This TED Talk features mortal realist Michelle Knox, recorded live at TED at Westpac, 2017.

To kick the bucket, bite the dust, cash in your chips, check out, depart, expire, launch into eternity.

These are all euthanisms we use in humor

to describe the one life event we are all going to experience.

Death.

But most of us don't want to acknowledge death.

We don't want to plan for it,

and we don't want to discuss it with the most important people in our lives.

I grew up in an Australian community where people got old or sick and passed away,

and only the adults attended the funeral.

My parents would come home looking sad and drained,

but they didn't discuss it with us,

so I was ignorant to death and of the grieving process.

At 15, I got my invitation.

A dear neighbor, who was like an aunt to me,

died suddenly of a heart attack,

and I attended my first funeral and did my first reading.

I didn't know the tightness in my chest

and the dryness in my mouth was normal.

The celebrant got some of the facts wrong and it made me really angry. He talked about how

she loved knitting. Knitting. He didn't mention that at 75, she still mowed her own lawn, built an amazing fish pond

in her front yard and made her own ginger beer. I'm pretty sure keen knitter isn't what she would

...