It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. As a designer, Elaine Fong helps bring ideas and brands to life. She shapes narratives for a living. In today's talk from 2017's TEDx San Francisco, Fong tells the powerful story of the lessons she learned about a concept that really needs a rebranding.

Death. She explains how talking it through could improve understanding, empathy, and humanity around a topic we so often avoid.

What do you want to create? Where do you share this with others, and how do you want them to feel?

As a brand designer, I ask a lot of questions and practice empathy to understand from people

their personalities and motivations behind the why of what they do to help them express themselves.

Sometimes transforming ugly moments into unique ones

or turning something ordinary into something memorable.

To help the face behind a brand express themselves through beautiful experiences.

But what happens when the experience you've been asked to design is death,

and the face behind that brand is your very own mother?

This was the design challenge I was faced with last year

when my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer,

and she asked us to support her end of life.

For 12 years, she was in remission from a previous cancer.

She had a tumor behind her ear, and this time it came back as bone cancer in one of her vertebrae.

What we all thought was back pain from arthritis

revealed itself to be the worst. It was the beginning of the end of her life. But first,

let me tell you about my mom. She was born in China in 1948. She and her twin brother grew up in a large family.

Her mother was the second wife to her father, and second wives and their children

weren't viewed in the most positive light because it was just the cultural norm of the time.

And growing up in communist China in the 1950s as a daughter and not a son

meant that my mom was not the pride of the family, and she knew she wanted better and needed

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