, because it explores an issue I'm really passionate
0:31.9	about.
0:33.4	Something you may not know about me is that I've dedicated my life's work so far, to
0:38.0	transforming how our culture thinks about, talks about, and plans for the end of life.
0:44.3	In this episode, you'll hear from designer Elaine Fong, and what she learned from her
0:48.6	mother's end of life experience.
0:51.0	It can be incredibly hard to get the care you want, even at the end.
0:55.5	I hope you'll join me after the talk, to hear about why pondering our own mortality
0:59.8	can allow us to live deeper, reach your lives.
1:03.6	Hey, it's Adam Grant.
1:07.1	The new season of my Ted Podcast's Work Life is out now.
1:10.7	The past few years have been full of changes to how we work, but there's so much more
1:14.6	we can rethink about our jobs.
1:17.1	Join me as I dive into the science of making work not suck.
1:21.0	This season, we'll explore how to fix your meetings, bust bureaucracy, and make the most
	...

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